When I was a kid, my family played a storytelling game. We had a bag full of things and we had to reach in, grab two or three, then tell a story that included all the items. I liked it a lot. This super short story—a snippet really—was written in a similar way. I chose three random items and made myself tell a story about them. Those items were a soda can, toothpaste, and a picture frame. Here it is.

Leaving

With everything packed into cardboard boxes and walls stripped of posters and paintings and misconstrued artworks, sounds seemed to echo instead of stop: sounds including laughter, hiccups, sobs, and glass shattering. As though marking them for the graveyard, the now-empty picture frame stood atop a pile of boxes she’d forgotten to label and its spoiled glass lay piled in a heap on the floor. Standing eye-to-eye with the little, brass rectangle, she grabbed her soda can, emptied it, and set it on top of a different box: this one was labeled living room, whatever that meant in a studio.

Her broom had been moved hours ago, so she knelt amongst the glass and picked up what she could with her hands. Carefully, she selected the largest pieces then carelessly brushed the smallest fragments into nothingness. Snagging the frameless photograph as she stood, her bare foot found a shard she’d ignored and she continued to ignore it.

It was cheap photo paper—probably purchased in a rush at the nearest Office Depot. Through the back, we could see two dark figures imprinted against a light background and scrawled there were the words Aspen, June 2011, some time and place three years ago. 

For an inhale and an exhale, she watched the photo. When nothing moved, she picked up the empty picture frame from its stack of empty boxes and held it with the photo and her now empty soda can. Holding the last pieces of trash her old apartment would see, she began making the rounds. She checked the kitchen for her pots, pans, and any half-used spices shoved in the back of the cupboard. She made a lap around the echoing bedroom for bobby pins and dog toys, but she had already grabbed it all. 

As she stepped into the bathroom with her hand on the light switch, she allowed a flitting glance around the edges of the counter and into the crevices of the baseboard. The bright white corner of something caught her eye where it had fallen between the toilet and the cupboard’s edge. Taking her hand off the switch, she reached down and pulled out a twisted, half-empty toothpaste tube: his twisted, half-empty toothpaste tube. The lid was still open and sparkling blue paste was cemented to the end: yet another thing she had forgotten that she hated. She wrapped her fingers around the tube—carrying it, the empty picture frame, and the soda can around her empty apartment probably held some thematic significance she didn’t notice at the time—and exited to find a trash can.

Stay gold,
Sabrina