Treasures
You are eight when on a visit to your father’s aunt you see beautiful things. Great Aunt lives alone in a tiny red cabin on the edge of a small town. Before her husband died, he built shelves throughout to display her collection of little china figurines: A lady in a ballgown hiding behind a fan. A shaggy dog carrying a big barrel around his neck. Two boys pushing a wheelbarrow full of apples together. Everyone doing things no one does anymore. Your favorite is a slender girl with a braid like your own who is holding a mirror. There’s a small piece of real glass so you can see the reflection of the girl’s perfect eyebrows, nose, and mouth. You look at the girl so much that your great aunt insists you keep her, while your sister is given a boy in a hot air balloon. Your parents are angry on the drive home. They think you schemed to get the china figure, and perhaps you did. This leaves the day and the memory and even the girl and her mirror damaged. But you keep the girl until one day you realize you have misplaced her, perhaps many years prior, this girl who was only concerned with herself. That day, however, you wave good-bye to Great Aunt framed by her door—like a little keepsake, too, although one hunched over her own waist, weighted down with the big hump on her back.
~
Valuables
Your uncle’s wife is beautiful. Her face is soft and unlined, like a pressed cotton handkerchief. Her hair is brushed back in dark waves. Her laugh is small and pretty, like a porcelain teacup when it touches its saucer. She wears patterned satin scarves, heels, pantsuits, gold pins she calls brooches on which the animals’ eyes are sapphires or diamonds. She drinks milky coffee that she lets you sip while the other women make Constant Comment tea. She has three handsome sons. One day when you’re a teenager she surprises you by saying the rock star Peter Frampton lives in the condo complex and likes to sunbathe with her by the pool. Not long after, you stay for a few days with her and your uncle. They never speak to one another; the house is silent, like during a play when the characters are waiting for someone unwelcome to enter. When you learn to drive, your mother says Aunt never did. When you go to college, your mother the teacher says your aunt never went, nor did she work. With time, you would think Aunt would lose her luster, but you adore her even more when you learn how her family married her very young to an old man, who died. A fast marriage to his best friend, your uncle, followed. Much later the sons waste away slowly, painfully. Despite all this, Aunt is gracious, unruffled. In your 40s and now a wife and mother, you visit Aunt in her memory care facility, where she thinks you’re her sister accompanying her on a cruise. The food is delicious. The waiters are sexy. The service is top drawer. She is what your own sister the nurse calls happy demented. When Aunt dies, you feel the same regret you do when something beautiful is broken, and part of that is the pain that she and so much more are in your past. Your mother calls you a month later. Aunt’s closet is crowded with fur coats, like an entire forest of animals fleeing a fire. Her bureau is crammed with lingerie, at least 100 pairs of stockings. Piles of dresses, blouses, what your aunt called slacks, handbags. Everything so tasteful. Too small, too fancy for us. All wearing price tags, Mother tells you, while smothered in their own perfect wrappings.
~
Bounty
Your father’s baby sister has all of the things your grandmother collected. But by now no one can remember exactly what they are, except legend has it that they’re valuable Chinese antiques. You have few memories of this aunt from whom your father and mother are estranged. Once when you were a child, you and your sister stayed with her while your parents went on a trip. During that time, she took the two of you to a store to replace your clothing. You still remember a beautiful mint green knit vest and a dark green pleated skirt, even down to their labels, “White Stag.” But by now you wouldn’t be able to envision your aunt if it weren’t for a few faded photos of a handsome woman with eyebrows like boomerangs over hooded eyes. When she is a very old woman and some would say that you are old, too, she sends a note asking if you’d like to have your grandmother’s things. And while she doesn’t say what they are, or when or how they might be delivered, she does make a point of saying your cousins don’t want any of it. You reply, saying that you want it all. You never hear back from your aunt, and the things that are so precious are buried even deeper several U.S. states over, like pirate booty on an ocean floor that can only be located by sonar. But by then it doesn’t matter because you have begun to gift things regularly, and in doing so find that each recipient’s pleasure is shared with you. First your late father’s belongings go to the next generation: pocket knives, wooden duck decoys, and telephone insulators, one shaped like Mickey Mouse ears. Then your own riches spread to family and friends: costume jewelry, kitchen gadgets, your maternal grandmother’s potholders crocheted to look like chickens. You’ve lugged around an Alice in Wonderland White Rabbit china cookie jar for 35 years, dusting it, protecting it from chips, surely for the intended purpose of witnessing the sudden pleasure on your youngest son’s face—like a music box opening with song—when you release this treasure to him.
~
Lynn Mundell is editor of Centaur and co-founder of 100 Word Story. Her writing has been published in Tin House, Booth, SmokeLong Quarterly, Best Microfiction, a W.W. Norton Anthology, and elsewhere. Lynn’s chapbook Let Our Bodies Be Returned to Us was published by the University of South Carolina in 2022.