Thirteen Things
by Star Spider
A small statue of Buddha
A pile of scraps from the basement
A smooth bowl
A piece of floorboard from under the bed
A nest of branches
A picture frame with the painting torn off
An old writing desk
Ella surveyed her collection. She had been gathering wooden things for over two months now and she was running out of time. She didn’t know exactly how many she needed, this wasn’t an exact science, but she simply felt she didn’t have enough yet. The feeling was a pressure on her chest, a tension that called for more. She picked up the statue of the Buddha and traced her finger along the deep scar that ran across its face from the time her father had whipped it across the room. The wood held onto the memories. Her whole collection held onto memories. The pile of scraps was a broken crib, the smooth bowl had been a gift from a serious-faced young man her mother had over from time to time when her father went out of town. The old writing desk belonged to her grandmother who was dead now. Dead and buried. The desk was a gnarled old thing and it had been the greatest challenge to get into her treehouse. It required two more ropes and an extra pulley.
Ella put the Buddha down at her feet and stood up. She barely fit in the treehouse anymore. The crooked window was too low for her to look out of properly. She had outgrown her childhood. She looked across the small, cramped space to the calendar she had stolen from her father’s garage. It was tacked haphazardly to the wall and on it a picture of a slim woman smiled with flowers in her hair and the word “March” written across her stomach. The woman wore nothing but the flowers in a way that felt like an expression of liberation, and the word “March” suggested a forward momentum that Ella found both encouraging and familiar. She squinted in the dim light and glanced at the line of small, empty squares that contained all the days of the month.
Today was the thirteenth. She had seven more days to collect.
She walked over to the writing desk and unfastened the drawer. It was broken and it groaned in protest but Ella ignored its complaints