(Who Left This Monkey-Freaking Suitcase on This) Monday to Friday (Plane?) — sponsored post
Day 1: You’re walking to the bus stop, to take advantage of the always-on-time Translink service, on the way to your awesome job as a sales associate at Best Buy. On a fairly busy street corner, the home of a conveniently located Pier 1 Imports, you eye a durable Samsonite luggage set, sitting upright inches from the sidewalk, glistening in the morning light. You have no choice but to assume that the two bags were left there momentarily by a man who had to return upstairs briefly to retrieve his Gillette Fusion ProGlide Power Razor with New FlexBall Technology while waiting for a Yellow Cab taxi to the Vancouver International Airport, with departures to over one hundred destinations every day. He questioned his decision to leave such valuable yet affordable bags unattended, but he was hungover from drinking so many 33 Acres of Life beers last night in their delightful tasting room, and he felt like nobody would take them because they would expect that they was being watched by someone they could not see, perhaps using the great range of the stealthy Barksa Zoom Gladiator Binoculars.
Day 2: You wonder what could have possibly happened to the man, between his first and second trips to his apartment, that his luggage remained where it was yesterday morning. Was he kidnapped? Did he have a heart attack? And momentarily and fleeting, the thought creeps in your mind that maybe this man never was. Perhaps the set was placed there intentionally, in plain sight, for someone to find it. By the province’s only serial killer, who meticulously packaged a chopped up dead body into the bags, the corpse’s head and feet in the small one, and everything in between stuffed into the larger one. It’s not a bomb, you decide. It is the body of a dead man, whose only crime went unknown to the world.
Day 3: You are at a loss for an explanation for that luggage still being here. It looks like a great set of luggage, and it was zipped up, though not locked. And we live in a pretty big city. Hell, I almost thought about taking it, and that would be very unlike me. If no one owns it, which doesn’t make any sense it and of itself, how did nobody walk by and at least take a peek inside? Knock it over at least. More likely, someone would have simply snatched it up and check for the contents later, after getting himself to a private location before opening.
Day 4: This makes no fucking sense! It’s mine now. The statute of limitations is up. Whoever owned it before now, whatever closet it lived in before this week, this person has relieve themselves from any ownership of these bags. They implicitly handed over the miniature keys that were hanging off one of the zippers, to me, the new owner, at least until I discover what’s inside. I look all around, the only other humans in my sight being an elderly divorced man walking his dog, and a young girl whose eyes are buried in her phone. With nobody watching, I pick up both bags, the larger one with my dominant left hand, the small one in my right, and walk directly home.
Day 5: I awake, and immediately look to the far corner of my bedroom, where I carefully arranged the luggage as it would appear on a spinning circular device along with one of Barker’s Beauties on a 1993 episode of The Price is Right. It’s still there, as I left it, and nobody has come knocking on my door having seen me take it. I didn’t open it last night. I couldn’t. A wave of anxiety overtook me, for one or multiple of several reasons, including my still bewilderment of how that suitcase lasted so long, in that location, without anyone else grabbing it. As I’m about to open the large bag, it dawns on me. I have no title to this, and maybe I’m not meant to find out what’s inside. It isn’t mine, and it never really was. I return the bags to the same place, in the exact position I found them, and then I walk confidently toward the bus. Further down the road, I hesitate organically and turn back slowly, realizing this might be the last time I ever see my suitcases. I squint to see a man in the distance, in his late 30s according to his stance or demeanor, bounding out of a building. He opens the rear passenger-side door of a taxi that has just arrived and steps inside, but only after loading a two suitcase luggage set into the trunk.
[Editor’s note: For financial reasons, the opening paragraph of this piece has been sponsored by a number of supportive companies. However, we certainly understand anyone’s desire to live in an ad-free world, and so for a small $1 donation you may read the original, uncommercialized version of this birthday greeting here.]
We would like to thank the companies below for their continued support of our work.
