matchbook

he coat closet at Aunt Belinda’s was always colder than the rest of the house. Even in summer. Maybe especially then. Always dark because the pull-chain fluorescent light had burned out and nobody knew how to change it. Smelled of old wool, faintest tinge of long-gone mothballs, floor varnish, the stiff and yellowed cardboard wrappers that ringed the bottom of wire hangers. Was a middling hide and seek spot, but not so obvious if you could crawl behind the quilted fabric garment bag that held the good winter coats. Other coats, an army uniform, and stiff, lacy dresses hung loose, or in clear plastic bags, the final resting place for clothes nobody owned anymore but no one could throw away. Remember that day cousin Ricky tried to scare us with the dead animal pieces, fur collars that clipped onto cloth coats, beady black eyes like the tops of push pins, snarly mouths somehow wired to bite each other’s tails. How I cried and insisted we bury them. How we had a funeral, dug and dug and threw in dandelions and clover, patted down dirt, scratched crosses into slate stones. How Aunt Belinda found out and got mad, because the furs had been Grandma's. How we got sent to bed with no TV, no supper. Told to think about what we’d done, and I did. It was still worth it.