Anais, smiling with everything but her eyes, laid a rectangular object on the table between them.
Mary watched her take a step back, fingers lifting off the edges of the object, elbows tucking into her sides as she spread her arms, a modified Christ-like ‘Ta-da!’
-What is it? Mary asked and Anais began to explain.
Mary’s head was tilted down but she couldn’t take her eyes off of Anais’ hands, their quick little fingersnaps punctuating her explanation. Mary thought of classroom charades with her girlfriends. Squeezing invisible toothpaste onto an invisible toothbrush, tying an imaginary shoelace. She wanted to watch Anais’ hands do these things and more.
Stop what you’re thinking, Mary said to herself and the evil little dwarf of her crush grinned and retreated back into the shadows, doing up its sticky flies with chubby pig-pink fingers.
-I got the idea from a dream I had, where there was an ant farm but for some reason the sand was turning to dust at the bottom and I had to keep running outside and shoveling sand into a honey jar so that the ants wouldn’t all end up at the bottom.
-What were you afraid would happen?
-I guess that they’d start fighting. That they’d be unhappy.
Mary nodded.
-Unhappy ants. Happy ants.
-Yes, Anais said, a sort of God dilemma. Anyway, in the dream I didn’t have a choice but to keep their world going.
-And so this box is the ant farm? But what’s inside it?
-Associatives. Stuff I’ve had in shoeboxes for ages. Found things but found so long ago they got lost again and now …
-…Here they are.
Within the 2 centimeter space between the two glass panes, banded by black, freshly-painted wood panels no wider than a venetian blind the following items were affixed, rainbowed from lower left to middle-top and down again to lower right: a mandolin tuning key, a quintet of slightly curved, hairbreadth’s-wide scarlet somethings spooning their replicate shapes one behind the other, a blue and white lozenge, a seed of some sort, an unlit match X’d with a burnt one, a tiny circle of brown paper, stained in the center, a wisp of shredded cotton ball, rosy at the cirrus tips, what at first appeared to be an insect’s antenna but which, after a moment’s concentration, revealed itself to be a single heavily-mascaraed eyelash, and finally, a miniscule clipping of newsprint which read ‘go home’.
Mary looked up at Anais, tilted her head and moued her lips, half-smile, whole-puzzle. She tapped her nail above the scarlet quintet and lifted her eyebrows.
-Fingernails, Anais said breathlessly.
Mary tapped above the lozenge.
-Antihistamine.
And next.
-Pomegranate seed. I think. Or. Mulberry, maybe. Don’t know.
Mary skipped the matches and tapped above the stained paper.
Anais laughed.
-Tears.
-Really?
-Really!
Mary laughed as well and stopped tapping, letting her fingers drift above the glass surface.
-Are you thinking of making others?
-Till I begin to bore myself. This is the seventh so far. I’d let you have it but I like it too much. I’ll give you one that means less to me. Do you understand that?
Mary brushed a strand of hair behind her ear, letting her eyes rise from the point on Anais’ golden chest where a shirt button would be if her shirt were buttoned.
-I understand completely.