to sort through the scraps of other peoples’ lives. There’s no glamor here, shoulder-deep in indigo plastic trays of the past, elbowing hostile scalpers away from all that relinquished real estate. Someone has gotten married and someone has died and someone has uprooted their profoundly individual life and moved to Berlin and left everything in the capable blue-gloved hands of the Goodwill employees, whose will, by contract, must be good. Posthuman turns over an XXL yellow cardigan, stained white in the armpits, revealing a mulch of baby clothes and broken pottery. They are looking for a new pair of pants. Something black to look like the kind of person who might nail a job interview. Posthuman has a job interview tomorrow, and they are immensely nervous about their ability to perform. In the sea of debris, they must find an item of clothing capable of converting a creature ransacking a dumpster into a passably believable human being. In their quest for conformity, their hands pass over a thousand pasts: a mug still ringed with black coffee, a wallet overflowing with receipts and tarnished quarters, a single purple-stained sock. Posthuman could throw the whole mess into their shopping cart, purchase it at $2.99 a pound, and walk into their interview decked out in technicolor memory. But they would not get the job. And though they do not particularly want the job, they need it. That’s why they’re buying pants at the Goodwill Bins. Posthuman finds a pair of ink-wash jeans which look like they might have potential to flatter their hips. Do employers care about hips? They shouldn’t, but probably. Posthuman dives a hand into the ocean-floor darkness of the pants pockets, pulls out a tatter of lined paper. To do: it says, groceries, clean bathroom, apologize to Nicholas. Posthuman buys the pants and the note, which costs nothing because it has no weight. Tomorrow, they will wear them both into their interview, the jeans and their college-ruled secret, and the interview will go moderately well, they will even make the interviewer laugh a couple times and their hopes will inflate like an untethered balloon, but they will not get the job, and when they get the rejection, they will blame the pants and their unknown original owner, because even in that steely office room they could hear the note unfinished in their pocket, in the pause after every question, they held themselves back from crying out I’m sorry, Nicholas, I’m so damn sorry.