What They Keep

The Saturday hobby exhibition in Dayton took up exactly half of a school gym. Leo had come to write four hundred funny words about strange people, and he had his first line ready before he'd finished parking.

Table one: hotel soap. Twelve hundred bars of it, arranged by country, every bar still in its paper. Leo asked the obvious question. The man said he had traveled for work for thirty-one years and had seen almost none of the cities he'd flown to — the airport, the office, twenty minutes in a room, the airport again. The soap, he said, was what he had.

Table two: keys. Three hundred and forty of them on a black cloth, and not one of them opened anything. The woman took them from houses that were being pulled down, and she wrote the address of each house on a small card. The keys weren't really the point, she said. The cards were.

Table three: two brothers, matchboxes from restaurants. Six hundred boxes, and by their own count, four hundred and ten of the restaurants had closed.

Table four: a girl of about fifteen with photographs of one street, one shop front at a time, taken in the same week every year for four years. In the first row, three of the shops had bright signs. In the last row, the same three had paper over the windows. Her grandfather's bakery was second from the left. It had paper over the windows too.

Leo stopped writing after that and simply walked the room. By the far wall he realized that he had asked eleven people the same question and got the same answer eleven times, in eleven different sets of words.

None of them had set out to collect objects. They had set out to keep a place that was going, and the objects were just the part that fitted in a box.

He crossed out his funny first line in the car. The article ran three weeks later under the title he wrote in the parking lot: What They Keep.