The Ultimate Collection

I’ve never seen a shrink before, unless you mean the school counsellor. She used to try to get me to say stuff I didn’t want to say. Now, they got me waiting here when I got better things to do. I’m so close to completing my collection. This is the best part - the point when the end is in sight. And now they’re making me waste time in this poxy office. It’s so lame. I gotta think what I can tell the shrink so as I can get out quick.

I guess you could say I’ve always been a collector. My whole life, I’ve collected things, grouped them, catalogued them, organised them. It’s the thrill of it, you see. Getting the whole set. Completing the task. Searching for that last elusive item. It’s no fun if it’s too easy. I know some guys will just go out and buy every Pokémon card in one hit. Not me. I enjoy the hunt. The thrill of the chase. Finding that last rare card to complete the compilation.

People say I’m obsessive. That’s what old Mrs Thomas said in my third-grade report card. I think her exact words were ‘William can apply himself with great attention to detail when it suits him, but needs to learn when to stop.’ Huh? She makes it sound like a bad thing. Anyhow, I sure showed her I knew when to stop. But that’s for later.

But collecting, yeah, there must be a goal. An end point. You wouldn’t believe the high you can get from scoring that last rare stamp to complete the set, that baseball card even the players themselves shout about, that Tonka toy old men would give their last dime to own.

But the high… well, it doesn’t last, see? It’s almost a disappointment when you turn up the final Star Wars figure on eBay, or the rare Panini sticker no-one ever saw before. Then you gotta find something else to collect pretty darn quick.

How do I afford it? Well, money’s no object for the old man. Jerry, that is. My so-called stepfather. He knows he gotta keep me on side because he needs to keep Momma happy, and I have her ear. I’m her beloved boy, who can do no wrong. Lucky he can afford it, ’cause if the day came when he couldn’t, well, he’d not be around long, and he knows it. He makes out he gives me the money ’cause he cares for me, but he and me… well, we both know that ain’t the case.

How’d it start? Well, I guess it all goes back to when I was a little kid. Maybe five or thereabouts. The first things I collected were boogers. Yeah, that’s right. I used to lie in bed, not sleeping on account of the shouting and slamming going on downstairs when Momma and my father got going on some disagreement or other. And I’d fish them boogers right out and stick them on the wall. That time, we had this gross old wallpaper, covered in sissy pink flowers. As I lay, listening to them hammering at each other, I’d plan how I’d cover all that sissy pink with boogers until it was gone. I never got that far though, ’cause one night, the shouting and slamming ended in Grandma picking me up, quilt an’ all, and putting me in the back of her Dodge. Momma’s face was shiny with dark sticky stuff, running down her nose and sticking her cheek to mine. We didn’t see my father after that, and I never saw them sissy pink flowers neither. I’m not sure which I was gladder about.

After that, my collecting started in earnest, and I guess you could say Momma became my enabler. I started with little things, the things all little kids collect: shiny stones, dead bugs, spiders’ legs. Then one day, Momma found my collection of earthworms under my pillow and put them in the garbage. I got so mad. Well, anyone would. Around that time, Jerry had bought Momma this rabbit. He was trying to get on her good side. Wanted to impress her, I guess. She made so much fuss of that lame rabbit, you’d think it was her kid. Anyhow, I was mad when she trashed my worms, so after I bust all them fancy bottles in her cabinet and calmed down a bit, I decided she needed to be taught a lesson.

I hadn’t realised how easy it would be for that darned rabbit’s head to come off between the blades of Momma’s shears. I watched as its paws twitched, even after its head rolled across the cage. I kinda didn’t like the way its black eyes looked at me after that, like I was a disappointment. The same way Mrs Thomas looked after I threw her lame poster paint on the walls in class. Anyways, I had to cover those eyes with straw, darn quick. I kept the rabbit’s feet. They say a rabbit’s foot is good luck and I had four of them. Can’t say I had much luck from them, though.

After the rabbit was gone, Momma had more time for me. She knew I liked collecting stuff and decided she should help me collect something more wholesome. She took me to Macy’s and picked out this diecast Chevrolet and told me I could have another one if I got a straight-A average. Like that would be difficult when my entire school is full of goofballs. Soon, my shelf was groaning with all those models. I only had to look at Momma and she’d buy me another. I had the whole set. But that was too easy, and I needed to find something else to collect. Something that would be a challenge.

It was while I was in Mrs Thomas’ third-grade class that I started the ultimate collection. Back then, I didn’t realise I was on the cusp of the most important collection of my life.

It was one of those late fall days when the sun doesn’t know its time is up, and it fools you into leaving your sweater at home. This day, I was sat by the window, the sun glaring in my face and darn near burning the skin off my bones. Like anyone with any sense, I opened the window to get some fresh air in the room. Alice Cutler was sat right by me, and she didn’t like that I opened the window without her permission, ’cause everyone knows Alice is the prettiest girl in the class, which meant what Alice wanted, Alice got. And right then, she didn’t want no howling gale on her, just ‘cause the sun had fooled her into leaving her sweater home. Now, I kinda liked Alice back in third grade, even if she was a ditz, mainly ’cause of the way she used to push that blonde curl behind her ear and chew her lip when she was thinking. Yeah, okay, I admit, I thought she was kinda cute. So, I never meant it to happen. But it did happen, and it started my collection, so I guess it was a good thing, really.

Alice got up and closed the window. Cute or not, I didn’t want my face half burned off just ’cause a ditzy girl left her sweater home, so I opened it again. Alice closed it. I opened it. We were both pushing and pulling the window and then I looked down and Alice’s hand was in the frame, and the red sticky stuff was on the floor and on the glass pane and Alice was screaming and Mrs Thomas was screaming. I pulled the frame up and Alice pulled her hand out and carried on making one helluva fuss. Those kids all crowded around Alice, ignoring me - though I’m used to that - so I never got the chance to apologise. I was left alone while the whole class went to care for Alice so she would like them the best. I sat back down and then I saw it. The start of my collection. The most perfect, cutest little pinkie, the nail glinting in the sunlight, a blob of perfect red, a precious ruby, at its end. No-one else saw it. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. It felt like I didn’t have a choice. At first, I thought maybe I might give it back to Alice. For a moment, I hoped maybe if I did, she’d like me the best. But remember, I was a stupid kid in those days. Anyhow, I kinda forgot about giving it back because by the time I got home, it didn’t look so great. By then, I guessed she wouldn’t want it, so I kept it. I had this old wooden box my grandma gave me. The box sat on my shelf between those old diecasts, and every now and then, I’d take it down and look at it.

All the while, I carried on collecting other things. That year I was big into collecting bobbleheads. You know, those models of sportsmen and the like. The heads are too big and bounce around on a spring. At first, I thought they were dope. Jerry was a Yankees fan and he’d take me to the game and buy me the latest team bobblehead. But the team keeps changing and you can never get the set as there’s always another player. Let me tell you one thing about collecting, something Jerry couldn’t understand. I think he is feeble-minded, even if he does run his own business. It’s no fun trying to hit a moving target. So I let him take me to the game and buy me bobbleheads, but only ’cause I wanted to be good to him as it can’t be easy being that dense and having to hang out with Momma all the time.

It was a while before I could continue to grow my collection. My opportunity came a year or so later. Grandma had been ill. Well, she was kinda old, I guess, and I had noticed her acting a touch crabby, so it was no loss to the world when she decided to die. Momma was sad and I guess I was a bit too, as Grandma had been good to me and she had rescued us when my father… well, she rescued us, anyhow. But she could be a witch. Sometimes she’d say to Momma, ‘you make a fool of that boy,’ if I asked for something. Then they’d fight. She tried to stop Momma buying me things. So I reckoned Momma would be better off without Grandma telling her what to do and stopping her buying me things.

When Grandma died, Momma took me to see her at the funeral home. I hadn’t seen a dead body before, so I was stoked to go. They showed us into a dark room where Grandma was lying in the casket. Well, the body kinda looked like my grandma but it wasn’t her. The stiff in the casket had makeup on, and everyone knows my grandma couldn’t bear women who wore lipstick. She was kinda like that. The body lay with its hands folded on its chest, the fingers wound around with rosary beads. That was another reason I knew it wasn’t my grandma. Grandma may have pretended to be nice to the priest when he came round, but after he left, she would be cussing him and his type to high heaven, so I knew she wouldn’t want to be lying there with rosary beads threaded round her hands. But it was kinda interesting, all the same, to see a stiff. I was thinking ‘bout how I would tell nine-fingers-Alice all about it, ’cause I thought she’d be interested. Momma was howling so as to be embarrassing. In fact, she was howling so much, she had to go out. Before we went to the funeral home, Momma had told me that sometimes, people like to have a keepsake from a dead body, like a lock of hair, to remind them. I can’t think of anything more gross than hair from an old person, with that old-person smell and old-person grease. Pretty crusty, huh? But when Momma left me alone with the stiff, I remembered what she had said about a keepsake. Momma had brought her scissors to take some hair, and they were right there in her purse.

That left pinkie came off way easier even than the rabbit’s head. You couldn’t see the gap once the rosary beads were arranged over the stump. What’s good about a stiff is there ain’t none of that red sticky stuff. I thought I might show the finger to Alice, but then I remembered she is missing one herself, so I put it in the wooden box.

The next few additions to my collection were easier to find. There had been a bit of trouble – people make a row over nothing – and the school said they’d only keep me if I didn’t take the bus. Adults are so lame. Jerry said I could take his car to school. His driver would drop me. I told the driver I could walk the few blocks once we were outta sight of home. I promised I’d go straight to school. I kinda meant to as well, only walking through the park, I got talking to these hobos. It wasn’t my fault. They musta seen me and thought maybe I had a spare dime or so. Anyways, we got talking and sitting and them drinking something outta a brown paper bag. They didn’t smell too good, but it was darn more interesting than the classes I shoulda been in. There was this one hobo who never said anything. Just lay and grunted and groaned. Musta been a hundred at least. The others were poking him and laughing. One said you could saw his leg off and he wouldn’t notice.

I didn’t saw his leg off. The way I see it, he was almost dead and didn’t need all them fingers.

I didn’t mean to hurt Jerry, though. He may be lame an’ all, but Momma likes him. Everyone was taking ’bout this solar eclipse that was going to happen. In Geography class, they made us learn all about it and how to watch it safely. Jerry got all fired up and bought himself a goddam massive telescope. On the day of the eclipse, he made me help him carry it to the park. He started spouting all these technical details ’bout lenses and electromagnetics at me, and I was humouring him, ’cause I know he doesn’t really know anything about stuff and just likes to pretend. He said I needed to hold the boom while he fixed the shutters, but it was getting dark, and I wasn’t concentrating. That ’scope was darned heavy, and I didn’t know the edge was so sharp.

The problem with the park was, with all the fuss Jerry was making ’bout his poxy finger and all that darned red sticky stuff getting all over us, it attracted some attention, and then those hobos recognised me, and one of them only had four fingers. It wasn’t long before the feds arrived and the hobos throwing all kinds of dumb stories around the place, ’bout what happened that day and how that one had ended up with only four fingers. Seems some adults get up tight ’bout the dumbest things.

So now I gotta talk to this shrink. It’s all so basic. I need to get on with my collection, ’cause I’m almost there now. Just one finger short, and I got the whole set. Right ring finger is all I need.

About time. The shrink is coming and I gotta decide how much of this I want to tell him.

Here he is at last.

Oh.

I was expecting a man in a white coat, like in the movies. Instead, he’s… well, he’s a she. Young. Pretty. She looks at me, deep into my eyes, and smiles in a way that makes me smile too. I can’t help myself. She tucks a blonde curl behind her ear, in that way I like, then holds out her hand for me to shake.

‘William, good to meet you. I’m Dr Goldsmith. Thank you for coming in to see me today.’

And as I take her hand, I see she is wearing the most exquisite diamond ring. But more importantly, it is on the most beautiful finger I have ever seen. Her right ring finger. And you gotta ask yourself, how far do you go to complete the ultimate collection?