This is the first post of Flash Fiction February. If I have to do an old story from my decades of folders, I’ll announce that, otherwise these very short 1-2K word stories were written the day before I post them.

“What’s with the lighters?” I asked Rhannia. She has thousands and thousands of old, spent, plastic cigarette lighters. They are categorized by size and then color. There are three stalls in the barn, full of them, in bags. Then, there is a storage shed outside the barn. She estimates that there are 350,000 of them. The weight is just under a ton.

“I don’t know yet, but what I do know is that someday, someone is going to need them for some new product, and I’m the one who is going to have them.” Did you know that on their sides they can hold 20 lbs of external pressure before they crack, and standing up, they can take 70 lbs? The little things are deceptively strong.”

Rhannia has a farm on the edge of a small town in Minnesota. There are few animals here, but she collects almost every random thing that no one would ever think to collect. “It’s a numbers game,” she says.

“Sooner or later someone is going to need this or that, and I’m the one who has it. Once I sold 2000 coffee cans.” It was too bad they didn’t want the 1500 I had leftover.”

“Can I ask you what you made on that?” I said.

“95 cents a can, they wouldn’t pay a penny more.” She answered.

Everywhere I look I see these rows of unlikely items. Ordered, categorized, and on the clock.

I asked Rhannia. “You must have this advertised online.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “There are clearinghouses for odd things like this. Inventors, startups, Universities and business incubators have a lot of interesting and odd needs; you just never know what someone is going to want. Say someone is inventing something, or they are fabricating a new part, or accessory to an already existing project. What they’ll do is go to one of these sites where my catalog is, and others just like mine and they scour the list, looking for something that can help them. They usually do not need it in the form it’s in; it will be augmented, or cut, or sliced, or modified for their purposes, but it might help them with their tests, or prototypes, or even their finished products.”

“Colleges and Universities use things in their labs, or for their celebrations, or their homecoming floats. Most years, it’s schools that provide the bulk of my business.”

“It has my brain working,” I said. “I look at all these things and now I’m thinking of ways that I could use them, or what they could be converted for.”

“Yep, It’ll drive you nuts,” she said.

“What do you think the craziest thing is that you ever sold?” I dared.

“Well that’s easy. It was the darndest thing. This old guy in a fancy pick-up truck showed up. We walked around and talked. He asked to see my chickens. At the time, I had about 20 chickens because I sold the eggs. Anyway, this man wants me to save all my eggshells for 6 months and he pays me in advance to do it.” “I told him, I don’t eat all these eggs! I sell the eggs to people and they have the shells.” He tells me, get this, this guy says I should give them a discount if they bring their shells back to me.

“Give ‘em a buck off their eggs if they bring back their shells” He says. “You can afford it because it’s like you’re getting paid twice for the same shells, I’ll pay you two bucks for every dozen shells you can give me. You give them a buck off, and you make an extra buck per dozen.” She explains.

“I’m fine with that, it’s no skin off me, I have space to store the empty shells, I don’t care, the guy is paying me in advance, so whatever.”

“Then he proceeds to show up every month, loading the shells into his truck, for six months.”

“What did he do with them?” I asked.

“He said something about making a calcium tincture for his grandson who is an athlete.”

“Wow,” I said. “Lucky kid to have a granddad like that.”

“Well, the funniest thing about it was it wasn’t anything that I had ever expected to sell; he didn’t even care to look at any of my other stuff after he saw those chickens.”

Then I asked her about the strangest requests she’s had. “What’s the weirdest thing anyone was looking for?”

“Where do I begin?” She said.

“Just the other day someone called here looking for unused breast implants and other types of saline implants. That’s illegal.” I have to call the authorities when I get a call like that, and I did. Medical supplies are a no-go, you need a special license for that stuff.”

“I’ve had calls for dog hair, dehydrated frogs, ram’s horns, that’s just the animal stuff, and I’m not going to get into the details with you, but I get a lot of calls from perverts looking for weird stuff for their… whatever they do.”

“I think the most popular request I get is mannequins. People always want a mannequin, until they have one, and then they’re creeped out by it, mannequins and shredded metal.”

“I had a guy call me looking for shredded metal. I told him I didn’t have a shredder.” Next thing you know, he goes out and gets his own shredder. He calls me and asks if I need any metal shredded.”

“You should have sold him your 1500 coffee cans!” I exclaimed.

“I tried!” She said. “He wouldn’t buy them though; he wants to charge me.”

“I say hold,” I said. “Hold those coffee cans, you’ll clean up eventually.”

“I love your business here; I love that you’re saving things from the landfills.”

“That’s the idea.” She said. “That’s the idea.”

End

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