For years, my home was a classroom or somewhere equally distinguished, like a library, back before Google Earth and Instagram. Before the woman found me at the antique mall and brought me home to sit atop her bookshelf, part of a collection. I used to have a lot to say. I’m quiet now, sitting still. But I remember fingers coaxing me to turn upon my axis. I speak the language of memory. I speak the language of forgetting. I tell the stories of old, made-up boundaries. Of places that used to exist but don’t anymore. The way things change. The way things take. There was a time when I was the way people explored the world. Sometimes, I whisper apologies for all the lies I’ve told. I remember the game children used to play, the one where they would give me a good spin and see where their finger landed as my rotations slowed, oceans waiting to swallow them whole. Sometimes, I whisper in a woman’s voice. I live in her daughter’s house now, atop a new bookcase. I connect them, a string made from the red cellophane equator peeling away from my middle. Mother to daughter. World to world. Forgetting. Remembering.
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Fiction - ISSUE #28