Possession

It's #FlashLit October! Our local writing community, To Live and Write in Alameda, is promoting three-day flash stories based on themed prompts. Here's a short piece I wrote based on the prompt "Giving Back."

As soon as I open the gift, I know we have to give it back.

“What is it?” my husband asks. He draws back, as if the box in my hands has growled at him. 

We didn’t even think the package was meant for us at first. Late last night, weary from our voyage home from our honeymoon, we stumbled in to find a craggy mountain of oversized boxes, precious inside their white and cream paper. My brother Stan collected them from the reception hall table and brought them to our apartment so they’d greet us when we got home.

This morning over coffee I tore into them with my husband. (I’ve been practicing referring to him as my husband in my head, reminding myself of his shiny-new status.) We feverishly ripped off the expensive paper like greedy children on Christmas. Only afterwards, when we’d taken inventory of the windfall—the blender, the panini maker, duplicate espresso machines—then disposed of the scraps and cleared a path through the room, did we notice the small package on the coffee table.

“Stan must have accidentally left this here,” I said. The box was clumsily bandaged in blue kids’ birthday paper, covered with red balloons and the number “nine,” and mummified with too much Scotch table. “It must belong to Reggie." It looked like something my nephew might have wrapped for a friend's birthday.

"Possibly."

"Maybe we shouldn’t open it."

“Open it," my husband urges. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law, isn’t it?”  

Now, I regret taking my husband’s advice. Once I've unwrapped it, I know what’s inside the crocodile-leather black box even before I open it. 

It’s been two decades since I’ve seen this box, since I used to dig through my mother’s bedroom drawers seeking hidden treasure without her permission. Yet the rippled cover feels soft and intimate under my fingertips.

My husband watches as I lift the lid. On a velvet bed, nestled into a thumbprint-shaped indentation, lies the family locket. It’s boxy and plain, handsome but not beautiful, a gold rectangle adorned with inlaid diamonds and sapphires.  

“Pretty.” I feel my husband’s attention stray back to the Sunday football game on TV. 

“This is a mistake. We shouldn’t have gotten this.”

“Who’s it from?” He picks up the torn wrapper from the floor but finds no card. 

“It can only be from one person.”

I was dubious when my Great Aunt Violet had RSVPed “yes” to our wedding, then shocked to spot her several rows back among the guests during the ceremony. She wore black-purple velvet and a veiled black hat, dressed for a Gothic winter funeral instead of an outdoor “casual dress encouraged” July wedding. 

“She’s been randomly gifting things to people,” I explain to my husband. “My brother opened the door one morning to find the two-foot brass bowl she bought in China fifty years ago on his doorstep. And my cousin Kathy found a carton of Land O’ Lakes butter and some used black silk stockings in her mailbox recently.”

“Old people give things away at the end of their lives. My grandmother did that.”

I hold up the box. “This isn’t hers to give.”

My great-grandfather had given the locket to his fiancee as an engagement gift. It’s one of those heirlooms that everyone in the family obsesses over and keeps tabs on, maybe built up in their minds as a symbol of long-ago prosperity and pride in our heritage. 

The eldest daughter, my grandmother claimed the locket upon her mother’s death. Then, she and her sister Violet squabbled over it for years. When she got sick later in her life, Grandma smuggled it over to my mother for safekeeping. After a Christmas party at our house a few years later, the locket went missing. We never saw it again. 

“You never found out what happened to it?”

“Mom thought I’d taken it. We went ten rounds about it until she eventually believed me. Now we know the truth."

"You're vindicated!" my husband cheers.

"Why would Violet give this to me, though? She should have passed it down to one of her own daughters. She obviously got confused. The wrapping paper proves it.”

My husband mutes the TV. He takes the box and studies the pendant. 

“How much do you think this is worth?”

“At least a few thousand dollars. Probably more. My mom had it appraised in the eighties. ”

His eyes sparkle. “Sounds like a pretty solid down payment on a new car.”

“We need to take it back to Aunt Violet this afternoon. She wasn’t in her right mind when she gave this to us. I could never live with myself if we kept it. Plus, it’s only going to cause trouble. My mom will be livid when she finds out.”

“Do you need to tell your mom? For all she'll ever know, it remains lost.” 

I remove the box from his hands and snap it closed.

“Do you not think about cosmic retribution?” I ask him.

“What?”

“A hundred-year-old family heirloom appears to you, with a test attached to it. If you fail the test, what do you think happens?”

He laughs. “I think we buy a new Tesla.”

I guess this isn’t his fault. His family doesn’t get tangled up in decades-long resentments or attach too much meaning to trinkets like mine does. On the other hand, I’ve spent too many holiday dinners and family reunions over the years listening to the exhaustive discussions and debates around this locket—who rightfully owned it, who might have it now, the wounding deceit behind its theft—to treat its sudden reappearance in my life as anything less than sinister. 

Our lifetime together rolls out before us from this moment. On this winding road together, my husband and I will uncover every gap between us in how we see the world.

This, apparently, is our first big one.