An Opening

The drawer smelled rancid. I dug into the narrow void, past where I could see. I hated losing things, and didn’t do it often, but somehow over the last few years I’d misplaced a box of my grandfather’s things that I’d found in his bedside table after he passed away. Its contents were gone as well, dispersed over the house by the kids during one of their various phases of fascination with Mommy and Daddy’s stuff. Of all the items the box contained, one stuck in my memory—a cardboard pheasant about three inches long and a quarter of an inch thick, the smooth, colorfully printed image laminated to the cardboard almost too detailed for the age of the other objects in the box....

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