by Nora Esme Wagner
Mom’s music box is being auctioned off on eBay. Not her exact one—that disappeared with her. Delia and I upended the entire house, opening air vents, the false back board in her closet, the paint cans left in the garage from when she decided to paint all the walls lemon. She only got as far as the kitchen. That solitary splash of yellow always reminded me of jaundice, how it starts in the palms, then consumes the body.
For the most part, Delia and I have wildly different memories of the music box: whom Mom promised to bequeath it to, who accidentally snapped off the tiny spinning ballerina and did a shit job hot-gluing it back on, so her slippers look set in congee. But we can at least agree that Mom shouldn’t get keepsies. It belonged to her mom, and her mom’s mom before that, and her mom’s mom’s mom first. Even though it can’t be the same box (Mom left a note swearing off technology, vowing to make herself unreachable), I place a $200 bid, $45 above the last.
A few hours later, I check the listing. I’ve been outbid by MOMMYMONROE. Her profile picture is a pixelated toddler’s face, eyes spaced wide and a cleft lip. I pull up Delia’s Facebook in an incognito browser, since she’s blocked me. Sure enough, photo after photo of the
same aesthetically-challenged kid—my niece. Delia is in every picture, her rotini curls so tiny and tight they give me a headache just looking. I imagine Delia cranking the box for her daughter; Delia tapping out the tinkling notes on her tummy like Mom used to do to her; Delia’s
younger son, invisible on her socials, watching from the doorway. I raise her thirty dollars.
We go up in smaller and smaller increments: five dollars, one dollar, fifty cents, a nickel. There’s no way for Delia to know her competitor is me, but I’m convinced she does. The last thing she ever said to me: Find Mom and she’s all yours, but I’m getting the fucking box.
I’m about to let her have it – all this fuss over a knockoff – when I notice something about the ballerina’s feet. I zoom in, trying to make out whether the shimmer is a lens flare, or the crusted edge of hot glue.
Nora Esme Wagner is a junior at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Smokelong, Wigleaf, JMWW, Milk Candy Review, Flash Frog, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. Her stories have been selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and the Co-Editor-in-Chief for The Wellesley Review.
January House Literary Journal 
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