The drawer of small things

An original fictional sample story.

I was looking for the good scissors when the drawer finally refused to close. A ribbon had caught beneath the cutlery tray, dragging a procession of forgotten objects into view: a smooth stone, two buttons, a paper crown, and a plastic key that opened nothing we owned.

My daughter came to investigate the noise. At eleven, she had become tall enough to see over my shoulder and old enough to ask why we kept so much rubbish. I said this was an excellent question from someone whose bedroom contained a collection of empty lip-balm tins.

We cleared a patch of table. The paper crown was from her fifth birthday, when we had invited three friends and spent most of the afternoon looking for a missing hamster that had never actually left its cage. She remembered the cake. I remembered checking beneath the sofa with a torch while wearing the crown myself.

The stone was less obvious. Grey, flat, unremarkable. She turned it over and then smiled. “The beach where it was too windy.” We had driven nearly two hours, eaten sandy sandwiches, and gone home early. I had filed the day under unsuccessful outings. She remembered that we had built a wall around our picnic and called it a castle.

There was a button from a cardigan she had outgrown years ago. A bus ticket from somewhere neither of us could identify. A tiny envelope containing a note she had written when spelling was still an adventurous process. She read it aloud, corrected herself halfway through, and laughed without embarrassment.

I had thought growing up might mean watching her discard each former version of herself. There had been moments that felt like that: the toys boxed away, the sudden dislike of a favourite jumper. Yet here she was, making space on the table for the paper crown, explaining that the bent bit had always been the front.

We threw some things away. The broken elastic bands, the dried-out pen, the takeaway menus for places that no longer existed. Keeping everything would have made it impossible to find anything, and neither of us wanted the drawer to become a shrine. We chose a small tin for the objects with stories.

At the bottom, we found the scissors. My daughter handed them to me, then picked up the plastic key. “This can stay too,” she said. I asked what it opened. She considered the question before putting it in the tin. “We might remember later.”

Illustrative photograph for an original fictional story. Photo: Clever Sparkle / Unsplash.