Following amuirin’s lead on fiction and point-of-view, I submit the following. The is a first for inane ramblings: Fiction.

The compact was at the bottom of a musty cardboard box, under tattered yearbooks, a torn report card and a water-stained ink drawing of a teenage girl. The pink-nailed hand pulled it from the box of high school detritus. Even in the light of the attic’s one window the patina was evident.

“What’s this, Dad?” she asked.

The grey-bearded man, stooped over a pile of old magazines, turned from his task. There was dust in his hair and cobwebs stuck to the shoulder of his shirt.

Handing him the compact the young woman asked again, “Who’s was this? Was it Mom’s?”

Her father turned the item over in his hands. A smile flashed on his face. He opened the lid and looked at his face in the broken mirror. His daughter thought he looked very sad.

“No, it wasn’t your mother’s,” he said. He handed it back and returned to sorting the magazines.

The young woman couldn’t understand why something so obviously expensive was in a box in her father’s attic. Another day she might have let it go and been done with it. Her father was never one to talk about the past. A weekend of sorting through boxes before her father’s move had made her brave.

He was a pack rat. Not given to physical displays of emotion he had shown his love in another way. She had found boxes of her school assignments, papers, and art projects. Her education, from preschool to high school, had been archived by a man she thought cared very little.

“Who’s was it?” she asked again.

His shoulders slumped as if the question had deflated him. That was the sign, she had learned, that he was giving up.

He didn’t stop sorting the moldy magazines. “It was a girl’s. Someone I knew in high school.”

She felt like a fisher with something big on her line. She braced herself and started to reel it in.

“A girl?” she asked, and raising one eyebrow, “A girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“Before mom?”

“Your mother and I met in college.”

“Was she pretty?”

“Very.”

“Did you love her?”

He dropped the magazine that had been in his hands, a copy of Popular Mechanics from 1987.

When he spoke his voice sounded like it had at her mother’s funeral, when he solemnly greeted hundreds of visitors.

“Yes.”

“Did she give this to you?”

“No.”

“Why do you have it?”

“I stole it from her bedroom the day she broke up with me.”

“You stole it?” The girl was astonished. Her father was the most honorable man she knew. He told a white lie when needed, but pathologically hated thieves.

“Yes, goddammit!” he barked. She told an involuntary step back. She hadn’t heard that tone since she had been in high school and they would argue over curfews and boyfriends. She heard him take a deep breath before saying, “Sorry.”

She wanted to put her arms around him; she had hit a sore spot, but knew he wouldn’t have it.

He picked up another magazine.

“Her name was Amelia. We were sweethearts in high school. More than that. I thought she was my one true love. I would have died for her.”

She couldn’t see his face but could imagine his ironic smile.

“She was going to college, a very good one, out of state. I wanted to get married and go with her. She had other plans and ended it. We were in her bedroom. After she announced her decision she left the room.”

He picked up a dog-eared copy of Rolling Stone and flipped through it before dropping it in the box of things he wanted to keep.

“I sat on her bed thinking my life was over. She had the bluest eyes. There isn’t a name for that color. She would look at me with such love. Those eyes melted me. The compact was on her nightstand. It had been her grandmother’s. Something snapped. I grabbed it before running out of there.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because her eyes had looked into that mirror. When I looked into it I felt like she was still looking at me.”

He said no more. Outside, the crickets had started to chirp as dusk settled over the neighborhood. He stood, knees cracking, and brushed himself off.

“Let’s go downtown for dinner,” he said, and walked to the stairs.

She was going to ask him what to do with the compact. Should it be kept or thrown away? As she heard his footfalls she knew the answer. It had served its purpose years before and been discarded. She placed it back in the box, under the yearbooks.

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