[Issue 2023.66]

‘Boxes Full of Memories’, Sean R. Robinson

Art © 2023 Fluffgar

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After the last of the mourning-casseroles were eaten, there was no way to put it off any longer.

I threw an overnight bag into the back of my rusted-out Mazda Miata and made my way down the coast. Mom’s landlord wanted her stuff cleared out, unless I wanted to foot the bill. I worked overnights at the local Seven-Eleven, and that wasn’t going to pay for a month’s rent somewhere I wasn’t living.

Mom moved around a lot, saying she needed to see new sights, find new clients. For a while it was in the back room of a bodega; she tried living out of a camper by the beach, until she couldn’t make the cops look the other way. Most recently, it was a little room above a tattoo shop on a stretch of sidewalk infested by tourists.

She always made sure I had the new address, even if there was never an invitation to visit. I figured she knew I’d turn it down if it was offered. Better to just not, instead of being rejected, right?

I stood outside and smoked a cigarette, holding the key in my hand, just staring at the door.

I wondered how many of her clients had done the same thing, hoping for a little burning courage before trudging up the steps that were too steep to be ADA compliant, but made one hell of a deterrent if you were drunk and looking to make bad decisions.

The room was what I expected, mostly.

A mattress on the floor under the window, a beaded screen hiding the bathroom. The hotplate I’d gotten her for Christmas, a microwave that looked like it was about to burst into flames. A few plants that seemed to be doing well, even after weeks without water.

And boxes. Small and big and in-between.

Chinese takeout containers and Amazon mailers, Tupperware and Ziplock bags.

All neatly organized.

All neatly labeled.

I sank to my knees beside one tower of them.

K. Ellsworth. 02 Feb 1983

J. McManus 01 Jun 1971

L. Giovenetti 15 Dec 1889

What was I even going to do?

I pulled out one (V. Albreicht 25 Oct 2015). At least that was recent, right? It was a plastic container you got from the deli to hold your pasta salad in. A quick glance inside showed a braid of hair coiled like a snake.

What do you even do with hair? Sell it to a wig maker? Throw it out? Were there laws about that?

I put the container back and looked at others.

A teddy bear was nestled in a shoebox from K. Ellsworth.

An old bandaid, used, from L. Giovenetti.

J. McManus was in a Chinese takeout box, the kind that Mom and I had eaten lo mein out of when I was a kid. I peeled back the cardboard and was assaulted by the voice of an old man.

Anything. Anything. Take anything.

I didn’t throw it across the room, but I wanted to. What do you do with a voice belonging to J. McManus from a deal made in 1971? Was he even alive?

I sighed, and looked at the rest.

It wasn’t like I could have a yard sale.

---

Thank god for the internet.

Veronyca Albreicht (25 Oct 2015) had a blog. That blog had an address and it was another three hours down the road, with a Tupperware sandwich box with a braid of hair in the passenger seat as a co-pilot. I hadn’t had to explain it to anyone else; I’d been careful not to speed, even as I got a little lost in the forest of cul-du-sacs. What do you say if a cop pulls you over?

Sorry, officer. My mother was a witch and she died. I’m trying to return all the stuff she collected.

I’m sure that would get me out of a speeding ticket.

I tried not to be too worried about how bad it looked, my battered car rolling down past the little McMansions. No one was playing on the manicured lawns, at least. No one to call the cops as I parked on the side of the road by the house with the number I’d found on the blog. I took a deep breath as I picked up the container and did my best to square my shoulders.

It was a McMansion that I would never be able to afford. Stucco walls, terracotta roof tiles. There was definitely a pool in the back, I could smell a little chlorine. I really wanted a cigarette, but I was ringing the bell before I lost my nerve.

I held the Tupperware with the braid in my hand like I was a neighbor coming over for a casserole.

And knew immediately that I’d made a mistake when Veronyca came to the door.

She was statuesque—all legs and arms, a face that would have looked best carved from marble. Her eyes were large and a blue dark enough that it might have been purple. Even her head, smooth as it was, was beautiful. She was probably ten years younger than me, and the smile on her face faded when she saw what I held in my hands.

“Can I help you?”

“Hi. Uh.” The script fell out of my head. I didn’t know what to say. “Veronyca? I think I have something that belongs to you?”

The polite smile died, and she stepped out onto the stoop, pulling the door almost-closed behind her. She looked at the container one more time and then met my eyes.

“I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care. I paid her fair and square. So take that back to where you got it and leave me the hell alone.”

She stepped backwards as another woman came to the door. I felt like a fish pulled out of the water by my mouth. “Everything alright, honey?”

The new woman was a little shorter, with black hair that just brushed her shoulders.

“Nothing at all, love. This woman was just looking for directions.” Veronyca kissed her wife’s temple before looking back at me, slipping the warm smile back on like a mask. “Hope you don’t get lost again.”

Then the door was shut in my face and I was left standing, three hours from my mom’s place, wondering what the hell had just happened.

---

The bottle of cheap vodka under the sink had one of my mother’s handwritten labels on it.

I didn’t see the label until I’d poured myself three fingers into a cloudy scratched-glass tumbler and took my first sip. It burnt with salt instead of alcohol.

X. Martinez 21 December 2016.

I debated for exactly one second about whether I should spit the tears back into the bottle, and went to the sink, trying not to throw up. I let the water run before putting my head under the faucet to get the taste out of my mouth.

It felt like hours before I crawled into my mother’s bed. It still smelled like her, a mix of lavender and sweat and whatever it was that made her, her. It was in the sheets, in the pillow.

She’d tried her best. I knew that. She’d tried hard when I was growing up, making sure I had a packed lunch, that my hair was brushed, that I had new clothes for school, and sat at the kitchen table to get my homework done.

Business hours were when I was at school, or late at night, or when I was away at summer camp. And the boxes and jars and cups had never been so out of control.

I cried into the pillow. I missed my mother, and fell asleep wondering if she’s kept anything inside the pillow I lay my head against. If there were her own tears, or her own dreams, nestled in the worn out batting.

---

Wanda Laurence had passed away after a thirty-year career as a dancer. Her matchbox full of ashes came back to Mom’s apartment over the tattoo shop. Konstantinos Smirnioudis had looked up from a table at the back of his line-out-the-door restaurant, saw the plastic ring I held in my hand—the kind you got for a quarter out of a machine—and had vaulted from his table, heading for the kitchen, and out the back. I hadn’t even been able to say hello. Yousef Haddad had welcomed me into his house, a quiet little place a few towns over from where Mom had lived at the beach in her camper.

He was an old man, gray wisps of hair. He sat me down at a kitchen table that had obviously been used a lot. The linoleum was ripped where the chairs had spent years being scraped back and forth. The place was clean and tidy—cleaner than my Mom’s.

But Mr. Haddad didn’t look at the coffee can that I held.

“So she’s gone,” he said as he put an equally battered kettle onto the old stove.

I hadn’t gotten any better at trying to talk to these people. Every time I thought I had a script, it went out the window. “Yes.”

He nodded as he pulled down two cups and put a tea bag in each. A spoon of sugar followed in one cup, two spoons in the other. When the kettle whistled, the hot water followed, then a drop of milk in one and a longer dollop in the other. The paler cup was for me, apparently, while he settled into the seat beside.

I took a sip when it was pretty clear that Mr. Haddad wouldn’t speak until I did. The tea was perfect, and I took another sip before setting the cup back on the table.

“Your mother took her tea like that. Said it needed to be the color of sand, and sweet enough to make you forget the salt.”

“Mr. Haddad,” I said. “I’m sorry, I just wanted to return this to you…”

I pushed the coffee jar across the table.

He looked at it, then back to me. “Do you know what’s in it?”

I shook my head. There was no telling, and there had been far too many surprises when I opened containers. The tear-filled vodka bottle had been worse than most of them, but I didn’t want to pry. Sure, they were my mother’s and she was gone, but they’d also belonged to people.

“She had rules, you know,” he said, “about the deals she made. Hard to believe a witch with rules, huh? With ethics.”

I nodded, not knowing what else to say. “You knew her?”

“We were friends, before. Spent a few years living in the same commune, back before she started moving around so much. Before she had you. But we kept in touch. I lent her my microwave, but I haven’t seen it since. She came over for tea sometimes.”

“I’m sorry, then,” I said.

He sighed. “Why did you bring that?”

Mr. Haddad took a long draw from his teacup.

“I’m trying to give them back,” I said. “But you’re first the person who didn’t run away, or scream, or threaten to hit me.”

The old man’s lips curls in a tired smile. “I’m not surprised. Who wants to make a trade with a witch and then some day later, after you’ve almost forgotten that bargain, someone shows up at your door telling you to take it back?”

“But she’s dead.” And never coming back.

“The world’s a duller place without her in it, that’s for sure. But folks made their deals and they weren’t ‘till death did them part.’ They came and made their deals with the witch and it’s not exactly fair for you to be showing up at their doors because you don’t know what to do with them.”

“But they can just have their things back,” I said, and pushed the coffee can toward the old man again.

He just laughed. “That was one of your mother’s rules. She never took anything that people needed. Nothing that would hurt them if they missed.”

“Hair? Tears?”

His smile still haunted his lips. “Vanity? Terror? Sorrow? Who knows? I was just her friend.”

I watched as he picked up the coffee can and twisted the cover. He reached inside and pulled out a picture. The smile turned more real, and then he slid the picture across the table.

In it were Mr. Haddad and Mom, both teenagers, sitting on grass, their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders.

“I kept that picture for a long time,” he said in a quiet voice. “Until I knew I couldn’t hold onto it anymore. And when your mom came to tea, I asked her for a favor; for a trade. I’d never asked before, had never wanted to before. But I did.”

“And she took this picture?”

He shook his head. “Do you think that that’s what she did? She didn’t take things. She was given things. Things that were too heavy to hold onto. It wasn’t the picture, but what the picture represented.”

He put the photo back into the coffee jar and screwed the lid back on, then pushed it back to me.

“I was in love with her for almost all my life, so much in love that there weren’t going to be any others. So I asked her to take it from me, because she could never love me the way I loved her. So we made a trade, and we could sit here and drink tea. I’ll miss her, and will never forget her.”

And he wouldn’t take the picture back.

My tea had gone cold.

---

I plugged the Christmas lights in when it got dark in the apartment. Turns out that none of the lights actually had bulbs. But that was okay. I was tired of looking at boxes and bottles and containers. I sat in the middle of a witch’s apartment and didn’t know whether to laugh, or cry, or light a match and watch the whole thing burn.

What do you do when your mother’s a witch and the apartment is crowded with things that no one wants back? What do you do when the last time you’d seen your mother, it had been years and years? Because you were angry, because you were embarrassed, because you were stupid.

I was crying, looking at the picture of Mr. Haddad and Mom. She was someone I didn’t know. A stranger, except for the voice at the other end of the phone when she called, or a card came to wish me a happy (belated) holiday.

I didn’t know her. Not really.

There was a knock on the apartment door.

“No one’s home!” I yelled.

The knock happened again.

“I’ll be out in a day or two,” I yelled back again. “The rent’s paid through the end of the month!”

There was a pause, but the knock happened a third time. I surged to my feet and padded to the door, ready to rip the landlord a new one. I cursed and flung the door open.

“I told you—”

But it wasn’t the landlord. It was a woman, maybe my age, clutching a handbag, wearing the kind of badly-fitting off-the-rack suit you got at a big-box store. It dipped too low in the front, and the bracelets on her wrists were cheap metal, the kind that left green stains on my skin.

“Are you?” she stumbled, “I heard—can you help me?”

“Can I help you?”

Her mascara wasn’t waterproof; it had melted down her cheeks with the tears that hadn’t stopped when she knocked on the door.

“They say that you can help people. For a price.”

It felt like being slapped.

I was about to tell her that my mother was dead, and that she’d have to look somewhere else for her miracle. I wasn’t in that business. I had a place up the coast that was full of my own stuff, and not the cast-offs of my mother’s bargains.

The woman clutched her handbag to her chest.

I wasn’t even sure I could do it.

I thought about my mother in the picture, my mother sitting at the kitchen table, my mother on the other end of the phone. My mother gone. She was gone, and the woman was standing looking at me like I was her only chance.

What had made her cry? I wondered. Where would she go if the door closed in her face? Was this what it felt like?

“Why don’t you come in, and we can see what we can do?” I said, barely deciding the words before they fell out of my mouth.

The woman nodded, crossing the threshold into the little apartment over the tattoo shop, and I shut the door behind us.

© 2023 Sean R. Robinson

[Issue 2023.66]

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