Out I stumble late afternoon one sunny and officially unemployed early February afternoon,
on my way to my late afternoon walk, leaving my PC and the stale apartment space behind.

I reached the bottom of the stairs from our third-story apartment and
began the short trek across the striped asphalt of the apartment complex
parking lot to toss the trash. Then I see two guys carrying a pretty nice
looking, mostly pale blue, mattress out of the dumpster area.

They were holding it lengthwise and moving at a pretty good clip.

A minute or so later some other guy comes running out from behind the trees
and comes streaking across the parking lot at an equally good clip, missing me by a few yards.

The first two and the mattress had disappeared from my sight but the scraggly bearded dude
who'd just missed me was still on their tail yelling:

    "Hey, that's my mattress."

I dropped my sunglass case I'd been carrying as I tried to follow
the emerging scene. In some kind of smartass move apparently designed
to show my middle-aged street hip quickness and adeptness at speaking
cleverly I parodied, before I could restrain myself:

    "Hey, that's my sunglasses case."

The scraggly dude cast an angry, unappreciative and uncomprehending backward
glance at me as he pursued his bed and the two who'd made away with it.

I don't know if he himself had spotted it in the dumpster and had planned
on absconding with it, or as seems likelier, had already been sleeping on it back
there for a few nights before the other two decided to make a grab for it.

In any case I didn't think it wise, and lacked the energy, to try to
catch up with them and never found out any more about it though I remain
curious as to the outcome.

Imagine chasing your bed from one dumpster to another.
Outnumbered, hungry, and hungry for a bed too.