my neighbor was sick of living until his organs quit and he died.
the only one in the complex I could talk to.
he knew there was nothing special about the sun and the moon.
there was no difference between them.
his sky was a wasteland.
his trash was his treasure...

he would ramble to me and sing to the trees and scream at the cars when they'd go screaming by.

he would explain to me vague and obtuse times- these stories.

-how one of his wives was more beautiful when she had died.

-how he dropped his son off in the middle of nowhere,
and months later the boy had returned a man...a killer of bears in fact.

-how they had made a statue of him.
a tribe somewhere in Vietnam.
and how he could still hear them speaking to him in ceremonies.
How he could taste the offerings sometimes in his morning coffee, or a few times mid-sentence with me.

and he would really go on about the thing he loved the most.
the only thing he had ever loved;
his pet plastic bag.

he would say these things and you couldn't respond..there was no need to.

he composed a will.
comprised of two lines-

the things I own will be burned but
my pet plastic bag I leave to michael

I respected this anomaly. This freak of nature. This neighbor. This man.
so I honored his request.

I wore shoes then and I had a shoebox I kept.

I engineered the burning of his possessions.
sifted through the frowzy living conditions of mostly nothing but a few standard chairs and esoteric books of esoteric things: symbols, dead languages.
Some ancient looking artifacts which were hard to trash because I'm sure they were either valuable or priceless.

a jar of teeth.

early on I had found the only plastic bag in his dry apartment in what looked to be a canopic jar lined with copper and more strange symbols wrapped around a grueome scene of children being eaten head-first by a many headed beast.

I kept the whole unit, figuring it was the appropriate container, and kept it stowed away in my once empty shoebox, tucked away more in the back top right of my sensible utilitarian closet.

Out of sight from me as it made me feel uneasy.