Tracie Cooper

The Black Fortune

We found it when we were kids. The locket, heavy and warm no matter the temperature outside, was in a shoebox that contained several packets of ancient soy sauce, a newspaper article about the opening of a big box store in the late 1980s, and a toy dinosaur I vaguely recall pulling out of a Happy Meal. My parents weren't hoarders but they were sentimental and disorganized; I could picture them dumping out the contents of the junk drawer and putting them into another box just in case.