Lost Object Story
Write a story about a lost object, but make the real story about love. It could be a story about a character who loses her late grandmother’s pearl necklace in a pizza parlor. Or it might be a story about a missing lover’s lost glasses.
When in doubt, always make the deeper story—the undercurrent— about love and your stories will shine.
Prompt Words: Ring, premonition, accordion, dented, couch, sweater, moth
In the attic, among the relics and the dust, Ella found the echo box. It lay hidden under heaps that murmured of the past—a stack of books, their spines cracked like dried lips, watches that had stopped ticking, forgotten like last breaths, and a sweater, moth-eaten and frayed as old love letters. She was there to find her grandmother’s accordion, an heirloom heavy with songs not sung for years. But it was the echo box, scarred and silent, that held her gaze.
A letter slipped from its side when she picked it up. The handwriting, a series of careful incisions into the paper, began with a “Dearest,” a word that landed softly, like a touch. “I send you this echo box as a symbol of our bond,” it read. Her hands trembled slightly, holding the letter as one might hold a bird too long caged.
Inside the echo box were voices. They came out slowly, stretching into the thick attic air—echoes of laughter, the scrape of a whisper, the sigh of someone sleeping next to you. Sounds one collects over a lifetime of loving another human being. Eliot wrote about measuring out life with coffee spoons; here was a life measured in echoes.
Ella opened the box wider. More sounds, each a fragment, each a flickering image: a door closing long ago, the soft tread of feet across a room, a sentence started but never finished. These echoes weren't just reverberations but palpitations, a heart beating through time.
The room grew dark as she read on. The letter spoke of love as a series of echoes, a continual return. “Your laughter still rings in my head long after you have fallen silent. Every echo, a story waiting to be told.” Ella thought of the ring on her finger, a loop of silver, simple and infinite. Each return of sound in the box was a return to the moment the ring was given, to the promise made.
Ella held the echo box close, its surface cold and slightly pocked, like the moon’s. It was an archive of intimacies, a catalogue of whispers. In the dim light of the attic, with beams that crossed like fate lines on a palm, she realized that this box, like all true loves, was both a keeper of the past and a herald of the future.
Beneath her hand, the box vibrated with stored energies. Each sound an artifact, each artifact a relic, each relic a testament to the fact that love, like sound, fades but does not vanish. It waits in echo boxes, in letters, in the quiet corners of attics, to be found and to resonate once more.
As she folded the letter, a final line caught her eye, a message that might have been written for her or for anyone who has ever loved: “And our story, my darling, is written in echoes.” Love, she understood then, is the longest echo.
"When in doubt, always make the deeper story—the undercurrent—about love and your stories will shine." I love that!