After the accident, he began acquiring little plastic baubles and losing friends. You cannot count the number of plastic pink spider-rings that he inadvertently sat on or crunched beneath his work boots before this realization came to him. The trinkets were everywhere. He found little strips of fake-tatoo paper caught on the branches of trees. They were the kind of toys you get for a quarter from a handcranked dispenser next to the front door of the grocery store, but they were all around him every day. Jiggly plastic skeletons were caught in the sidewalk storm drains at the corner. All of the items had the same bright poverty to them, poorly made with cheap plastic and ugly decals. He saved some of the nicest ones on his kitchen table, propped up back-to-back next to a stack of catalogues. He had a small, disjointed dog that went slack and collapsed when a button on the bottom of its pedestal was pushed. There was a bat made of rubber, textured so its wings seemed to be covered with real fur. A fake-Barbie hand mirror, so tiny it would fit in the palm of his hand, but with a real glass mirror in it. He'd found all of it in the strange months since he fell.

You could put a lot of quarters in those toy dispensers and never get such a collection. He'd done it when he was a kid, and then again as a teenager, when Angela moved away and they'd started sending each other those little toys as signs of affection. It was like a kind of contest to see who could find the funniest items. He would spend several dollars in the toy machines at the Giant and send the best of his yield in a padded envelope along with a long and desperate letter promising to love her forever. Once a week or two he'd get a padded envelope just like the one he sent, and open it to find the same strange little things: green army men with an attached parachute that you could throw up in the air and watch slowly descend, mood rings, and smiley-face key chains. Then he would read her long letter, and miss her. The toys were like a weak attempt to balance the misery they felt at the separation.

They tried, through a soft wall of embarrassment, to find words for the things they had done to each other's bodies when they were still together. It surprised him that touches and movements that had seemed so perfect at the time would be so impossible to talk about. He wanted to write her and tell her everything of what he had felt that day before she left. He fed quarters into the toy machines and hoped for something so whimsical that it might make those words seem less precarious.

Now he found those trinkets on the sidewalk, in his seat on the bus, or wherever he leaned a hand when he took a break at the antique mall. There seemed to be more and more of them as time went on, and they ran in waves. Lately it seemed like he found a lot of small plastic frogs. They varied from flamboyant tree-frogs to plain green toads. He thought maybe he should start a collection of them, keep them in a plastic bag. They weren't all that much individually, but he thought a big bag of them might look rather impressive. He could give them away for Halloween, instead of candy, or along with candy. Some kids wouldn't be happy unless they got candy.

He hadn't really noticed when this started. We're all finding odd things from time to time. His father once found an egg in his shoe. He couldn't quite remember how that happened; it had been so long ago since he heard the story. Maybe a chicken got into the house and thought that big shoe looked almost like a nest. Anyway, the upshot was that his father went to put on his shoes one morning and - squish! That had been one of his favorite stories as a kid, and the reason why he turned his shoes over and shook them every morning of his life. He'd never actually found one of the toys in a shoe. That would have been too... magical. The toys were strange all right, but they weren't magic. They didn't appear, they just showed up.

Other people saw them, too. He'd checked that out a while after he realized that these objects were showing up in his life more often than might be considered normal. He found the little wobbly dog at the base of a "No Parking" sign when he was walking over the the store after work. He swept it up almost without breaking step, and for the first time, he felt a little proud of his new life. The toys were like a sign that things couldn't be so bad.

At the store he bought hot dogs and buns, and when he walked to the cashier he was holding the little dog in one hand. "Willya look at this!" he said to her. "Anybody lose this? I found it outside." He made the little dog flop down by pushing the button underneath.

He watched her eyes go to his hand. She saw it. He could tell it was real even before she spoke. She said she hadn't heard anyone mention it and he could leave it in the lost and found if he wanted. He declined and took his bag of groceries. It was just a test to make sure. He knew the little dog belonged to him.

Now every day was like an Easter egg hunt. He saved only the toys he really liked. He thought that he would have to clear more space somewhere when he ran out of room on his kitchen table. He thought that it was a good thing he had something nice for himself, because he never much heard from the people who had been his friends before. How he'd lost them all was every bit as impossible to explain as were the toys that seemed to surround him at all times, cheery and protective.