The Memory Pod by Sylvia Petter

Jewellery can be just a work of art. Did I say just? No. If it’s design, it needs to have some practical purpose. But your practicality, she thought is perhaps my serendipity. That had always been the way with him and he never gave up. But all that was now in the past, and she was firmly in the present with a project to complete.

It’s not just rings on your fingers and bells round your neck, she thought as she took two pieces of aluminium. She cut and filed tiny leaf holes all over them until her fingers and thumbs were coated in silvery dust; here and there thin scratches stopped just short of blood. She shaped the two pieces into the form of praying hands: not ones that were pressed together, those that let life still breathe in.

The silvery grey of the metal was cold, so she enamelled the pieces in ruby red. She dried them on their backs like open palms, and then on their fronts, humped like twin turtles.

She took his love letter and ripped it into scraps. The tears lacerated the words “I”, “love” and “you”. There were so many of them. She piled them into one of the halves and quickly trapped them with the other. With a thin white silk ribbon she laced the two humps of her life together. She wanted to tie a long flowing bow, but the ribbon was too short. There was only enough for a tight little knot.

The humps now resembled a heart: not the Valentine sort, the one shaped like a fist. She cupped it in both hands and shook it about. The love scraps danced and whichever way she stopped the three little words peeked out at her from within her memory pod.

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Inspired by Maarit’s memory pod