Waste Pickup | EXTENDED | 2024 |

Leo swung his legs out of bed and padded barefoot across the cold concrete floor. The closet door in his studio apartment had a faint, sickly green glow seeping from its edges. He could hear it moving in there—a soft, wet shuffling, like a stack of old photographs being stirred by a damp breeze.

The Collector stepped past him without permission, its long fingers twitching. It went straight to the closet, pressed a palm against the door, and whispered something that sounded like a lullaby in reverse. The green glow intensified, then solidified into a translucent, squirming bag—like a jellyfish made of memory. Inside, Leo could see fragments: a frozen frame of himself yelling at his mother, a blurry image of a blank sheet of music paper, a small, ugly knot of something dark that he knew was the time he laughed at a friend’s grief.

The Collector hoisted the bag onto its shoulder. The mass should have been negligible, but the creature’s spine bent slightly under the weight. waste pickup

But for now, there was nothing. And nothing, Leo thought, was the most expensive thing he’d ever paid for.

For the past three years, Leo had lived by one rule: don’t open the closet after midnight. The Waste wasn’t garbage in the traditional sense—no banana peels or crumpled receipts. The Waste was the sum of everything you regretted, forgot, or deliberately buried. The argument you lost. The apology you never made. The dream you abandoned at nineteen. Every night, while you slept, it coalesced, slithering from the corners of your mind into physical form behind the nearest door. Leo swung his legs out of bed and

The Collector turned to leave, then paused at the threshold. “The guitar is getting heavier.”

Leo held out his left hand. The Collector produced a small, silver blade from its coat—not a weapon, a tool. It made a tiny, precise cut on Leo’s index finger. A single drop of blood welled up, pearlescent and strangely heavy. The Collector caught it in a vial, then licked the blade clean. Leo felt a flash of vertigo, as if he’d just forgotten something important. That was the payment: not blood, but the memory of the cut. He’d never remember the pain. He’d never learn from it. The Collector stepped past him without permission, its

“Standard,” Leo said. He always said standard.