Day 2 Winner of Quarto’s 2023 Thunderdome Flash Fiction Contest. View the prompt here
Illustration by Watson Frank
I love so hard, I love so hard the small things. Antique bottles found in muck, washed, displayed. Misaddressed letters from strangers kept for decades, never opened, waiting even now. Grocery lists discarded on the concrete, still dictating your needs—you, who I will never meet, but who I will always know is today out of shampoo.
I leave my own small things behind purposefully, for people like me and people not like me. I am not lonely, though I go to the movies often, and read many books. Each movie ticket I save, no matter the film, no matter whose body occupied the seat next to mine. However, I do not allow myself to save them for long. I have seen my mother’s room. I have seen the envelopes and boarding passes and movie tickets stacked high in the empty space behind her pupils. I have seen my grandmother’s collection of spoons, of stamps, of long strands of hair. I have seen my sister’s dolls, and her unhappiness.
My greatest fear is becoming a woman with seashells and postcards falling out of her ears and nose, even as I long for just that.
So I give mine away. One by one, I slip these movie tickets into the yellow pages of library books on each and every visit. I have worshiped my god on three continents now.
Maybe tomorrow, maybe in years, hands will find these tickets. They will read the date, the time, my seat number, and touch the worn ink with their fingers. Then they will slip them back into the book, and turn the page. I will turn it with them.