by Dominick Basile

Created on: September 08, 2010

The Find


Cecilia turned down the black, oil-packed dirt road toward the sea. She was heading home, a ramshackle conglomeration of shipping containers that her father had pushed, together and piled atop one another. He had insulated and decorated his domestic achievement with cardboard and any piece of driftwood that came his way. He had painted the interior pink. Either someone had forgotten the five-gallon buckets of paint at the big-box hardware center or someone could not find room for the paint on his truck. Emilio found room in his aging Mercury station wagon and was quick to perform a roadside acquisition.

Cecilia ran quickly up the rope steps Emilio had jerry rigged. On entering, she turned toward the kitchen and the pile of clothing she had washed that morning. Charlie Castro, the skipper and crew of the Dorothy, a party fishing boat, had offered her a week's wage if she'd show up at the dock at 4 p.m. and get his party, thirty retired financial wizards, on board and help on the trip as a crewman. The noonday sun had begun to bake the containers as Cecilia pulled a pair of pants from the pile of laundry. She dropped the ironing board down from the wall (another of Emilio's accomplishments) and between the hot black steam iron and the sun's force, it grew stifling in the small kitchen. The only relief she could hope for was a small breeze coming from the window overlooking the distant waves. Her arm started moving methodically and, just as she started to fantasize about a cool swim, the iron stopped at a bump in the pocket.

"Damn, what the hell."

And as her hand fumbled into the pocket searching for this unwanted find:

"I thought I'd cleaned out all these damn pockets," she murmured.

Her fingers wrapped themselves around what seemed to feel like a metal cap.” I don't remember this," she thought. Out, her hand came out, and she now saw a small, decorated ball. Obviously metal, but she didn't know what it was, except that it was pretty. It looked like something the Turk on the pier would have. In fact, as she scrutinized her find, she though it looked just like the design the Turk had on his little change purse. All kinds of swirls and lines. He said they meant something, but he couldn't read Turkish. His aunt had sent him the purse as a birthday gift.

"Pretty," she thought, "I'll keep it. I'll put it on the shelf and worry about it tomorrow." There was one shelf in the room, a fourteen-foot plank that once held sand at bay while men worked in a ditch.

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