Object

He picked up the object.

“What even is this?”  It sat on his hand, a wooden ring.  Like a crop circle on his palm.  “Our house is so full of crap.”

A nail pierced the ring on one side, a hook protruded from the other.  I mean maybe it could be – he could never shake the feeling that something could very possibly be useful at some point.

“Shhhh,” she warned.  She got up, took the object from him.  When she did that, he felt lost without it in his hand.  It had been the perfect shape and weight to make him momentarily happy.  Maybe there would one day be another moment like that.

She took him by the hand and dragged him through to another room.

“We don’t know what that thing is yet,” she told him.  “It might be important.”

“We don’t even know what it’s for,” he argued.

“Keep your voice down.  If we don’t know what it is used for, how do we even know how important it is?”

Chastened, he went back through to the other room.  He picked up the wooden ring again but it didn’t make him feel happy.

“The secrets of the universe have yet to be entirely uncovered,” she said as she followed.

She opened a box of matches and started setting them out one by one on the counter, investigating them, looking for differences.