backforthmenu Another Yard Sale. We look around at all the shit we don’t want. The things that won’t die—the things left by the dead. Some of them my father’s. A tin hat rack that you nail into a wall, C clamps and files, a box of old pens, a student clarinet, a child’s dresser, an ugly end table, a Mr. Coffee machine, keychains. “Hello boys.” An older woman ambles up the steep driveway with a big brown glass bottle in her hand. “I think you left this in front of my house last night.” She sets an empty 40 ouncer down on the sidewalk with a clink. Jeff and I had walked around stapling up our signs at about 1am last night. Drunk. Apparently we’d woken her up and inadvertently left her directions to our house so she could scold us. “We’re sorry maam...” She holds up her hand waving off the apology, “Don’t worry about it.” She was already busy looking at a tangled string of Christmas lights. “How much for these lights?” Later, an elderly man, maybe 80, wanders up in a loose-fitting, white shirt tucked into dirty chinos, a mashed straw hat sitting on his snow-white hair and a stiff, short beard sticking out of numerous fissures in his face. “Hullo there.” I notice there are no teeth in his mouth and he’s gumming something to death. A piece of paper maybe. Behind him follows a harried woman maybe 10 years younger, but she wanders off, saying absolutely nothing, after gazing at our treasures a full minute. “You can’t leave without buying anything...” he yells after her, but she is already most of the way home, a few doors down. They live on the corner in a dilapidated house with a dirt lawn. Their old, bright yellow pick-up is always parked out front filled with old furniture and in the backyard sit two tin Sears sheds packed with the same. “Crazy bitch,” he mumbles, picking up the clarinet. “I just got that old lady a piano she had to have, but the damn thing is so heavy I thought it might go through the floor—house is so termite infested. It’s sitting in the backyard now.” “Do you buy and sell antiques?” I ask. “No, no. We just get new stuff all the time. Get rid a the old stuff and put the new stuff in.” He left with the box of ball-point pens. 50 cents. I imagine someday they will be left for the living.