The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan

Author:Mary Swan [Swan, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-80804-2
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2013-08-13T04:00:00+00:00

Button

THERE’S NOTHING REMARKABLE about it. Color of old bone, size of a small coin, holes for thread to pass through. It’s only where it comes from that gives it meaning, and how long will that last? It may be kept in a small tin box for a generation or two, and then someone will want or need the box for something else. Hold the small button in the palm of a hand, half remembering a passed-down story, and put it into another container, a jar, maybe, for safekeeping. Doing that, but at the same time wondering if there really was a story, thinking that even if there was, it might not have been true. It may have come from one of those posed in the battered album that has also been passed down, faces faded or darkened with age, people with names no one alive still knows. And why assume that they always told the truth? Still, the button goes into a glass jar and someone thinks, late at night, of the way that stories lose their meaning, just like objects do, as the years wheel on, as new ones take their place. Someone understands that this thought too will be gone and no one will know, no one will ever know.

And perhaps sometime later, someone else will find a glass jar with one bone-colored button, add a few more. Maybe with a pinprick of a thought, or maybe the story is completely gone, although there are others. Over time the jar will fill up because that’s the thing about buttons, they are always falling off, they are always turning up in a house, in a life, and you don’t throw them away; there will surely come a day when you need just that color, just that size. The first small button is probably still rattling around in a jar with many others, old ones, newer, all shades and sizes, bits of trailing thread. Nothing at all to set it apart; it could have belonged to anyone.

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