Oddities Donated to the Goodwill I Work At

  If you live in America, you know what Goodwill is, a chain of thrift stores where people can donate any old unused garbage they want. Some of it goes to retail, a LOT of it goes straight to the trash, and the rest goes to what people usually just call "the bins," at one of our sorting centers, where customers can pick through the stuff that was only barely deemed sellable before it heads for a landfill.


  For years, I was one of the people who gives that junk its very last once-over before the bins, just to make sure there's nothing like a dead animal, a used needle or a smutty magazine lurking under the grimy baby blankets and broken kitchen gadgets, and obviously I've seen a lot of very weird, very gross stuff...but some things stick in my memory as just plain baffling.


THE SUITCASE - one day, someone donated a suitcase wrapped completely in about an inch of duct tape, and it weighed a TON. Immediately we wondered if it would be stuffed full of something like cocaine, stolen money or part of a murder victim, maybe even a bomb, but we obviously HAD to know. Once we hacked through the tape we found that the suitcase was nailed shut and padlocked several times, but we had plenty of tools on hand. The inside was filled with concrete we had to bust up, and in the concrete was another mass of duct tape, surrounding a smaller wooden box, also nailed shut. So....inside that box, in a plastic sandwich bag, was a single, tiny, very dead hermit crab.


HIGHLY PARTICULAR TOOTH COLLECTION - finding human teeth doesn't phase me anymore, but I've never stopped thinking about the box of fourteen adult wisdom teeth, all with the same degree of coffee staining and all with one black cavity. Not perfectly identical, but how does someone get together that many wisdom teeth with the same exact features, and why?


THE VHS TAPES - an old VHS tape with no other markings but the words "DON'T PLAY FROM 3:45pm to 7:00 am," so that piqued my curiosity of course. It turned out to be a copy of "Air Bud," but for some reason, the whole screen turned blue every time a dog of any sort was on screen. Opening it up, it turned out someone had carefully painted blue nail polish over each and every individual frame containing a canine, Bud or otherwise. Now, notice I said "tapes?" Well, we found just one more like it, and this time it was "There's Something About Mary." We immediately remembered there were several famous scenes involving a dog in that movie, and sure enough...blue nail polish. Yeah, I watched both of them, and I watched them around four or five in the afternoon. Nothing weird has happened so far.


OMINOUS GREETING CARD - the front is a bland photo of the beach and the inside is custom printed with "sorry for the legs! We can trim it, but we can't eat it!" ...then it's signed with a perfectly ordinary "MISS YA! - Beth" I know this one probably has a mundane meaning, but we've had a lot of fun trying to guess what exactly those words could be referring to that would also warrant a greeting card.


GIANT CLOWN CLOTHES - the first thing we got was a ball of red foam, about the size of a soccer ball, with a big slit cut into it. It didn't cross our minds that it was a humongous clown nose until we got the floppy shoe, polka-dotted pants and a few other pieces all ten to fifteen times too big for anyone to possibly wear. Our guess was that they may have been made to put on a large sculpture or one of those oversized halloween skeletons, but.....I know what old sweat smells like, and I know what pit stains look like, too. If someone faked all that, then why?


UPSIDE-DOWN MONA LISA - a pretty sloppy replica of the mona lisa, but it's been framed upside-down, and the words "KEEP THIS WAY DO NOT FLIP!!!" are painted over it in white, with the "DO NOT" underlined and circled in red.


AGGRESSIVE TROPHY - a fake gold "first place" golfing trophy, but the custom text engraved on the base reads: "You sold me a broken VCR and when I tried to return it you lied to me that you don't sell VCR's. This isn't over."


THE MOUSE PUPPET - a seemingly homemade felt puppet of a cartoon mouse in overalls. The head felt weird, so I opened it up and found that a child's dental retainer was very carefully and secretively sewn inside a hollow cavity in the foam rubber, along with a single scratched-up penny. Sometimes I really wonder what sort of curses and hauntings I'm unleashing when I take these kinds of things apart.


ANNIE F'S NOTEBOOK - a cheap school notebook signed "ANNIE F." It's completely packed with breathtakingly lifelike sketches of various animals, objects, people and especially lots of horses, except for one thing: the horses don't have the right kind of eye. They have perfectly circular, flattened eyes like a fish, about halfway too far down the skull, and I know it's not a mistake because their every glassy detail is incredible. The eyes are the most attentively drawn part. Sure, people make up their own animal species and whatnot, but why *hundreds* of normal horses with just these eyes? Why is everything else in the sketchbook normal?


ANACHRONISTIC CHILDREN'S BOOK - an old looking, worn out kid's book with fairly generic, watercolor illustrations of anthropomorphic kittens engaged in various playground activities. The text, however, seems to be the setup instructions for a Windows 10 desktop PC. It's still written as a part of the book, like "click next to enter profile setup, said the black kitten!" I think it's some kind of weird art piece, like a lot of these things could be, but they did a good job making it smell old.


THE RECIPE BINDER - this is someone's personal collection of recipes cut from various magazines, books, or hand-written. It's all fairly normal stuff; soups, casseroles, cakes, cookies, except for the fact that in every single one of them, hand written or collected, every single recipe calls for the addition of a sand dollar. Yeah, a sand dollar, one of those white seashell things. I know that's what they mean because it usually specifies something like "dead" or "spines removed." No instructions to grind it up or anything, just plop it right in. Two things get me even worse, though: one is that a single recipe says you can substitute the sand dollar for a cup of diced tomatoes, and the other is that it's the recipe for peanut butter fudge.


NOTEBOOK #2 - this worn out notebook contains a lot of writing in Chinese, and a handful of sketches of different subjects. Everything in it seems normal enough, except on the tenth page. There's a drawing of a horse, and the rest of the horse isn't very good, but...I'd know those beautifully incorrect eyes anywhere.


THE SOUP CANS - maybe an art project? I don't know. It's a series of 17 soup cans that all came in one box, with several oddities. First, the labels are messily held on with clear tape and all appear to be xeroxed copies of decreasing quality, with the last having details filled in with marker. Second, the cans are filled to the top with solid glass, as if it had been melted and poured in. Third, at the bottom of almost every can is part of a barbie doll sliced into 17 chunks. The only piece missing, for some reason, is the left hand, which would have been in the "last" can, with the crappiest attempt at a label. Instead of a doll hand, however, there's a sort of ragged little tunnel through the glass.


THE FISH - a taxidermied fish, like a salmon or something? It's pretty big, but it's lightweight and hollow. The mouth is held shut by a mess of stitching, glue, staples and nails as if someone went over it a dozen times. The eyes are torn out but they're also covered over by many layers of tape, and the stomach is ripped open as if it burst outward. We thought that was all there was to it, but having seen so many weird little surprises hidden in these things, I couldn't help but look inside it with a pen light. Lo and behold, a phrase was scratched into the inside, near the torn-open hole, so small it must have been with something like the tip of a thumbtack. It only says: "i win."

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