A cigarette case made of silver with an engraving of Christ crucified on the inside. His wounds smell like tobacco.

It was a gift to my grandfather from one of his Jazz friends, a man named Paul who said, “Everything is permitted.” They always teased him about his days as a Catholic Priest. He gave up the cloth when he was twenty-nine, took up smoking and playing the piano. His father had played the organ.

He never talked about it much back then, but on Sunday mornings he could always be found at Cafe Martin, across the street from St. Mary’s Cathedral. He’d sit on the patio smoking and drinking his coffee, and he’d listen to the new priest sing the mass in Latin and to the sound of his father’s old instrument wheezing from the Cathedral’s open door. He’d sip his drink and watch the thin little wisp of white rise from the end of his coffin nail and he’d think of incense and the Holy Ghost. Occasionally, he’d look at the engraving and remember when people called him Father. Sometimes they still did, leaving the church after mass.

“Good morning, Father,” one might call to him and he’d snap the cigarette case closed and wave, smoke drifting from between his delicate fingers.

Later, he moved to the country, where there were no cathedrals. He got married and had kids. Later yet, once he’d become a grandfather, he started attending mass again. He died of lung cancer a few years after that, his sins, presumably, absolved.

A platinum pocket watch with a broken chain. The glass was cracked once, but has since been replaced. Its tick is exceptionally loud.

My great Uncle bought it to keep track of time during his walks in the Bell Woods. Before he had it, he would sometimes stroll until the sun had set and then he’d have to find his way home in the dark. He’d arrive at his parents’ house, muddy and scratched up but alive.

During the spring and the summer, he’d walk every day in the late afternoon. The ticking of the watch would be drowned out by the chatter of bugs, the weeping of the cicada in late summer, the grasshopper’s fiddle, and the cricket’s chirp in the evenings when it was time to go home. The minutes were counted out by the clicking and the whining of the insects.

In autumn, he’d pick mushrooms and listen to the crunch of dead leaves. The year he died, he found a spot where deer gathered to drink water. He’d watch them and measure out the moments of those golden afternoons by the sound of their hooves as they hopped around the stream.

Then winter came. Everything went to sleep, and any sounds left over were consumed by the layers of indifferent snow which fell over the woods. Still he walked and listened, now to the sharp ticking of his pocket watch, each tick cutting another second into the cold, empty air.

They found his body near the stream where the deer would congregate in the previous season. He was torn apart by a bear, awakened early from hibernation, hungry. I think about him in that clearing, seeing the shaggy beast emerge from the snow-covered trees. I think about the silence between each tick of his watch, as that gentle man met eyes with hungry death.

The bear was shot a week later, by my grandfather. The watch still keeps time.

A gold fountain pen with Lapis Lazuli inlay. The initials A.B. are etched at the base.

It was a gift to my Aunt from her parents for graduating medical school. Her initials were A. R. At first her parents were ashamed about the mistake with the initials, but my aunt didn’t mind. Years later they would joke that she should just marry someone with a last name that started with B, but she would never marry.

She was a heart surgeon. My grandparents were proud, but they would admit that they could never really understand the life my aunt chose for herself. She had always been odd. Perhaps that was why it took so long for people to notice something was wrong.

She treasured the pen, using it rarely, and then only to write love letters - if they could really be called such. They were violent blurbs, grotesque at times, scribbled by that lovely pen on loose bits of paper, half of which, I’m sure, were thrown away immediately. She signed every one A. B.

She would write about a lover on the table, how she would cut open his chest and break his ribs to get at his heart. She wrote about the heat of the muscle in her fingers, the emotions pumping through his arteries.

One pictures her late at night, after surgery, doing paper work. She reaches for the pen, dips it in an ink well, but not before dipping it into the well of her own heart, then scratches those violent, desperate little words into the margins of her papers, her life. Soon those margins would grow.

She broke down during an operation, in the end, nearly costing a seventy-year-old man his life. She quit medicine after that, moved back in with her parents. She took care of them when they got older. After they died, I heard she took up writing. I don’t know if she still used the pen then. She never showed anybody what she wrote and always burned the papers afterwards.

She died alone. Only a few scraps of her writing from before her breakdown remain, faded, almost entirely illegible.