She decided, while walking the dog, that the last rent was paid and done. She was sick of the frustration; she was on her way down.  The dog was getting haggy and worn out, too. 

    She'd just find a room somewhere, live on her lump for a while and daydream.  The wage-slave crap was endless.  She was sick of the stuff, her stuff, her things, she'd sell it, one by one by each, and anything left could burn.

    So long as there was money for food and beer, and a place to walk Janine, the hound, she would be okay.  So, say good-bye customer service, and smile savage on the way out. 

    Sure that little lump wouldn't last forever, or even five months and on the humblest of lifestyles, but maybe by then she'll have figured out how to do like some people she'd heard of, buying stuff at flea markets and selling it on E-Bay, or answering surveys or some such silly business. 

    Carmen felt good.  There was freedom in indigence. A breath of life.

    The neighbors didn't understand, but they came in and looked at the things.  She had lots of cardboard and junk mail.  The neighbors had a hard time seeing the things though all that paper.  She held back telling them that they could have all the paper for cheap.  She did say that it could be recycled or used for paintings, those were some possible uses, and smiled in case they wanted to take it for a joke.  They sort of did. She said, "Or you could just unicycle it." That joke they didn't get. She was hoping they would buy it, but they didn't.

    They did want her books, but those weren't for sale after all. Not one, even the junky ones like the beat up collection of dirty letters written to Forces magazine in the seventies, or her romances from the 1890's that she had never read but purchased as a child for pennies at the library, or her old Sociology and Statistics textbooks.  Turns out she was an information hoarder after all.  Her CD's she sold; they'd all been backed up on mp3.  She was honest and realistic about the nicotine coating on the broken cases from those years she and her lovers smoked, and the fact that they all skipped, but hopefully it was just her thirteen-year-old player and perhaps they could be resurfaced and played again.  She sold a couple for fifty cents apiece and then a big batch of them to her friendly collector neighbor for twenty dollars-not bad.

    She didn't sell her Telecaster or her cat, but she did sell her acoustic guitar and her giant African millipedes. Good riddance to that stuff.

    She tried to sell her plates, they were nice, had been her grandmother's, but had a hard time.  Finally, an uptight realtor took them for thirty dollars.  Not bad.  They were nice plates.  The realtor looked shifty on her way out and the nice lawyer girl from next door seemed worried.  Was Carmen suicidal?  "What will you eat off of, Carmen?"