I admit it. I cheated. I spent a week and a half trying to write a list and failing miserably, and finally had to get a friend to write a list. And here is the list:
- A WWII bomber jacket
- A restaurant menu
- A partially emptied cup of coffee
- A mostly filled journal- the latest entry has not been completed
- A fresh long-stem rose
- A work cookbook held together with tape
- A bottle of wine
- A green glass vase
- A red and white checkered tablecloth
- An old locket with a folded paper in it
- A cider press (I didn't use this item)
- An old rolling pin
- An old poster written in French
-A potted ivy
- A ball of twine
- A pheasant feather
- A chunk of multi-colored glass
- A wrought iron paper weight
And here is the story I wrote with these things:
Morgan decided she liked the neighborhood. It had personality that the last one had lacked; there were flowers in window boxes and flyers on lampposts and a couple of buskers on the corner, singing softly in some language full of slippery consonants and mournful vowels. It felt like the sort of place that Zoe would be comfortable in.
Zoe’s building was a tall, narrow column of brick with a bright purple door that opened on an equally narrow hallway and a rather spindly staircase that paused briefly at each door on the way up, then continued to gain altitude until it terminated in a rusty hatch that probably lead out onto the roof. The door Morgan wanted, number 6, was the last one before the roof hatch. It was also painted an eye-burning shade of fluorescent green, with the six painted in white over it.
Morgan’s knock was answered by a lot of shuffling and bumping, and a sudden thump against the door.
“Zoe?”
“I got it, hang on.” More shuffling, and then the door swung open. Zoe grinned up at Morgan from the floor, where she was sprawled with a replica of a World War Two bomber jacket tangled around her feet. “Hi.”
“Hi yourself. What happened?”
“Unpacking happened.” She untangled herself and stood up, dusting her black wrap pants off.
Morgan picked her way around mounds of cardboard boxes, heading for an empty patch of space under a massive floor to ceiling window that took up most of one wall. The space was large enough for a red and white checked tablecloth to be laid out in it, as well as a few handmade pillows.
“So you’re doing okay, then?” Morgan asked, tucking her skirt underneath herself and dropping down to sit on a large, round pillow that looked like the top of a fairytale toadstool.
“Okay relative to what?”
“You know. Okay after…all of this.”
Zoe shrugged, choosing a box at random and carrying it over to the tablecloth. She put it in Morgan’s lap and went to get another one.
“I guess. Got the new place and new stuff to do. That’s definitely an improvement.” She didn’t sit down so much as she just crumpled, somehow landing neatly on another pillow. “Go though that, would you? Everything just got thrown into boxes and there’s all kinds of stuff I don’t want anymore.”
“How will I know what you don’t want?”
“Ask, of course. How else?”
Morgan shrugged and picked at the thin brown tape holding the box shut until a strip of it caught under her nail and she could peel it off with a satisfyingly loud tearing sound. The flaps popped up immediately.
“Wow. They really packed this stuff in here.”
Zoe nodded, turning a heavy iron paperweight over in her hands. It was shaped like a circus elephant up on two legs, complete with all the trappings. In spite of this, it was also ugly as sin. “I asked them to get everything in as few boxes as possible. God, why have I kept this thing around?”
“Um…because it was a gift from Jason’s mother?”
“Ew, right. Doesn’t matter now.” The elephant found a new home in a large box labeled ‘CRAP’.
Morgan giggled and rummaged in her own box, coming up with a large piece of multicolored glass. It was lumpy and uneven, the colors mixing in places to form muddy brownish shades that were far from attractive. A few holes had been drilled into it, presumably to put pens into. “Keep this?”
“Yeah, I love that thing. It’s just so ugly I can’t help it, y’know? Here, put this in the office box with it.” She handed over a softball-sized ball of fraying twine with no easily located loose end.
Ball and glass went into the office box. Morgan added a collection of fancy pens, a pheasant feather, a very well-loved leather-bound journal with a bookmark sticking before of the fourth to last page, and a mesh basket pull of little logic toys and puzzles.
“Has he called or anything?” She didn’t mean to ask, but it just slipped out.
“Why would he?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’ll just want to talk or something?”
Zoe snorted, stretching across the tablecloth to pull a grey folder out of another box. She shoveled a handful of takeout menus into it, then changed her mind and upended the folder in her lap. Menus cascaded over her ankles in a wash of color and universally unsteady fonts. Taking a fistful of them at random, she sorted through them, tossing all but three into the CRAP box. One missed and skidded over towards Morgan.
“I thought you liked Loca Loca. Why aren’t you keeping this?”
“I never liked it. Jason did, and I said it was okay because it made him happy. Their menudo was terrible, the tortillas were tough, and the chile was never hot enough.”
Morgan shrugged and threw the menu into its intended box.
“Anyway, why would Jason want to talk to me about anything?”
“He could, you know.”
“Okay, fine. Why would I want to talk to him? He was a wannabe and a lousy boyfriend, and I should have broken it off and left him ages ago.” Perhaps two dozen menus remained once Zoe had finished her sorting, and they fit inside the folder without making it bulge obscenely.
“Um…”
“I wouldn’t. He’s out of my life and I’m happy.”
“Sorry, I was just wondering.” Morgan turned her box upside down. A tarnished locket slid out and landed in her lap. “Oh, hey. What’s this?”
Zoe looked over at it. “Huh. I haven’t seen that thing in ages. It got put away somewhere when I moved in with Jason and I couldn’t find it.”
“It’s pretty.” She pushed the catch and parted the halves of the locket. “There’s something in here.”
“Really? I never put anything in it.”
Morgan unfolded the slip of paper. “Oh, wow.”
“What?”
“Jason wrote a love letter on this.”
“He did what?”
“See for yourself.”
Zoe snatched the delicate paper from Morgan and squinted at the few tiny lines scrawled on it in Jason’s familiarly ornate handwriting. She read it twice, and scowled.
“He must have had this the whole time and never told me. Jackass.” She crumpled the paper up and threw it into the CRAP box. “And that’s a terrible way to try and get your girlfriend back. I got this locket from my grandmother, and I was absolutely sure that it was gone for good, and now I find out he’d been hiding it for two years? Yeah, that’s a great way to win me back.”
“I’m sure he meant well.”
“No, he meant to get his way. You need a new box?”
“Nah, I think I need to stretch first.”
“Go ahead.”
Morgan got to her feet and meandered into the kitchen. It was separated from the living and dining room by a breakfast bar of sorts, though the hand painted tiles were mostly hidden under even more boxes. The kitchen itself was rather bare, still being set up, but it had the usual appliances- stove, fridge, dishwasher- and evidence of Zoe’s ongoing effort to get things unpacked. An old cookbook leaned against the microwave. Whatever color the cover had once been, it was lost under pictures clipped from culinary magazines and a smooth layer of contact paper, and the spine was held together with duct tape and a prayer. A well-used wooden rolling pin lay abandoned on the counter beside the stove, kept company by a glossy black mug with WTF? Printed on it in large white letters. When Morgan leaned over it, she found that it still contained coffee, about half a cup of cold, toffee-colored liquid that only looked drinkable.
“Hey, take this and put that rose in it, would you?” Zoe waved a tall, thin vase over her head. The clear green glass caught the light coming through the window and sent it dancing around the room in emerald shards.
“What rose?”
“The one in the sink.”
Sure enough, there was a single long-stemmed rose lying in the sink. It had been stripped of leaves, though not of thorns, and it looked very out of place against the slightly dented stainless steel of the sink.
“Where did this come from?” Morgan picked the rose up and took it with her to take the vase from Zoe.
“Some guy from the building across the street. He brought it over while I was bringing groceries in.”
“That’s sweet.” The vase was just the right height for the rose. Morgan smiled at it and put it on top of the fridge to keep it out of the way. There was a bottle of wine up there as well, which she took down and examined. “Was this from him too?”
“Was what from rose-boy?”
“This wine.”
“Oh, that? No, it’s a welcome to the building gift from the woman in Apartment 2.”
“Nice of her.”
“It would be if I liked red wine. You want it?”
“Sure.”
“Great. Go ahead and take it.” Zoe put her box to the side and stood up, stretching. She had miniature ivy in a hand-glazed pot in one hand, the dark leaves draping over her hand and wrist like a scarf. “Mmm…I think I’ve been in here too long. Want to go for a walk? We can go find this little guy a friend or three.”
“Yeah, I can do that. Gonna start building a little plant army?”
Zoe laughed and settled the ivy on top of an empty bookshelf, carefully centering it under a framed poster for a French play Morgan had never heard of. It was the only thing on any of the walls. “You bet I am. Ready to go?”
“Ready when you are.”
“Let’s go, then.”
Their footsteps echoed in the stairwell, bouncing down to the ground floor before them. On the way down, Morgan noticed that each door was painted a different painfully bright shade, which hadn’t registered with her on the way up. It was sort of sweet, in a weird way, like finding pieces of beach glass in a plastic bucket full of drab sand and shells that a child had picked up without much thought.
Out on the street, the buskers had moved on into a lively sea shanty that had something to do with mermaids and how they made terrible wives. The rough, bawdy language made Zoe laugh, and she danced a few steps of something that might have been some kind of jig, to the great delight of the buskers. She curtsied, holding the outer edge of her wrap pants out like a skirt and managing to make it look a lot more elegant than it should have. Then she straightened and continued down the sidewalk like nothing had happened, the locket wound around her wrist glinting in the sunlight.
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