[Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background page. Also see the note at the foot of this page. A regular whiskey river Fridays post will appear later today.]
[source]In his room he presents his orderly box. [His mother] makes him try on the snowsuit and when the sleeves don’t reach his wrists she sighs and tells him he can take it off. Then she looks at his box again and agrees there may be nothing else, but she wants to make sure. She kneels in his closet, and he plops down on the bed.
“This?” she says, stretching an arm behind her. Between two fingers she holds a little corked bottle filled with water from the place in Maryland where they spent a weekend the summer before.
“I want that!” he shouts.
She stands and turns around, the bottle still in her hand. “Oh, Mike,” she says and she is looking at him, but then she isn’t. He knows this trick of her gaze. Her eyes redden and she focuses on a place above his head.
“Would someone buy it?” he asks.
She blinks and looks at him. “Maybe. It’s a pretty bottle. You never know what people will want.”
“Okay,” he says.
She smiles sadly. “No. You should keep it. They’re your memories.”
…Now he shakes the bottle. A bit of sand swirls up from the bottom, but the water looks dull. “No,” he says. “It’s okay, but I don’t see why anyone would want it.” He slides off the bed and puts the bottle gently in the box for the sale.
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Note: This post concludes the Story Up My Sleeve series here at RAMH. It seemed right to end the series with a story by Jessica Francis Kane, whose off-the-cuff remark on Twitter indirectly inspired the series in the first place. Finding a fine excerpt from one of Kane’s stories wasn’t a stretch at all: This Close, the new collection in which this story appears, has been longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Get that? International — not too shabby!
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