From The Mind Of Wag...

What Remains The auction lasted most of the afternoon. People wandered through the old farmhouse carrying numbered paddles, pausing at tables covered with the ordinary evidence of a life. A cast-iron skillet. Boxes of Christmas ornaments. Books with someone’s name written inside the cover. A worn leather chair that had settled into the shape of its owner years before. By three o’clock, little colored stickers covered almost everything. SOLD. The furniture disappeared first. Then the dishes. The tools. The quilts. The grandfather clock that had stood in the hallway longer than anyone could remember. By sunset, the house echoed. The rooms looked strangely unfamiliar. As though the walls themselves had forgotten who had lived there. A young man stood alone in the empty living room. He had flown home for the auction after his grandmother died. He hadn’t expected to buy anything. He wasn’t really sure why he came. The auctioneer walked past him carrying a clipboard. “Looks like that’s about...

The Things We Carry Every morning, just after sunrise, the old man walked through the town with the same weathered backpack across his shoulders. It was too large for a daypack. Too worn to be new. Too full to belong to someone who was traveling. Children often wondered where he was going. The adults stopped wondering years ago. Some assumed he was homeless. Others thought he simply liked to walk. No one ever asked what was inside. One afternoon, a young woman sitting outside a café notices how carefully he lowers the pack before sitting on a nearby bench. Almost reverently. She eventually asks, “Is there something valuable in there?” He smiles. “Everything.” Curious, she asks if she’ll ever get to see it. He hesitates. Then slowly opens it. Inside... Nothing expensive. Just ordinary objects. A cracked coffee mug. An old report card. A rusted house key. A folded letter. A child’s drawing. A broken watch. A faded photograph. Each object represents something he couldn’t stop carrying. Wo...