The Coffee Table

Flash Fiction

Aimee found the coffee table in an abandoned house in the Midwest countryside. In her free time, she liked to explore abandoned houses and take photos of them. Ordinarily, she took nothing from them, except maybe old photos that nobody wanted, that would simply decay with time otherwise. But, the coffee table, which she saw coated with dust in the corner of the old house, spoke to her, and so she took it. It would be destroyed by the slow collapse of the old home anyway. 

The dust rose from the coffee table into the still, stifling air of the summer day as she carried it to her vehicle parked out of sight behind the trees that used to serve as a wind break for the old home. It was just an ordinary wooden coffee table, nothing fancy. Aimee took it home, and put it in her apartment and put magazines on it, and a vase, in which she sometimes put real flowers. It had likely been made by one of the past owners of the old farmstead she thought. It wasn't fancy and didn't look anything other than hand made. 

On the underside of the table, concealed, but visible if Aimee had looked closely, were two initials, A.H to S.H. But she didn't look closely, and could not know of the coffee table's other life when it had been made as a wedding gift from a farmer and carpenter to his bride. She could not see it covered with vintage magazines and old kids toys, which however, were quite current back then. She could not see the vases of peonies and lilacs and roses from the gardens around the farm house( falling into weeds now) that every summer for decades sat for weeks on the coffee table bringing fragrance to the farm house. Aimee did, however, look at the table speculating as to the many moments it must have witnessed before the original owners likely died and their descendents did not want it. "Oh that old thing"?  ''Isn't that rotten by now"?

One night, when Aimee was asleep, she could not see the two shadowy forms in her apartment. They were looking at the coffee table. But, rather than being offended someone else owned it now, they were pleased. A. H looked at S. H and smiled.