Short Little Stories

A lever. A kettle. A small wooden fish. Aniya looked at her dresser and sighed. It wasn’t enough, it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t enough.

She collected things, but she could never collect more than three. Her room was perfect and pristine, polished and proper – and had a window out over the dumpster. Whenever something new caught her eye, she brought it home, selected the least worthwhile of her collection, and chucked it out the window. Something lovingly caressed the night before would be hurled into the trash with never a second look.

She did not know what she was looking for.

She knew some items were more interesting to her than others. Shadows of the soul she called it – she saw something inside them, stories and memories and dreams. She wasn’t sure, but she imagined that there must be something out there that had her dream in it, and one day she would find it, and treasure it, and never need collect anything ever again.

She occasionally worried that she already had passed it without noticing. Her eyes, so adept at picking out the signs of something special, had looked the wrong way at just the wrong time, and the relic of her soul went unfound. Or, even worse, that she had once found it – but hadn’t realized what it meant to her, and thrown it out for something momentarily brighter, never knowing what she had lost.

Aniya dismissed such dreams as nonsense, though. It didn’t do to dwell on what could not be changed, and the past was certainly that.

There came a knocking at the door. She heard it distantly, and imagined she could hear the sound struggling through the living room, up the stairs, down the hallway, through her door. She looked at her clock, a plain thing (to her eyes), and saw it was half past one. Meriam, then, her mother’s friend, here to drop off some form of baked goods for the church. What she baked always blended together in Aniya’s mind – but it was always very good, she knew that much.

She turned her eyes away from the fish and walked calmly downstairs. She had already forgotten why she had been looking at her collection, had lost track of what need called forth her gift, her hidden eye, her ability to search for special things. She would remember, in time. She would go out, to find something more proper, more fitting for the moment.

But she did not need to go now.

After all, she had all the time in the world.