Raider of the Lost Pocket Watch

Stacy took down the old cigar box from the top shelf of her bookcase and rubbed the top lovingly.  Grandpa had given her the box after he took out his last cigar – not just the last of the box, but the last he would ever smoke.

She opened the lid and stared at the contents.  Her very first My Little Pony, put in the box for safekeeping after Jimmy took one of her other Ponies and lit a match to it.  Twenty-two dollars and sixty-three cents, her entire fortune.  If she didn’t spend any of it, by her birthday she should have enough to buy her first Breyer horse.  And finally, her very first tooth that came out.  She replaced the tooth under her pillow with a piece of corn.  Evidently the Tooth Fairy wasn’t all that bright.  Stacy still got a dollar.

She looked at her prized treasures and smiled.  Then she flipped the box over and dumped the entirety out on her desk.  She dug in her jacket pocket and pulled out Grandpa’s pocket watch.  Until five minutes ago it had been in Jimmy’s room displayed under a  glass dome on his dresser.  But she had snuck in while he was at baseball practice and took it.  She knew she was being naughty, she knew she was going to get into trouble, but the temptation was just too much.  When Indiana Jones’ adversary held up a pocket watch and said that if he buried it in the sand, in time it would be priceless, Stacy got the idea; if she buried Grandpa’s pocket watch in the back yard it too would become priceless.  Then in a thousand years they would all be rich!  Grandpa was surely over a thousand years old when he went to heaven, so all her family would need to do was wait.

Stacy dropped the watch into the cigar box and closed the lid.  Then, box tucked securely under her left arm, she bolted out of the house and into the backyard.  She stopped at her sandbox and picked up her shovel.  Yes, she thought briefly about burying the future relic in the sandbox, but that was too obvious.  She trotted to the very back of the lot, to where the forested greenbelt began.  She knelt down and used the small plastic shovel to dig about six inches down.  She then placed the box in the hole and covered it back up.

Just as she was tapping the last of the dirt over her buried treasure she heard her brother scream from his room, “STACY!”

“Oopsie,” she whispered.  “Caught already.”

–   –   –   –   –

This story is in response to Stephanie’s Inspiration Monday.

The Rules

There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the exact prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.

OR

No really; I need rules!

Okay; write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before 6 pm CST on the Monday following this post.

The Prompts:

FUTURE RELIC

SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

LAST WISH

UNATTENDED CHILDREN

MIDWIFE

Want to share your Inspiration Monday piece? Post it on your blog and link back to today’s post; I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post. No blog? Email your piece to me at bekindrewrite (at) yahoo (dot) com. (I do reserve the right to NOT link to a piece as stated in my Link Discretion Policy.)