She was a gatherer, buying chipped lilac-colored plates and mugs out of discount bins, mothball-scented afghans from racks, VHS tapes off rickety corner shelves. One year, a widow, and she’d have something to show for it. She turned into a licker with wide gums, tongue over teeth, and repeat. She was a tissue tearer, too. With wired fingers, she rolled Puffs into dozens of small little balls and soaked them between her cheeks, sucking the lotion out.

Like a true Beaverton citizen, she collected twigs, garbage, and the used and reused things she found salvaging around. She tried to rebuild her house into a home, though the stay was supposed to be short. A trilogy of longing, of waiting at the cusp of an impending bubble’s burst. She became a scrapper, dragging pipes across the street, the tinny tune, a theme song, a signature sound – Woody the Woodpecker’s guffaw, Porky Pig’s speech impediment, Elmer Fudd’s rhotacism.

With the scrap of copper and steel, the canned foods, and storage boxes, she’d build a bridge: a truss bridge, a beam bridge, a suspension bridge. The suspense grew in the water’s growling gurgles, swallowing whole another can of okra, cat food, creamed corn. Certain, yes, she’d soon make it to the other side of the shore, as she always should have.

It was coming along now; she was a nodder, nodded, seeing the bulge of debris peaking from the river’s glassy top. The refrigerator hadn’t been able to open in six weeks, where she slept just a crinkling cloud of plastic bags. She hadn’t spoken aloud in nine months, and even then, it was just a gasp as a darting moth tried to make home in her hair.

Didn’t she once have a dog, or was it a cat? She became a wonderer, watching the furry backside of a rat as he climbed the tower of toilet paper rolls, balanced across a twirler’s baton, and leapt to the kitchen counter. He used a stack of mail, pots, and a pair-less shoe as a stairway, his tail slinking inside the dark space between cabinet and door as it closed, and he was gone.

She went to wash in the river, unable to find the bathtub. At the edge, she pulled the wet wedge of tissue from her bottom lip and spat it to the overgrown ground. Swimming along with the quiet current, the labels had peeled off the cans like a bed of undulating eels swimming downshore.

There was a tent sale just south of town. She pushed the old grocery cart and came home with the sense of a fresh start. Peeling off plastic wrap, tearing off pull tabs, cracking lids loose, those satisfying sensations of something anew in her twisted fingers and frail palms.

A few days later, she carried bags through thrift stores, around garbage day, and by yard sales. She tried to keep it together that widening leap of bridge turned dam being tugged by the water, splitting apart. The fish floated to the surface, scales of stone to skip across. Their black eyes mirrored the speck of sun, buoying little beads. Consumer. Her floors were getting smaller; her house shrunk many sizes, too. Consumed. Her feet poked through the windows, and her head popped out the chimney as the house’s hunger grew and grew.