Author's disclaimer:
There once was a group in Toronto,
Who made the world's best TV show.
People, wolves, places, and plot,
All the rights they have got,
But here I can do what I want to!

The doll nods forlornly at me, dangling from a Shaker gibbet. Her cloth neck is pinched between the slats on the back of the three-legged chair, her head askance and her little patchwork shoes caked with dry mud, as though she had walked here rather than being unceremoniously tossed from the back of a pickup with so many other unwanted things. The stitching is beginning to come loose from one side of her embroidered smile, and it droops slightly, giving her expression a puckish twist, almost as if in ironic acknowledgment of her own fallen status.

Once, I am sure, she was a little girl's favored companion. Her dress is too mended, her face too stained for her to have been anything less than adored. I can imagine her crushed under the arm of a sleeping four-year-old, uncomplaining as she was slowly drooled on. I'm sure she withstood being left out in the rain and thrown against the wall during a tantrum; that she put up with being cuddled tightly and danced with wildly. Her right leg has been reattached more than once, and the marks on it could only have come from a teething puppy. There are memories in this doll, but now she sits in a pile at the back door of the Salvation Army Thrift Store.

My eyes move from the doll to the broken chair, and from there across the rest of the pile. One coffee maker without a carafe. One record player with two vinyl records. "A Merry Hawaiian Christmas" and "The Best of the Detergents." One oven with two of the knobs missing and rust streaking its tasteful avocado paint job. One pair of badly worn ice skates with no laces. Two boxes, the blue marker scrawled onto the sides reading "Clothes" and "Other Stuff."

I pick up the box marked "Clothes" and carry it into the back room. The familiar anger is thick in my throat, and I'm willing to bet that the clothing will be at least twenty years out of date, stained, and/or threadbare. We usually receive three types of donations here, but these are the kind I hate.

Occasionally, we receive donations that are the leftovers of a life. A grandparent has died, perhaps, and after the family has extracted the heirloom china, the jewelry, and the World War II medals, the furniture and other bits and pieces arrive at our door. Once, I helped to unload an unusually contemporary cargo of CD's, blue jeans, and baseball caps. Their owner had been seventeen when his car spun into a tree. His parents gave us everything.

I cried until the end of my shift that day.

Other times, it will be a grocery bag or cardboard box filled with things no longer needed or not quite wanted. Perhaps they are clothes that have been recently dieted out of, or two of the three identical high chairs received at a baby shower. I smile when I get these donations, and I thank them for thinking of us rather than simply shoving the items to the back corner of the attic.

Too many of our donations, however, are like this one. The huddled masses of garages and attics, they bring them to us because the trash man doesn't give tax deductions. Half the things only wind up thrown out, too broken and battered to be sold. The other half I might eventually place on the shelves, but they will need to be scrubbed and stitched and sorted before I can decide how much is garbage and how much I can put a price on with a clear conscience. These are the ones that make me grit my teeth as I fill out the receipts. These 'gifts' are devoid of any semblance of charity, and the glimpses of humanity that peer out from the eyes of worn dolls and the grass-stained knees of Little-League baseball uniforms only offer a dark irony.

As I reach for a knife to slit open the packing tape, I hear the crunch of wheels on gravel. Another donation has arrived. I make sure to take the pad for the receipts as I step out to greet them. I know it's cynical, but somehow, I get the feeling that we've been mistaken for a dumpster again.

The car is a sleek, black GTO, and the driver who steps out only strengthens my suspicions. He looks to be in his mid thirties, but he dresses like a teenager infatuated with James Dean in worn blue jeans, a skin-tight white tee shirt, and a black leather jacket. His blonde hair is gelled and sprayed to stand almost completely on end, and his body language has an affected casualness about it, as though he were trying very hard to look like nothing mattered. I wonder what exactly he has brought me...the leftovers of a love affair? A move to a smaller apartment?

He doesn't say a word, but opens the back door of the car and brings out a plain cardboard box. As he lifts it, the change that sweeps over him is nothing short of a metamorphosis. His shoulders fall, though the lack of tension in his arms shows the box to be relatively light. The muscles in his cheeks twitch, and though I cannot see his eyes behind the sunglasses he wears, the lines that suddenly crease beyond the edges of the lenses tell me that they are squeezed tightly closed. He pauses a moment, awkwardly half-bent, then suddenly turns to me so abruptly that I take a step back, startled.

"Here." He thrusts the box at me, his voice somehow confrontational, even though the single word is spoken under his breath and half-mumbled. I take the box, and he waits until I have my arms wrapped completely around it before he lets it go. My hands brush his, and I feel that he's trembling. His control is good, I would never have known if I hadn't actually touched him.

"Is this all?" I try not to let my curiosity show in my voice.

He jerks his head once to the side, the movement more spasm than nod. "That's it."

"Would you...uh..." There is something hypnotically intense about him, and I find myself struggling to remember the simple order of business. I've done hundreds of these transactions, maybe thousands. It shouldn't be that hard to do another. "...Would you like a receipt, sir?"

"No."

"All right, sir, I'll just..." My words trail off, and I'm not sure whether to be offended or not. He's ignoring me completely, and is getting back into the car. "Sir?" I am now talking to a closed door. The car grumbles out of idle and the tires spit gravel as he accelerates away, leaving me standing there, holding the box and feeling more than a bit confused by his rapid departure.

Shaking my head, I begin to take the box inside, then stop. This is Chicago. A very hard-looking man who seemed very tense has just given me a closed box, refused a receipt, and left within less than a minute of his arrival. Something is definitely wrong here, and I have a bad feeling about taking this box inside or even opening it before I have a better idea of the contents.

I retrieve the knife from the storeroom and study the box. If there is something unsavory inside, it would probably not be a good idea to open it in the conventional fashion. Instead, I slit along two of the side seams and across the bottom, creating a flap out of one of the sides. Slowly, carefully, I lift it up, peering curiously inside. Nothing goes boom, and I don't see anything that appears equipped to go boom, so I relax a little. I reach inside the box, withdrawing the items one by one and stacking them neatly.

It is an unusual assortment. One metal dog dish. A collection of medals in an old wooden box. Several dozen small, leather-bound journals filled with precisely dated entries in a man's handwriting. A black and white photograph of a man, a woman, and a small boy in heavy winter clothing. A set of woodworking tools. Another photograph in a simple wooden frame, this one of the mysterious spike-haired man standing next to another man, on what appears to be the deck of a sailing ship. They have their arms across each other's shoulders, and they are grinning like schoolboys.

The second man seems oddly familiar, and a cold knot settles in the pit of my stomach as I realize where I've seen him before. That face is unmistakable, a Disney movie prince made flesh and blood. When I saw him this morning, it was the scarlet splash of color from his tunic that caught my eye, and I remember thinking that I'd have to take time at lunch to read the newspaper story that came with the flamboyant picture. It wasn't every day, after all, that the Chicago Tribune put a Mountie on the front page.

Abandoning the box and its contents, I rush inside, tripping and nearly falling on the slight lip of the doorway. The paper is there on my desk, unopened. The photograph is visible, but the caption and story have disappeared below the fold. Suddenly careful, I pick up the paper, shaking it open. The headline falls into view. My hands begin to shake, and the cold knot in my stomach swells until it seems to completely obscure my throat. I can barely breathe, and the words blur beyond the sudden haze of tears in my eyes.

"MOUNTIE KILLED IN WATERFRONT SHOOTOUT."

Fin.