May 12 - Packrat

He got it from his father, who'd gotten it from his father, who'd gotten it from the Great Depression: the inability to throw anything away, the feeling that you never knew when you were going to need those old newspapers or that broken bicycle pump or that set of encyclopedias from the early 70s that was missing seven or eight volumes, so you held on to it. And the more stuff you held on to, and the longer you held on to it, the harder it became to let yourself throw anything away.
So he didn't.
His house was filled: Boxes upon boxes of old electric, gas, water, and phone bills, videotapes, loose photographs, shopping bags, empty shampoo bottles, garbage bags filled with crushed aluminum cans, stacks of flower pots, broken TVs, stereo components, bundles of magazines bound with twine, an RCA Videodisc Player.
The hallways were tighter than crawlspaces, with encroaching heaps of junk closing off the passable space like cholesterol closing off arteries.
The basement was a network of tunnels through decades of broken furniture, piping, scrap metal, lumber, bicycle parts, auto parts, and railroad ties. Slot machines, carousel horses, signs for businesses that had been bankrupt since before he was born.
No garbage ever went out. He had one stack for egg cartons, one for tin cans, another for milk cartons, junk mail, light bulbs, orange peels, coffee grounds, toilet paper rolls, cereal boxes, olive pits, bread crumbs, aerosol cans, dryer lint, saltine cracker sleeves, paint cans.
The fire destroyed all of it.
He was at work when it happened. By the time they got in touch with him, it was too late for it to matter.
It burned for days. When it was finished everything was gone.
Faulty wiring, they said.
He moved in to a hotel. Compared to his old bedroom, the hotel room was so wide open it was like sleeping in the middle of a football field.
On the first morning after the fire was completely extinguished, he got a cup of coffee from the vending machine in the hotel lobby. After he finished it, he held on to the cup, thinking he might use it again later.