A Visit from the Goon Squad

Sasha is thirty-five years old but pretending to be twenty-eight and is a kleptomaniac. On a first date with Alex, she steals a wallet from the open purse of a woman in the ladies’ room. When the woman discovers the loss, Sasha decides to correct her action, discreetly returning the wallet and telling the woman about her condition. The woman agrees not to tell anyone about it. Sasha and Alex go back to her apartment, where Alex is charmed to find that she lives in “a bathtub-in-the-kitchen apartment” (13) and decides to take a bath. Also in Sasha’s apartment is her collection of stolen objects, which she keeps, piled up on a pair of tables, “separate from the rest of her life” (16). Alex sees a box of bath salts in the midst of the stolen objects, and decides to use them in the bath. The smell of the bath salts causes Sasha to remember the friend they belonged to, Lizzie, from whom Sasha is now estranged. While Alex is in the bathroom, Sasha steals a worn piece of paper from Alex’s wallet, on which is scribbled in fading ink, “I BELIEVE IN YOU” (17).

“Found Objects” is narrated from a 3rd-person