Jaci Dawn

Cora walked through the ashes of her home. Nothing was left, nothing. Melted glasses, tattered shreds of curtains, a still-smoldering sofa pulled out into the dirt road. The appliances were blackened hulks of themselves. She felt something hard against her toe, and heard a metallic clink of metal against glass; there, at  her foot, gleaming dully in the hazy light, were her orange sewing scissors splayed open. She stared at them: the thumb handle was twisted and concave, black against the bright orange handle.

Gingerly, she picked them up out of the soot, running her thumb over the rough, pocked surface of the melted plastic, feeling how cool they were in her hand now. How odd that they had survived! She took her thumb and felt the edge, gasped at the sharpness of it. These scissors, always comfortable in her hands, now disfigured, but still sharp…

She snipped them shut: snip-click, a little grating noise as the sooty sides came together, snip-click, the sound they made when cutting fabric. Cora turned them over in her hand, and thought how the thumb hole now resembled a tear-drop: were the scissors as sad as she was? She lifted them to her nose and breathed in the smell of fire, melted plastic, tasted the smoke that still lingered on them. Burnt, salvaged, something of hers from the fire.

Describe an ordinary household object using: 5 visual descriptions, 4 tactile descriptions, 3 audial descriptions, 2 olfactory, and one about how it might taste.

*Postscript – while I own the scissors pictured and they were found in the aftermath of a house fire, I made the story up.