David Shapiro's Editor's Pick:
Forgotten Pinecones
by Chris Marselli
Today my son came home and presented me with two pinecones, fresh and fragrant, still heavy with resin.
"This one is papa and this one is me."
He sent me back to my grandparents' apartment 40 years earlier, a small boy like him.
It was a winter day and I had been playing outside in the yard near the big pine tree, my grandfather musing in the background with his gloved hands clasped behind his back, the flaps on his tweed flat cap flipped down over his ears. I searched for cones, looking for just the right two.
I brought them upstairs and presented them to my grandmother, telling her they were she and I. She put them on the shelf in her bedroom next to the twin bed where I slept when I visited.
"I'll keep these forever," she had said.
*****
Ten years later I saw the pinecones for the last time, still on the shelf, dried out and faded, as she had been, lying in her hospital bed days earlier just before dying.
I stood in the doorway looking on as my mother went through her things on the shelves, in the closet, in the drawers of the vanity against the wall, and in the large gray sheet metal case under her bed, packed with keepsakes, its layers like those in an archeological dig, telling a story of her past.
But I wasn't interested in exploring those layers or touching anything. I didn't enter or speak up. The room where I had spent so much time was now a foreign place. Its contents belonged to no one. Their owner was gone.
*****
I saw myself again in the apartment as a small boy, taking in the details I had overlooked as a sullen teenager, the turquoise color motif of the furniture and trim, the framed family photos, the chair in the corner — covered with plastic like all the furniture — to keep it new.
From under her bed, one of the two matching twins, just like the two in my grandfather's room across the hall, my grandmother pulled out the gray sheet metal case, opened it, and dug out a wallet from the bottom far left corner. She peeled it open and counted out the stack of twenties.
"Don't tell your grandfather."
She had no friends I realized with whom to share the secret of her treasure, only a five-year old confidante who had offered pinecones in return.