May 2nd, 11:48 PM, the metal yard on Sterling Road, in the small-goods pile that sits under the west light and gets picked over on Tuesdays. I had followed it. I will not pretend otherwise: I went back to the lane on three nights, and on the third the toaster was gone from the asphalt, and there is only one place in this part of the city that such things go, so I drove there.
It is on top. That is the mercy of the eighth station and the only one I could find. It came off the truck last and it landed face out on a mound of dryer drums and oven doors and the ribbed grille of something I could not identify, and so it is the one object in the heap that is fully lit. A sodium fixture on a pole at the upper right does the work, badly and warmly. Everything beneath goes brown, then umber, then out. The scorch on the flank sits directly in that light. In a pile this size the eye needs somewhere to land, and it lands there, on the one mark this object made for itself across eleven years of being useful. The viewer should understand that a distinguishing mark and a wound are the same information delivered at different volumes.
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