where she came from

She sat at her desk, bathed in faded yellow light from the burgundy lamp she'd picked up on the side of the road by the gelati shop. It was a very good sidewalk find, that lamp. It was Summer when she found it, and her dad had taken her to get ice-cream as a special treat. She had gotten hazelnut and passionfruit and was walking back to the car and licking the ice-cream luxuriously when she spotted the lamp. Her dad was sometimes loathe to pick up things that they didn't really need, but she protested that her current desk lamp was old and white and too fluorescent. And besides, they could always re-abandon on the roadside if it was faulty.

Where she came from, it was unheard of for White People to take things from the side of the road. This was not done. It was not necessary for them and, also, there were people who needed things more. These were the homeless people who would come around in abandoned supermarket trolleys. They would ring on doorbells and ask for old snackwich machines and broken fans and exhausted hairdryers. They would ask if you needed your grass cut or your roof painted or maybe your dog walked. Or did you have any spare old clothing? Sometimes, she would give them things. Sometimes she wouldn't have anything to give them and she felt bad, but she knew that it would be hard for her to help every person in the world (or even her city).

One time somebody stole a pair of gardening scissors from her front garden, and she wasn't sure if she was meant to feel afraid or not. One time the neighbours went on holiday for a coastal getaway and when they came back their front window was splintered and there was burgundy blood on their lacy white curtains.

One time when she was younger she heard (or maybe she imagined) that somebody stole her uncle's entire cd collection. She thought that this would make her very sad, and it seemed like a very personal and unnecessary thing to take. cd's are like some small part of your soul, and they are full of memories and past romance and deep sadness and uplifting happiness. What right (or reason) did someone have to take these? She didn't think that this was fair

Her uncle was a good man. He was a lawyer and lived in a very nice house with a very steep driveway. He had beautiful children.

No one rang her doorbell asking for old telephones anymore. Instead, she gave them to recycling bins that contributed to saving orangutangs in Borneo. She quite liked the idea of this: that her cell phone from 2000 that didn't work might help a gentle orangutang. She didn't really know what the homeless people used to do with her broken kitchen appliances. They didn't work so it seemed unlikely that they would be able to use them in their own homes. Perhaps they dismantled them slowly and carefully and removed the useful parts and sold the rest as scrap metal.

Sometimes, in the place where she used to live, the homeless people would rifle through the big rubbish bins that her father would put outside their house on Sunday nights. She didn't know what they were looking for exactly, and never got the chance to ask. They would search through the rubbish as if on a hunt for buried treasure. The neighbours didn't like this: they used to wait patiently behind the gated fence for the rubbish truck to arrive with the sunrise and they would bring out the rubbish bins and accept them back once the truck had consumed the waste.