Nov 1, 2023 - Oct 31, 2024 second place winner by kai jennings

THE RING

A ring sat, discarded, on someone’s bedside table. They had found it in a thrift shop. The silver had tarnished and the inscription was unclear. The owner never knew what it had said.

The ring used to be worn by a girl, years ago. She wore it on her thumb, spinning it as she went about her day. On it were the numbers ‘1942’. They probably meant something to the previous owner.

Before her, the owner was a man with brown eyes that constantly scanned important work documents. He rarely wore the ring and it gathered dust in a drawer. He had gotten it at a market.

Before the man, there was a woman who loved the ring. She had bought it from a man in Paris and taken it everywhere with her on a chain around her neck.

The man who had sold it to her was not the original owner of the ring either. It had belonged to a long-ago friend of his. He hadn’t talked to him in years.

His friend lay in a grave in a graveyard where weeds grew through cracks in the stone. The worn out dating on his grave read ‘1942 - 1973’. But he was not the original owner of the ring either.

The ring’s first owner lay a few graves away. The date read ‘1919-1942’. The name was faded and covered in ivy but if you squinted you could see ‘Nicol Synthia’, and if you looked up her name you would find but one reference to who she was. But no one ever looked because no one wanted to remember and now no one remembered.