A paper poppy. At the back of his desk. He wore it home in his lapel. He told me about his favorite uncle who’d been in the war. He curled the stem around a yellow Ticonderoga pencil (number 2), then slipped the flower off the pencil and handed it to me to wear as a pinky ring. I took it off and put it on the kitchen counter while I prepared dinner. When it got wet, the flower left a red stain.

Coffee mug. In the dishwasher. Handmade pottery, blue and white glaze. We had purchased two in a shop in Cape May during our first weekend together. Identical mugs. When one broke in the dishwasher, he said it was mine that broke. Who loaded the pot on top of the china? The cast iron enameled pot?

A wallet. On his bureau. The leather was stretched and worn smooth, thin. An old driver’s license. A photo of me smiling. He stopped carrying it, he told me, because one of his friends was mugged and lost all his family photos. He never cut up old credit cards. He kept them in this wallet with a few receipts, phone numbers in pen and pencil on the back of the receipts. I could phone them all, one after the other.

An empty bottle of Ambien. Top shelf of the medicine cabinet. No refills. “What’s this?”
I asked when I found the pharmacist’s bag in the trash. I should have asked to see the bottle and counted the pills. He’d pour himself a drink every night when he got home and another at dinner. Skye vodka from the freezer. Red jug wine kept in the fridge. He said it was good for the heart.

Teaching creative writing at Drexel University, Miriam N. Kotzin writes fiction and poetry. Her collection of flash fiction, Just Desserts, was published by by Star Cloud Press (2011).