A Small Reckoning

By the time the late light slanted through the attic window, the house smelled like everything Etta had been pretending not to notice: dust soft as flour, the dry paper tang of old receipts, and the faint lemon scrape of soap in a box labeled KITCHEN that had never been unpacked. She moved slowly between the stacks because speed felt disrespectful in this room where things waited like small altars—Sam’s league trophies packed in a shoebox, a collapsed paper robot with a missing arm, the comic books that had once looked enormous to her and now sat flat and polite as history. Lena hummed downstairs in the kind of low voice that could smooth anyone out of a question; it was her way of keeping the present from scratching at the wound that sat in the middle of their house. They’d promised each other small changes: a different lamp, a fresh coat of paint. No one used the word that sat like a bruise under everything, the one that began with move and ended with away.

Etta had planned to make a dent in the attic for practical reasons—old boxes made the house feel like a time that could not be unpacked—but reasons did not hold. It was an accident when her fingers brushed the edge of a cardboard box shoved behind a row of winter coats. The box was cheap, taped in places people had tried to mend it with the kind of effort that says someone expected it to last. When she opened the lid a thin breath of candle-smoke and paper rose. Inside: dozens of folded slips, their edges softened, some with the faint brown ring that coffee makes when you place a mug down and forget it. She lifted one and another until the pile felt like a small pulsing thing in her hands.

The town had a release night every autumn—the night when people put their petty, private weight into a communal chest beneath the elm on the green and lit a fire to watch it go. She had been small the last time she’d gone; Sam had jammed a folded note into her palm and made her guard it like contraband. This box, she realized, was a remnant: anonymous confessions and apologies in a miscellany of handwriting. Mostly they were small, ordinary regrets—sorry I forgot your birthday, I took the last of the pie, I wish I’d called back—until one narrow rectangle of paper slid free and unrolled inside her like a small, sharp coin.