067. You might want to double bag your sadness

Jim smelt weird. It wasn’t something you could put your finger on – maybe a mixture of damp towels and sneezes and heated-up takeaway – but it was hardly surprising. You couldn’t spend all day picking up bags of people’s sadness without it rubbing off on you.

The Council collected sadness Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Mayor had won the election by campaigning for a city where “families don’t have to keep piles of unwanted despondency in their basements”. Nobody asked where it went – most people assumed that the authorities packed it up and sent it to sea. Like maybe there were islands of sadness, floating in the currents of the remote Pacific.

But not all the sadness made it back to the Council depot. Sometimes, when no-one was looking, Jim would rub his beard nervously. Then, he’d tear open up bags or cardboard boxes, and look in at people’s grief and loneliness.

Sometimes, it was beautiful – tear-washed and smooth – and sometimes it was wrathful. There were days the thrown-out sadness looked like art, and days it seemed to wash the whole sky grey. Some days he found pieces of sadness, so perfect and artful and raw, he snuck fragments of it into his pockets and took them home.

Jim didn’t consider himself a bright man. He’d never been to college, and he couldn’t spell right.  There were things he just didn’t understand.

Bagging your sadness up and hiding it was one thing, and putting it out on the kerb was easy enough. But, he wondered, as he hauled bags and bags of sadness off the kerb each day, what did all those people do when they went inside, empty-handed? How did they look at each other? When the emptiness that made us reach for love and flesh and comfort had been disposed of – what was left to hold people together?