When people ask what magic power you’d choose, you never want to fly, or be invisible. You want what you’ve always wanted, the power to make all lost things come back to you. You’d walk into the room of lost things, open your eyes, and there they’d be: the pet turtle you let loose in green grass all those years ago, the story your best friend tore up when she was mad at you, your mother’s Pucci dress, the one you loved as a child, its wild pattern like a monstera plant, moss-green leaves, pale celery background. Mommy, wear your dipsy-doodle dress! You were sure that dress had hung untouched in her closet for 35 years, zipped in its garment bag, but when you asked your stepfather, not two days after the funeral, he shrugged and said he’d sent all that stuff to Goodwill.

 You picture your mother’s eyebrow lifting. Just the one. The vintage designer dresses she collected, on wire hangers at some thrift store. But toward the end of her life she only ever wore sweatsuits, all her bright plumage faded. Maybe that dress meant nothing to her but a time she didn’t want to remember, a shadowy time almost lost to you except in gulps of vivid color, your mother chopping limes by the swimming pool; a bright yellow Big Bird toy you dragged with you everywhere that left bits of yarny fuzz in your hair; the man in a blue velvet shirt who came over and played the piano but never talked to anyone. There were stairs down to the living room, a red carpet. Look, I’m on the red carpet, your mother would say. There was a balcony on the second floor, and if you looked down all you saw was trees for miles, a dizzy-making canyon a person could disappear into, and people did. That was what you remembered most about that time: the sense of danger, of adult conversations that stopped when you walked into the room. The murders, people whispered. The trial. A nameless threat that might still be out there, in the hills. Faces would turn to you, guilty smiles, a sudden interest in coffee cups. You breathed it all in, the way Victorian children were said to breathe in arsenic from poison-green wallpaper. And then it wasn’t there: the house wasn’t there, the piano, the man in the blue velvet shirt. Your mother’s green dress, zipped away in a black bag, gone forever. In that room of lost things you’ll find it. Your mother will be there, wearing the dress, head thrown back in a model pose, long legs in knee-high boots. And sitting in the corner, by the piano, maybe a little shy, will be a man who looks just like his picture, the one picture of him your mother kept. A little slowly, a little haltingly, your mother will lead you to him. And then, for the first time, your father will take your hand.

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Kathryn Kulpa is a New England-based writer with stories in Best Microfiction, Fictive Dream, Flash Frontier, Ghost Parachute, and other journals. Her books include Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted (New Rivers Press), For Every Tower, a Princess (a micro-chapbook, forthcoming from Porkbelly Press), and the flash collection A Map of Lost Places (forthcoming from Gold Line Press).