STORIES / COLLECTION STORY
The label in the box
In this imagined story, a date on a folded paper star helps Nora and her sister recover different pieces of the same afternoon.
A box on the top shelf
Nora had carried the box through two moves. At the second apartment, she’d put it on the top shelf and stacked scarves in front of it. Now, looking for a spare button, she brought the box down and tipped its contents onto a table.
A folded ticket slid out first. She recognized it by the crease where she used to tuck it into her coat pocket. The paper star beside it was harder to place. One point had flattened against the lid. When she pressed it back into shape, she saw her sister’s initials and a date in blue ink.
The afternoon came back
The power had gone out during a rainstorm. She and her sister had folded stars at the kitchen table, holding each crease down with a thumbnail. As the room grew darker, her sister wrote on the last two stars and put one into Nora’s pocket. They’d left the others on the windowsill.
Nora took a photo of both sides and wrote down the date. She remembered the rain against the glass, but she couldn’t remember what paper they had used. The star had a pale stripe on one edge that looked as if it belonged to a bigger pattern.
Leave room for another line
Nora made a small card for each keepsake. The ticket got a line about the long walk home after the last bus had gone. She left the source blank on a little button she couldn’t place. She put the star back in the box with its new card resting beneath it.
When her sister visited the following week, Nora showed her the photo. “That looks like the divider from our recipe folder,” her sister said. That evening she sent a picture of the folder with a corner missing. Nora held the star up beside the picture, then pulled its card out of the box. There was space for another line.