Life of an Inanimate Object: Part XI: Going, Going, Gone

Post date: Apr 13, 2017 2:27:48 PM

By: Megan Cichon, Entertainment Editor

Posted April 13th, 2017

Part XI: Going, Going, Gone

Galen spent the week after his release from the hospital holed up in his room, sleeping a lot. When he wasn’t sleeping, he just stared at the ceiling with a zoned out expression on his face. I just sat on his desk, staring at him the entire time. Occasionally, Galen’s mother would come up and practically drag Galen out of bed. He’d return barely thirty minutes later and lay back down, seemingly depressed. One day, Galen’s mother entered, and opened the shades over the window just a little bit.

“Galen,” she began, “get up. The doctor wants to see you today.”

Galen groaned, clearly not pleased with the prospect of getting up, but clambered out of bed anyhow.

“Am I gonna be able to write again?” Galen asked, pulling on some jeans and digging around a dirty clothes pile for a shirt of some sort.

“I would imagine so,” his mother sighed, “Now hurry up. We leave in ten minutes.”

Galen waited until his mother left and then pulled the shirt over his head. He glanced at the desk where I lay and crawled over. He pulled me off the desk and looked at me.

“I’ve been thinking up so many ideas,” he whispered to no one in particular. “It’s all pent up inside and ready burst forth.”

“Galen!” His mother shouted.

Galen tossed me back onto the desk, and raced out of the room, clumsily pulling shoes onto his feet.

📖 📖 📖

A few hours later, Galen burst back into his room, shouting at the top of his lungs.

“I’m all better!” He cried, rushing to the window and practically ripping the shades from the wall mount they were hanging on.

He threw open the window and leaned out. I heard him excitedly breath in the air and started laughing.

“You still need to take it easy!” His mother shouted.

Galen raced back to the desk and plopped himself into the chair.

“Time to write,” he sang, “time to write, time to write, time to write...”

He picked me up and quickly opened the notebook. Then he started writing:

“I asked her where we could go, but I only partly heard her reply. I was too busy focusing on the sky. It was bright blue, and because it had just stormed, I could see a rainbow. I hadn’t ever seen anything so spectacular in my life. The red looked like a pale red rose, and the purple on the flip side looked gloomy and...”

We wrote like that for the rest of the day. Galen didn’t stop until his mother told him fifteen different times to go to bed. And even after that, he wrote by flashlight.

“The spines of the books felt like soft sikn...”

Galen stopped and flipped me over to fix his spelling error, and I heard a scratchy sound. Something felt very wrong. Galen flipped me back over and ran his finger over my eraser.

“Darn,” he muttered, “Looks like I need to invest in a new eraser for you.”

He set me back down and glanced at the clock.

“We'll keep going tomorrow,” he muttered, standing.

I watched him stumble across the room and collapse lazily onto his bed. I frowned and glanced upwards, scared of what I might see. What I saw almost drove me to tears.

My eraser was gone.