Magpie

Toothbrush.

Deflated doll’s head.

Fridge magnet. “Keeping that.”

Dried up nail polish.

Small box. Filled with white powder. “Bleh.”

More dried polish.

Headless doll. “There you go, all fixed up.”

Empty.

“On to the next box,” she mutters, sliding the now empty cardboard box away across the shiny polished floor. The box comes to a stop beside three others, all in various states of decay and water damage. Propping herself up a little further, Magpie reaches for the next box. Though still calling this a box is more than charitable. Its side gapes open and what’s left of the top is so sodden it’s more sludge than cardboard at this stage. She sits back on her knees and begins to root through the box’s contents, reaching in through the side. Beside her are two piles, one considerably larger than the other.

Broken bottle. She throws this on the larger pile to her right.

Batteries. Shake, shake. To the right.

Intact doll. Right.

Mouldy teddy. Right.

Scissors. A few quick snips in the air to make sure they still open properly before she places these carefully on the left pile.

Bag of glass balls. Right.

More batteries. Right.

Intact glass bottle. Left.

“On second thought.” She grabs the mesh bag filled with multicoloured glass balls and moves it to the left pile. “I’m sure someone will find a use for these.”

On through the box she sorts, throwing away the moulding and stinking toys and the forgotten treasures that it once seemed so important to keep. Only a few more items get added to the left pile. A handful of pencils, a set of tiny metal clippers, a bottle of orange liquid that she sniffs and empties out before adding the empty bottle to her collection.

Once the box is empty, Magpie stands carefully and carries the decaying box to the others, not quite trusting it to slide across the floor without disintegrating. Through the hole in the roof, she judges the position of the sun and checks for clouds.

“One more box,” she says to no one, “better make it a good one.” Looking around the cluttered room she looks for the right box. Her piles fill most of the free space of the room. The larger pile covers a large brown stain in the centre of the floor, which somehow feels slightly greasy despite the place being abandoned for years. The walls are lined with shelves of boxes and crates of detritus, piled towards what is left of the roof. They cover every square inch of remaining wall except for what is taken up instead by a rusting work bench. This bench is the only tidy space in the room. The marked surface has been picked clean of anything that could be considered even moderately useful and the faded shadows on the wall above it outline where once tools must have hung. These would have been the first to go.

Magpie wanders over to the corner covered in the rubble which was once the roof. This corner must have collapsed in a cyclone at one point, probably taken down by the falling of a tree or even destroyed by another passing roof lifted in the storm. It was long enough ago that the smaller pieces of rubble have drifted away, either blown off by another storm or shifted by the movement of the animals which use these partially standing buildings as cover. As she approaches the corner there’s a scurry of movement and a small family of possums streak past and up a nearby tree. Magpie doesn’t flinch, neither at the movement nor the smell of the nest once she gets close enough. This is just another day on the job. Moving some of the medium pieces of ceiling away, those that she can handle by herself, she shifts the boxes that she can reach looking for the right one to end the day on.

Deciding on the one that recently served as the primary nest for the ousted possum family, she hoists the reeking box in her arms and returns to the piles. This is the sort of box Magpie enjoys the most, stinking and disgusting, the ones that most wouldn’t even consider worth their time. She easily lifts the tape which has long since lost its adhesive and wedges her fingers under the slimy dented flaps. The layers of possum poo do a better job sealing them down than the tape but soon she shimmies them open and dives into the contents. The inside is almost worse than the outside. Filled to the brim with soft toys in various stages of moulding, white fluff and green muck covers the indistinct shapes. Now glued together by generations of mould and animal waste, its hard to make out any one toy, especially since many are missing eyes, buttons, and any facial markings. Magpie pauses for a moment to pull her scarf over her mouth and nose, it wouldn’t do to breathe in all this mould, then plunges into the mess, slowly extricating each teddy from the whole. She takes her time with each one, carefully examining them for useful supplies before casting them aside with the rest of the junk. Pausing with one, she pulls a small metal tool from the bag around her waist and removes the doll’s remaining button eye, adding it to the useful pile.

Shiny.

Halfway through the box a glint of metal catches Magpie’s eye. She shifts her weight to her toes, squatting over the box in excitement. Holding the sides of the box she tilts it slowly in the dimming sunlight. Yes! There it is. A tiny speck of reflective metal peaks from out of the box. All thought of careful salvaging gone, Magpie digs through the mass of felt to find the shiny. She pulls out a decaying brown teddy bear, tugging to extricate it from its neighbour. It would have been fluffy once, with a thick neck and soft fur, probably meant to be a display piece rather than a child’s plaything. Now its fur is matted and wet, either from rain or from possum pee. It clumps strangely, collecting in odd little tufts each topped with a hat of black mould. None of this matters to magpie though, only the shiny chain around its neck. Picking up her button tool she breaks the stitches holding it in place and lifts the chain over the bear’s head.

To her surprise out of the hidden pocket in the bear’s stomach comes a thick piece of metal shaped like a heart. Attached to the chain, it hangs in the sunlight as Magpie holds it up to examine. The metal glows in the light, somehow untouched by rust despite its time in the box.

‘This is special,’ she thinks.

The metal piece rotates slowly as it hangs and reveals two small bumps on the side of the metal where it is thinnest. Magpie examines it carefully and finds a thin line tracing all around the metal, beginning from one of the side bumps and ending all the way around on the other side of the other bump. Taking her tool, she touches this line with the sharp metal tip. The tip dips a short way into the metal and the line widens.

“It opens,” gasps Magpie, grinning as she lowers her scarf.

Eagerly she wedges the tool deeper into the crack then, remembering the white powder from earlier, holds the thing at arm’s length as the metal piece breaks open, splitting cleanly into two connected halves. Inside is a picture of a girl with dark hair and matching eyes. Her hair is uncombed and pulled to the back of her head roughly and her skin is dirty with a large streak across one cheek. It’s been taken at a strange angle, as though the girl was not prepared and slightly wary of the photo taker. Magpie pulls the picture towards her face for a closer look and the picture moves with her, zooming in on the girl’s surprised brown eyes. ‘It’s not a picture,’ Magpie thinks, moving the metal backwards a forward, watching the face move with it. ‘It’s me.’

The eyes in the metal frown as the light around them fades. Then fill with fear as Magpie hurriedly looks to the sky. She’s stayed too long and already the clouds are pressing down on her. No time to examine it further, she stuffs the metal and its chain into the bag at her waist and hurries to pack her small pile of useful supplies into a nearby sack. She lets out an ‘oof’ as she throws the sack over her shoulder and it lands heavily on her back before she runs from the building and into the empty street. Away from the stench of the room and its contents, she smells the scent of rain in the air and takes in the sight from the black storm clouds rushing towards her. Turning and running is all she can do, hoping against hope she’ll be able to make it back.

Racing against the storm.