Original short fiction from Rarle USA. Characters and events are fictional.
Claire found the lunchbox at the back of the hall closet while looking for an extension cord. It was the red one she had carried through elementary school, its clasp still stubborn at one corner. Her father had kept it long after she started buying lunch with friends and asking him not to put notes in anything.
He had respected the request. At twelve, Claire had been relieved. At eighteen, standing among half-packed college boxes, she remembered the notes with an affection she would not have admitted six years earlier. Most had been terrible jokes. A few simply said he hoped the spelling test went well.
Inside the lunchbox were folded squares of paper held together with a rubber band. She assumed they were old notes he had collected from her backpack. Then she opened one dated the day of her first high-school audition. “You can be nervous and still walk into the room,” it read.
The next was from the afternoon she failed her driving test. Another mentioned the week she stopped talking about a friendship that had ended. None had been put in a lunchbox. Her father had kept writing after she asked him to stop delivering them. She sat down on the floor between two cardboard boxes.
He found her there carrying the extension cord. For a moment, both looked as embarrassed as if she had opened a private diary. “Those weren’t meant to make you feel bad,” he said. Claire shook her head. “Why didn’t you just tell me these things?” she asked.
Her father leaned against the doorframe. “Sometimes I tried at the wrong time,” he said. “Sometimes you needed me to stop asking questions. Writing it down helped me work out what I
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