Flash! Fiction 3 by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

76

That would be nice. Thoughtful. It does get pretty chilly in here some nights and that would feel good on my legs.

Nathalie was back. She started to take my vitals, and I shook my head with as much force as I could muster and said I had to know what was in the box. She asked if I'd been worrying about that all this time. I nodded.

She moved the box close to my bedside and took off the lid. Inside was a framed photograph of me and Lizzie—must have been in our twenties—and another of me and Lizzie and the boys at the Grand Canyon. There was a commencement program for our oldest who graduated first in his class in college. There were letters from our youngest from when he was overseas. His boyhood stamp collection was neatly tucked away. A copy of our first mortgage was in there, partly burned because we changed our minds and decided to stamp it "Paid in Full" and keep it as a souvenir. The dog tags from Tag, Sparky, Pal, and Roxie were carefully wrapped in a kerchief that Roxie used to wear on special occasions. Christmas cards from our closest friends and our grownup boys were carefully bun-dled. The pocket watch from her grandfather—on her mother's side—that got returned…twice.

I stopped her. "Nathalie, take it away! Please! It's too much. Please take it away."

She did. That evening I begged her for an extra pain killer or seda-tive or something—just for one night, I said.

The next day I realized that Lizzie had sent the box, sort of. She had kept a box of memorabilia like that in our attic. I never looked in it. After Lizzie passed, I never thought about the box again, so it must have been sitting there until the new owners came across it and pieced together who it belonged to. That was real thoughtful of them.