Removalists heaved my belongings into their truck. You don’t realise how little of the stuff you have until it’s packed up into cardboard boxes. The curtain fall of the roller door came down with a crash, and everything I owned went off to a storage shed in Footscray.
My mother’s bedroom door creaked open. I reached for the light switch and flicked it back and forth; the globe was blown. I opened the blinds. It was one of those days where the morning air and light turn into a sunset and you wonder if there was anything in between. Maybe most lives go the same way.
Her perfumes and jewellery went into boxes for donation. I figured it’s what she’d have wanted, and there wasn’t anyone to disagree with me. The living speaking for the dead is a dangerous thing. I slid the door of her built-in wardrobe open, and took down and folded clothes. When there was just her antique shoe rack in its corner remaining, I heaved and dragged it to the centre of the room and got to work. All her shoes were laid out in perfect order – tidy and precise like everything she did. Touching them made me feel ill. Each pair I moved became one less thing in the world that would remain exactly as left by her.
I wiped down the last pair and placed them in the garbage bag. Sitting against the wall across the room, I lit a cigarette and noticed a lone shoebox in the wardrobe that I’d somehow missed, resting between indentations left in the carpet by the rack. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I mumbled, climbing to my feet. Lifting the box to fling it at a pile of rubbish in the corner, the sound of contents moving within made me pause.
I looked from the box to where it had been in the wardrobe – too big to have fallen through gaps in the rack to rest beneath. I pried its lid, seized by dust and humidity that’d crept into the cardboard. It came free with a pop and I peered inside.
A pile of photographs, a beat-up flip lighter and an envelope. The lighter’s lid croaked open. I pressed down on the wheel with my thumb, harder and harder, until it twisted free, coughing sparks over a blackened wick. I spun it a few more times, each becoming easier than the last and the sparks more abundant, yet still no flame. I slid it into my jeans’ pocket…
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