What We Keep

Grieving her grandmother’s death, Margaret inherits a snow globe with impossible clarity—and a figure inside that seems to know her name. Some heirlooms don’t hold memories; they hold destinies.

The cardboard box had been sitting on Margaret's kitchen table for two months, seventeen days, and six hours. She knew because she'd been counting—the way she counted everything now. Days since Rosalie's funeral. Weeks since she'd last called her grandmother's number just to hear the voicemail. Hours since Tom had stopped asking when she planned to deal with "all this stuff."

The January wind carved through the bare elm branches outside their Evanston bungalow, rattling windows that Rosalie would have said needed new weatherstripping. Margaret pulled her grandmother's moth-eaten shawl—still carrying traces of lavender and Lucky Strikes—tighter around her shoulders. The fabric, though soft, sometimes seemed to hold a static charge, prickling her skin with an unsettling awareness, even when she wasn't thinking of Rosalie. Rosalie, who remembered everything. Every birthday, every anniversary, every story passed down through generations. A true keeper. The packing tape on the box remained intact, a barrier she hadn't found the courage to cross.

Her phone buzzed, a sharp, insistent chirp. The lawyer again.

"Mrs. Rodriguez called," Tom said, appearing in the kitchen doorway with ice crystals clinging to his beard and an angry red flush on his cheeks. "The apartment management wants to know when you're clearing out the rest of Rosalie's things. They've got a waiting list."

Margaret's hands tightened around her coffee mug—the one that said "World's Best Grandma" that she'd bought Rosalie fifteen years ago and somehow ended up keeping. "I'll get to it."

"When?" The word came out sharper than Tom probably intended, edged with a weariness that pulled at Margaret's own frayed nerves. Dark circles shadowed his eyes; neither of them had been sleeping well. "Maggie, it's been over two months. The storage unit's costing us money we don't have, the apartment's costing money we definitely don't have, and that box—" He gestured at the table. "—is just sitting there like some kind of shrine."

"Don't." The word cracked like breaking glass.

"She's gone, honey. I know you loved her, but she's gone, and we need to—"

"Don't you dare tell me to move on." Margaret stood so abruptly her chair scraped against the linoleum—the same sound Rosalie's kitchen chair used to make when she'd get up to refill the teapot. Always two cups. Always assuming Margaret would stay longer than she'd planned.

Tom's jaw worked the way it did when he was trying not to lose his temper. Twenty-four years of marriage had taught her to read those signs. "I'm not saying move on. I'm saying we can't afford to keep living in the past."

The past. As if Rosalie were ancient history instead of the woman who'd called every Sunday morning without fail, who'd remembered every birthday and anniversary, who'd been the only family Margaret had left after her parents died in that car accident ten years ago.

"It's not your decision," she said.

Tom stared at her for a long moment. She could see him fighting with himself—the practical man who balanced their checkbook and fixed the leaky faucets warring with the gentle soul who'd held her while she sobbed after the funeral.

The practical man won.

"It'll be my problem when the maintenance bills start rolling in. When we're eating ramen because we're house-poor." His footsteps retreated toward the front door. "I'm going to the hardware store. Think about what's left to lose."

The door closed with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence, leaving Margaret in silence that felt heavier than before.

She sank back into her chair, the shawl sliding off her shoulders. The box sat before her, patient as a predator. Inside, she knew, was the snow globe from the highest shelf in Rosalie's apartment—the one her grandmother had never let her touch as a child.

*Some things aren't for little hands, sweetheart. Some things require understanding.*

She reached for the scissors. The packing tape parted with a whisper.

Nestled in tissue that crackled like old bones, the snow globe waited. The base was carved from black walnut, weathered smooth by decades of handling. Delicate spirals wound around its circumference—not decorative flourishes but letters in a script that seemed to writhe when she looked directly at them.

The glass sphere was impossibly clear for its age, unmarred by the yellowing that had claimed every other globe in Rosalie's collection. Inside, a perfect New England town slumbered under perpetual snow. Tiny clapboard houses lined streets that curved and twisted in patterns that tugged at her memory.

Millfield, she realized. The town where Rosalie had grown up, before the war, before everything changed.

In the window of what appeared to be a general store, a figure stood watching.

Margaret lifted the globe toward the weak morning light. The detail was extraordinary—she could make out individual roof shingles, tiny icicles hanging from eaves, even what looked like smoke curling from chimneys. But it was the figure that made her hands tremble.

An elderly woman with silver hair pulled back in a bun, wearing a dress that might have been fashionable in the 1940s. She was pressing one hand against the glass from the inside, as if trying to reach through. Her eyes seemed to pierce through the glass and into Margaret's soul.

The face was her own—but aged, weathered by decades she hadn't lived yet.

The globe slipped from Margaret's nerveless fingers, hitting the table with a sound like breaking bells. When she looked again, the figure had moved. Now it stood in the street, surrounded by swirling snow, its head cocked at an unnatural angle, looking directly at her.

Margaret's vision blurred. She was crying, she realized—ugly, gasping sobs that tore at her throat. How long had it been since she'd really let herself grieve? Tom meant well, but his solution to everything was action, movement, getting things done. He didn't understand that some losses couldn't be managed or organized away.

The globe grew warm under her hands.

That afternoon, Margaret drove to Rogers Park for the first time since the funeral.

Rosalie's building squatted between a taqueria and a dry cleaner, its brick facade stained with decades of Chicago winters. The super, a grizzled man named Kowalski who'd known her grandmother for thirty years, let her into the apartment with hands that shook from more than just age.

"She talked about you all the time," he said. "Always said you were the only one who understood her." He fumbled with the keys. "I keep expecting to see her in the hallway. Forty-three years she lived here."

The apartment smelled exactly as Margaret remembered—lavender sachets fighting a losing battle against cigarette smoke and the musty scent of old books. But underneath those familiar odors was something new: the smell of endings, of a life interrupted mid-sentence.

Every surface was covered with Rosalie's collections, but it was the snow globes that drew Margaret's attention. They lined the mantelpiece, crowded the bookshelf, perched on side tables and windowsills like a miniature city of trapped winters.

But these weren't random tourist trinkets, she realized. Each one represented a place that had meant something to their family. The Prague globe sat where Rosalie's great-grandmother had been born. The Ellis Island scene marked where the family had first touched American soil. The Chicago skyline commemorated where Margaret's parents had met, fallen in love, died too young.

Each globe was a chapter in the story Rosalie had been appointed to remember. And their details were sharper than she remembered, more vivid. In the Times Square globe, she could make out individual neon signs, tiny yellow taxis frozen mid-turn. Had they always been so lifelike?

In the bedroom, Margaret found her grandmother's journal—leather-bound and filled with spidery handwriting that grew more erratic toward the end. Most entries were mundane: grocery lists, doctor's appointments, complaints about Mrs. Rodriguez's yapping poodle. But scattered throughout were passages that made Margaret's hands tremble:

*Mama always said the women in our family were keepers. I thought she meant we kept house, kept families together, kept traditions alive. I understand now what she really meant. We keep what others forget—and sometimes, what we keep starts to keep us.*

*The globes aren't just pretty things. They're anchors. Each one holds a piece of who we were, who we are, who we might become. When I'm gone, they'll need someone else to tend them. Someone who understands that forgetting is the real death.*

*Margaret has the gift. She always did, even as a child. She could see things others missed, remember things others let go. The collection needs someone like her.*

The final entry, dated just a week before Rosalie's death, was barely legible:

*The Millfield globe is acting up. The snow won't settle properly, and the figure in the general store keeps moving. I think they know I'm leaving. I think they're getting ready for Margaret.*

*Be gentle with my collection, sweetheart. Each one holds a piece of our hearts. And whatever you do, don't let them know you're afraid.*

Margaret closed the journal, her vision blurred with understanding. Through the bedroom window, Lake Michigan stretched toward a horizon that seemed impossibly distant. For the first time since the funeral, she felt something besides the crushing weight of loss.

She felt purpose.

That evening, she sat at her kitchen table with the Millfield globe cradled in her hands. Tom was at his brother's house—whether by choice or because he needed space, she didn't know. The silence felt different now, not empty but expectant.

The carved spirals on the globe's base pulsed with warmth. As she watched, the letters seemed to rearrange themselves into words she could almost understand.

Inside the sphere, snow was falling. Not the artificial kind that usually swirled through tourist trinkets, but real snow that seemed to follow actual weather patterns. It drifted down in lazy spirals, coating the tiny houses, accumulating in miniature drifts against miniature doors.

The figure in the general store—unmistakably Rosalie now—had moved again. She stood in the doorway, one hand raised in a slow, deliberate beckoning gesture, her eyes fixed on Margaret.

Margaret pressed her palm against the glass.

Heat flared through the contact, racing up her arm. The moment they connected—her hand, her grandmother's miniature one—everything changed. The storm inside the globe twisted. One flake turned crimson. Then another. Then hundreds, until the perfect little town was painted in scarlet snow.

Margaret felt her consciousness expanding, stretching beyond the confines of her suburban kitchen. She could see layers of reality spreading out like an onion. In one layer, she and Tom were happy, growing old together. In another, they'd never met, and she'd become the writer she'd always dreamed of being. In a third, Rosalie was still alive, still smoking Lucky Strikes and telling stories.

And in the deepest layer, she stood in a general store in a town called Millfield, watching through a window as snow fell on a world that existed only when someone was there to observe it.

Margaret smiled and felt herself dissolving into the glass. The kitchen around her flickered like a dying lightbulb. The walls became transparent. The furniture faded to outlines.

When Tom returned home three hours later, he found the house empty. Margaret's coffee mug sat cold on the table beside an open cardboard box. Inside the box, nested in crumpled tissue paper, was a snow globe containing a perfect replica of their Evanston neighborhood.

In the window of the house that looked exactly like theirs, a figure stood watching. It had Margaret's face, Margaret's clothes, Margaret's desperate smile. When Tom lifted the globe to the light, the figure pressed its hand against the glass from the inside and mouthed a single word: *Remember.*

Tom set the globe down carefully and reached for his phone to call the police. But as he dialed, he noticed something that made his hands shake. In the miniature front yard of the miniature house, tiny footprints led from the front door to the edge of the glass dome, where they simply... stopped.

Outside the real window, snow began to fall—soft at first, then heavier. By morning, it would cover everything in a blanket of white that never seemed to melt completely, no matter how warm the weather became.

And sometimes, if you knew where to look, you could see other footprints in that snow. Footprints that led nowhere and everywhere, connecting all the places where love persisted beyond loss, where memory became a living thing that refused to let go.

The cycle, as always, continued.