A Borrower's Anthology

Change

With a penchant for shiny quarters, Michelle and Nicholas take a trip out of the walls to find a few pennies for Michelle's itch.

...

There were sweatshirts left out, and with sweatshirts meant pockets. More importantly, pocket change.

Michelle loved the tinkling noise coins made when they knocked against one another, like clean dishes against the rack. When she was little, Michelle remembered in the old house she and her family lived in, there was something the humans called a 'wind chime' that hung aside the door. Each time a gust blew past the oblong pipes, they would sing a welcome to the guests and a warning to the borrowers. It meant someone had entered the house, and whatever they were scavenging needed to be finished quickly or carefully abandoned. In that old house, the couple was gone a lot, giving Michelle free reign of the gigantic estate.

Coins held no priority on their family's list, but on her personal list, they were number two. So she was only allowed to snag them on rare occasions like these. It was why on Saturdays, when Darius and Philip took Elizabeth to her ballet recitals and practices, Michelle and Nicholas ventured to Darius' room on a special borrowing mission. Or, rather, she had ended up dragging Nicholas along the first time from fear, and each subsequent time had become more of a tradition between them. They'd set the hook and line from the wooden table down to the floor some sixty, seventy feet below and climb down. Nicholas wouldn't complain the whole way anymore when he was able to share an up-close and intimate audience with Darius' golden guitar.

So while Nicholas perused the song books he'd been memorizing and plucked lazily at the guitar's chords, Michelle hopped from hoodie to jeans finding her prized possession.

"Being out this long is giving me the willies," Nicholas muttered from the east. "Come on, Mitch--did you find any yet?"

Poking her head out from the pocket of one of Darius' sweatshirts, Michelle carefully procured two circles from inside. Clothes hung around far longer than they should have in his room, if his brother was any comparison. Pants, sweatshirts, hoodies, jackets, and other assortments of garments lay in discarded piles against his bedside or his wardrobe. Darius always seemed in a rush to go places; it was usually his steps Michelle heard thundering down the stairs--his or his sister Elizabeth. When he was gone though, no one else entered his room. And he had plenty of treasures to grab.

Michelle didn't really understand the humans' currency. With how sparse interactions between borrowers were, trading wasn't feasible or really necessary. Apparently, humans used it to buy their goods and the Henderson family's offspring loved its paper sibling. Michelle could care less about its flat value. The coins were superior-they were shiny, three-dimensional, and they made a lovely noise when they clattered. The humans couldn't tell their heads from their tails if they hadn't realized all of the potential these round little jewels of stories had to tell.

"Come on, Nick, look at them!" She laughed, taking the larger of the two to inspect. The smell of metal may have been strong in her nose, but it wasn't enough of a deterrent to part with it anytime soon like her parents insisted. "Oh, this one is different."

She'd noticed that about the biggest of the coins; all of them had different backings and engravings on them. Some resembled houses, or trees she'd never seen before, or birds she would have hated to cross in real life. She'd come across some of the same types, but the only thing constant of all of these coins--large or small, silver or brown--was the profile silhouette of a face on their front. Otherwise, she'd made it a point to collect as many of the larger silver coins as she could until her room held no more space for them. She'd had about six or seven different ones. Anytime she found a familiar back, she left it.