Eight Objects

There are eight objects. All of them must fit into a suitcase. The suitcase cannot exceed the dimensions of the underside of an airline seat and must weigh only twenty pounds.

The first: A baby blanket. One of the edges is badly chewed. Another is stained black, and crumbles when touched. She cradles it, one hand tucked beneath, as she settles it into the corners of the suitcase. The blackened edge is gathered under, out of the way, where it will not be jostled.

The second: A sewing kit. The case is battered, cracked plastic. The threads are not original, have been replenished many times over the years, and the miniature chalk pencil has been replaced thrice. The scissors, metal, tarnished, are not the ones that came with the kit initially, she is sure. But they are the ones that were in it when her mother gave it to her.

It was not the first gift she received from her mother, nor the last. But it is the only one she now has.

The part of her that still can laughs that her mother, eminently practical, would have appreciated that.

The third: A cookbook. The edges of the pages are soft and feathery, as is the spine. Many of the corners are rounded over from generations of dog-earing. She stopped needing to turn the pages for reference several years ago, but there are notes scribbled in the margins. They are equally memorized, but she still seeks them out. She never wishes to forget the exact, looping scrawl of her father.

The fourth: A cardigan. It is thickly dusty, enough that she had to hold it at length and beat it until the dust had at least settled enough for her to stop sneezing. A cousin (she couldn’t remember who. She had tried for hours, but they blurred together until there was nothing but the thickening weight of guilt and a smear of colors) had bought it for her some years ago. It is thick and ugly, but warm.

The fifth: A single earring. She has never been one for vanity, but it is small and gold and star-shaped. He’d gotten them for her the fifth time they’d met.

She had searched for days to find the other. Days of jumping at every sunlit sparkle in the dust. Of ripping up already-ruined carpet. Of peering into every crack in their floor with a flashlight clenched between her teeth, fingers scraping away debris.

But there was only ever the one, and it didn’t take her long to realize that looking further was pointless. If it had been lost, she was never going to find it. It had been a blessing alone to find the first one. It had been a blessing to find anything at all.

The sixth: A phone. The screen is cracked. Two of the buttons no longer work. The charging port has warped (from heat, from impact, from both, she isn’t sure) and only charges if the cable is plugged in three times and turned upside down twice. She has nightmares of the day the wires inside are severed and despite every contortion, the screen remains dark and still.

She tries not to open it more than once a day. The nightmares of it no longer charging are accompanied by nightmares of it failing to turn on, of the buttons breaking beneath her fingers, of the cracked screen developing black pixels that spread like billowing smoke until it is a useless brick. It’s like taking only the smallest bites of food, to stretch every morsel until you can pretend it’s truly a meal.

But still. On nights where she can’t sleep (most of them, now) she clicks the button on the side (she needs to hold it in just the right way, or it won’t turn on at all) and pulls up the saved voicemails. Or she looks at the pictures, thumbing through a sheaf of memories.

Perhaps it’s smarter to tuck the phone somewhere safe and ignore it until she can upload the images elsewhere. No, she tells herself. This is safer. She’s just ensuring things are working.

(That is not the only reason. But she did not live to deny herself small pleasures.)

The seventh: A plastic bag filled with cards or, more precisely, the fragments of them. The largest recovered section shows a flash of his smile. The next largest has a portion of a scrawled name. The baby had just been learning how to write, then, and had taken pride in writing her letters large and proud across any surface. There had been so many pages filled with them. No scrap large enough to contain her full name had survived.

The eighth, and this had been a point of some deliberation: A ceramic figure of a bird.

It was not an expensive piece of ceramic, nor one of any particular note. But birds had fascinated her since her youth. The loose formations of them, moving onward from the unknown to the unknown. How did they know where they were going?

She had placed it on their dresser, when it was still a dresser, and felt a pang of odd loneliness. Birds, she learned, flew in V formations to rest their wings. One grew tired, fell to the back, and rode on the slipstream of others. This bird flew onward, with no one to usher it forward.

It had been lying on the ground when she found it, ceramic wings somehow intact, polished white gleaming under dust.

She takes it, wraps it in old socks, and tucks it into the suitcase.

She closes it. Joins the throng of people bobbing down the street. Birds fly overhead, wings pointed in the sharp V of an arrow across the sky. One by one, they drift out of formation. She watches until only one remains.

It flies above her as she walks. Distance and smoke swallow her house behind her. She does not look back. Her suitcase thumps against her legs. The distance and smoke that swallowed her house swallow the bird, and then her.