The air vibrates as explosions rocked the houses. Screams of people panicking in the streets as they fled for safety. A woman frantically gathers everything she can, not caring what she takes. Pictures and knick knacks and other personal items fly into her bag as her son tries to drag her away. As he manages to pull her out the door, she cries out and reaches into the house as she sees a picture frame the last photo of her husband before he left for war and never returned.
Days later, the bombing stops and soldiers enter the town. One comes into the house and searches it for valuables. He comes across the picture frame and, for reasons of his own, takes it. He returns home and gives it to his daughter as a present, where it sits in her room for several years before she moves to Canada.
She attends university, studying to be a doctor. The frame sat on her dresser in her dorm room until one rowdy night when her drunken roommate knocked it over and it broke. Saddened by the loss of the gift, she found a shop that could repair the frame. The shop was backlogged with orders and the frame sat in the back for weeks, gathering dust as it awaited its turn for repairs.
Unfortunately, they never came to pass as a thief robbed the shop one night and took anything he could get his hands on. The thief sought a buyer but nobody wanted the broken frame. Eventually, the thief cast it aside into the trash where it was found by a garbage picker, seeking lost treasures.
A man who had made a living selling the castoffs of other people, he had a stall in the flea market. He did his best to repair the frame and it almost looked brand new, minus a few bends and dents. On his table it sat, marked down from $5 to $2.
* * *
It was an anniversary present, giving on the third year they’d been married. He’d found the tiara at a jewelry shop just around the corner of the office he worked in. It’d taken them days to get it ready and he’d been worried that it wouldn’t be prepared in time. She’d always loved princesses and this was his way of making her feel like one. When he got the phone call, he decided to leave work early and surprise her at home.
She loved the gift and they had a romantic night out of dinner and dancing, ending it with a late night picnic beneath the full moon with wine and cheese. They made love beneath the stars the night. Unbeknownst to her, the necklace clasp got hooked on a root and snapped off. She didn’t notice until they’d gotten home.
When she returned for it, the necklace was right where they’d laid that night. However, on the drive home, the car coming the opposite direction lost control and the two collided. She died on the scene, the necklace still in her hands. When he came to identify her, they returned the necklace to him, but he couldn’t bear to look at it. He gave it to the nurse and left the hospital, heartbroken.
The nurse didn’t feel comfortable keeping the jewelry, and so passed it on to one of her friends who loved shiny jewels. She was delighted and wore the necklace all the time. However, times were tough for her family and she was forced to make a choice; sell her jewelry or let her kids go hungry. It wasn’t a hard choice and the necklace got sold to a second hand shop.
The necklace wound up in a box in storage for years, packed with other jewelry that had been sold or donated. Eventually, it came time to do a clean up and so the owner of the shop took several boxes to the flea market where he had a stand. There, the necklace hung.
* * *
He loved comic books when he was a kid. He’d collect anything he could get his hands on. Superheroes. Fantasy. Space travel. Monsters. It didn’t matter to him. As he got older, his collection became huge. His prized possession, though, was the first issue of Tales of the Skull Jester. It was in good condition, considering how old it was and how many times he’d leafed through it.
As most people do, he grew up, got married, and had a kid. That was when he decided that he would sell his collection to help save for his college tuition. He found a wealthy collector who paid him handsomely for his complete set. When he refused to sell the one issue he loved, the collector almost paid him double and he reluctantly let it go.
The collector was big into charity and participated in granting gravely ill children wishes. One boy suffering from leukemia loved the Skull Jester and wanted a copy of the first issue. So the collector donated the issue to the boy, who was ecstatic at the gift. When he managed to pull through and beat the disease, he credited it to the power of his favorite comic book character.
A few years later, as his mom was gathering up things to sell at the flea market, her son asked to sell the comic book at her stall. When asked why, he said that he wanted the Skull Jester’s power to help someone else just like it helped him. She smiled at his idea and took the book, the now well read and fading book at her table where it waited for the next soul to save.
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