Please Come To My Estate Sale

Come on down this Friday to 2456 Eagle Street for the most important estate sale of the season. That’s right, friends and neighbors, it’s what you’ve all been waiting for: two weeks ago, my dear father’s tumor finally metastasized, spread to his lungs, and devoured his innards with the apathetic ferocity typical of most universal processes. And, of course, this comes only two months after my mother’s tragic fall onto four unfortunately positioned gardening spikes, leaving their vast stockpile of accumulated possessions to be distributed at my discretion.

But hey, my loss is your gain! Come plunder my parents’ home with the irreverence of a dirty desert scavenger, one who smashes his way into a pyramid and tears off the Pharaoh’s mummified arm to use for kindling. You are an obese suburban Indiana Jones, uncovering artifacts that defined an ancient civilization and then piling them in your son’s old bedroom/storage room. Yes, you are the SS trooper, plucking forth a dead Ukrainian’s gold filling with a pair of rusty pliers. You are the glorious detritivores, the squirming wriggling death machines, returning my parents’ possessions to the living.

We’ve got ceramic dragon statuettes, Quest for Glory 1-4 on CD-ROM, thousands of floppy disks, How to Win the Lottery by Gordon Sutherland, McDonalds Batman Forever collectible glasses, Star Wars Monopoly without the player pieces or money, and taped episodes of Growing Pains. We’ve got tons of self-help get rich quick books, which is so funny since you can tell they never got rich, never even upgraded their plastic countertops to marble. Come laugh at my poverty stricken dead parents’ futile aspirations and comfort yourself in the knowledge that you, on the other hand, will definitely be rich and famous when you die.

We’ve got a two foot tall Santa dressed as a Swiss mountain climber, a vase with marbles in it for some reason, a painting of popcorn, Dallas Cowboys koozies, and five boxes of Alfredo Pastaroni. Yes, come buy my father’s Pastaroni and devour the nutrient rich noodles originally meant to nourish my father’s body because after all, corpses don’t eat, never eat, unless they join Satan’s undead army in the End Times, and even then, they wouldn’t eat a bowl of Pastaroni unless festooned with the blood and flesh of the damned, so don’t worry; just eat my dead parents’ food. Eat it and feel their strength flow into you like Highlander. Dig up their graves — why not? — peel off their dried skin in flakes, and dip the flakes in honey mustard. Get all their nutrients, motherfucker. Get that shit inside you and know you’ll never die like these sad animals.

We’ve got penguin plates, a glass candy dish, prescription painkillers, a pencil drawing of a burning tree, and an old yellow quilt. Only one dollar for my parents’ old yellow quilt. I promise it’s not the quilt my father wrapped himself in like a womb as death approached. It’s definitely not the quilt we carried his corpse downstairs in, the hot fishy smell of him oozing into the fabric. It’s totally not the quilt all his bodily fluids rushed into from every orifice like a roach crushed in your fist. No, we wouldn’t sell that quilt to you because we are not purveyors of death; we have a government issued estate sale permit, and we are reputable members of this community, okay?

We’ve got t-shirts, dresses, shorts, jeans, and hats — dead people clothes of all kinds for you to wear like you’re going as my mom or dad for Halloween, like my parents morphed Mystique style into fat rosacea faced hoarders who frequent estate sales. The dresses are particularly excellent deals because my mother loved fashion, and also, in case you’re worried, I’m certain a fragment of her spirit body hasn’t attached itself to any of her clothes. That is to say, by wearing her dress, her ghost won’t possess you, have sex with your husband, and then cook a casserole. Although you may find strands of my dead parents’ hair stuck to the fabric, which I would appreciate having returned to me. Can’t have dead people hair wandering around having new experiences, ha ha ha–

Everyone I love is dead.

Anyway, think of our estate sale as a museum of my parents’ lives, the archaeological record of their time on this earth. Here are the dishes they received as a wedding gift, the coffee pot they used every morning, and all the books they ever read. Evaluate the efficacy of their lives based on each possession: ‘Oh look, they enjoyed Kenny Loggins and John Denver. They did not have good taste in music and therefore were probably inferior human beings. Perhaps, if they liked bad things, it’s not so bad they’re dead because they were spending their limited time liking bad things. Perhaps the world’s better off without these dumb people who liked dumb things.’ You can think these thoughts because I won’t know because I can’t read minds. It’s your prerogative. Go ahead and judge my dead parents, you bloodsucking Skeksis trash, and then put your head in plastic bag. Speaking of which, everything you fit in a gallon sized plastic bag is five dollars.