Safekeeping

by Jessamyn Hope

  “Sir, you can’t touch the displays.” A security guard waved him back. “You have to stand behind that line, sir.”

  Isaac stepped back. If he wasn’t going to punch through the glass, he wasn’t sure what more there was to do. He had seen it now. He could go. But he didn’t want to, because as soon as he turned to leave, it would be over, this story between him and his father. He stared at the brooch, feeling as if he too were in a box, the air growing stale, every day a little less satisfying to breathe. He knew his father had wanted the brooch in a museum, but he had never seen it here, plucked out of the chaos of life.

  It had been decades since Isaac believed in the power of prayers and wishes, but he made a wish anyway. He wished that one day the brooch—whether it was in a hundred years or four hundred years or a thousand—would find itself outside a museum case again, set free by an earthquake perhaps, or a looting, or a mismanaged shipment between exhibitions. He wished it for the brooch’s sake and for his and his father’s, because then a part of them would be out there again in the world.