You seem to like collecting so I could, I suppose, suggest that you might consider collecting earwax. It can, after all, be scooped out. That way you could keep it in a jar and stored on a shelf alongside your other containers full of belly button fluff and miscellaneous foot scrapings. This would allow you to augment a contrasting lifestyle for a fraction of the cost (if contrasting is the appropriate word, which, now I think about it, probably isn’t. “Alternative”might be a better one). I know how you like to collect things because I’ve also seen that packing case in your garage (although it’s not so much of a packing case as an old tea chest), which has been there for eight years now and you haven’t touched it since it arrived. I suspect that this new hobby would appeal to your sense of the strange. That probably comes from being a funeral director and having to handle dead bodies all the time. But then, there’s lots of dead stuff at the cemetery: leaves, flowers, people. Come to think of it, you wouldn’t be interested in earwax because you already have that collection of toes you have snipped off at the funeral home and so that’s probably enough.
Henry Bladon is based in Somerset in the UK. He is a writer of short fiction and poetry with a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Birmingham. He is the author of the novel Threeways, and several poetry collections. His work can be seen in Poetica Review, Pure Slush, Truth Serum Press, Lunate, and O:JA&L, among other places.
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