Grandma spread hair clippings in her garden to deter deer. Stuffed dryer lint in the attic as insulation. Hoarded ripped wrapping paper, broken tennis rackets, grimy rag dolls, stained plastic containers.
After she died, we gather to toss her junk in a rented dumpster, barely bothering to inspect the boxes. Until Rosie, Grandma’s namesake, finds a collection of comic books, hidden under Cool Whip containers and jam jars.
Batman, Superman, Captain America, Wonder Woman. All perfect, preserved in plastic. Maybe? What-if? Could-be? We Google mint-quality comics. Then we whoop —worth thousands!
We clink beers to toast our family’s matriarch and search how to sell to collectors, imagining spending our windfall:
Travel first-class to the Caribbean?
Invest in a Colorado ski condo?
Splurge on a Corvette Convertible?
Rent a vacation villa?
But crunching the numbers, we realize the proceeds won’t cover Grandma’s final medical bills or her outstanding mortgage. It will pay for the dumpster rental, though, where her yellowed papers flutter, like brittle butterflies that can never escape.
Liz deBeer is the author of Farewell to Emptiness, a novelette-in-flash (Thirty West). Her flash has appeared in BULL, Fictive Dream, Bending Genres, DIHP, and others. A volunteer reader for Flash Fiction Magazine, Liz is a teacher and writer with Project Write Now. Substack: A Lizard’s Tale. Website: http://www.ldebeerwriter.com.