Antique store

Julie walked into the antique store not to buy something, but to jump start her brain. She found that when she had trouble writing, she would go to her uncle’s shop and look around. Then Julie would write a story about something that caught her eye. She had stories about a lot items that her uncle sold, and she was a little sad whenever one of them was sold. It was as if a part of her life was gone.

There was an old stained-glass lamp that sat on the countertop, and it was the first item she wrote about, so her uncle promised never to sell it. Instead he placed it up on the counter, and took the price tag off. It was a beautiful lamp, with red, yellow, and brown stained glass arranged into various leaf designs. This lamp’s story was about a woman who fell in love, and when her lover became sick and passed away, she stole the lamp from his apartment. Then she burned the whole thing to the ground.

An old, orange, leather chair sat in a corner at the front of the store. Kevin, her uncle said that it was originally dark brown, but it had faded so much it looked orange. No one made orange leather 150 years ago, he said. Julie sat in the chair, which is where she usually sat while she breathed in the smells of dust and oxidation before writing. She had also written about the chair. There was an old farmer named Edgar, and he had moved the chair to his field after he was too old to farm. He would sit in the chair all afternoon, and his wife would bring him glasses of iced tea. She was a wonderful wife.

Julie looked around at the lamps hanging from the ceilings, the hutches and desks lining the walls, and the chairs and audamins which filled the middle of the room. She gazed at the room as whole, not at any particular piece. There were streaks of dust where the light came in through the blinds. One line of dust guided her eye toward an upright piano that hadn’t been tuned in years. There it was: her muse.

Julie pulled a yellow pad out her messenger bag, and placed her pen between her teeth to chew on while she stared at the black piano and daydreamed.