Two Treasure Tins
You learned to mark things early on, when you lived in the station. Write your name on things with a marker, put some kind of decal on it, whatever. Because all your neighbors were scavengers, and would see nothing wrong with lifting something while it was lying in your quarters (assuming the door was open). But even so, personal property was a sacred thing, if only because nobody wanted their stuff lifted in retaliation.
Anyway, most people developed some sort of personal mark; not quite a signature, just a stamp made from markers or stickers or carved erasers so you’d not only know that an item was someone’s, but whose it was.
Gigi’s tag was two Granny stickers, peeled off some long forgotten product back when we still got supply dumps. G-G = Granny Granny, even though she was a year or two younger than me.
She had two identical tins with the stickers on them. One was for money, because Gigi wanted nothing more than to get the ever living hell out of this place. Which is possible, if you happen to have…well, a tinful of money. We used to call it her treasure tin.
The one we called her “other treasure tin” was full of…well, junk. Odds and ends of things that meant something to her. Money might be hard to come by, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of it out there. These things were irreplaceable.
She’s gone now. Near as I can tell, she left the station an hour ago. Which hurts, but in a way that’s too big to notice. Like the ceiling over my head.
The thing that might collapse the ceiling, the thing that has me staring at a barely decorated metal tin is that one of the tins is missing. I guess she took it with her.
I just don’t know which one.
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