The Tin Box

She took the stool near her mother’s cupboard and quietly climbed on. She reached the shelf where her mom kept a tin box of her old stuff. She brought the box down and took it to her room.
Lily always wanted to know what was kept in this box that her mother removed every time she was low. Lately she had seen her mom going to that box every few days and crying her heart out. Oh, how she wanted to know what was in there. Lily turned eight last month and on her birthday her mom gave her a piece of gold seahorse pendant. When her dad got to know about it he got mad. Her parents had been fighting awfully lot these days and Lily thought the answer to all of this would be in that box. Today her parents had gone to a party leaving her elder sister Mini to babysit. It was the perfect time to find out what was in that box.
She opened the tin box and found it had only four things inside. She removed the first thing that caught her eye instantly, a small devise she had never seen before. She flipped open the instrument and found a number pad and a small screen. There were three small holes above the screen and two below the numbers. She could only assume it was a phone. She turned it around and found the power button on the right side. She pressed it and a female voice with background music greeted her... “Hello Moto”. Surprised she replied; “Hello, but my name isn’t moto!”
As the phone turned on, she saw a screen she had never seen before. A series of black dots circle to form an M and then the screen only a greenish gray background and black dots forming words of images. She went to the contacts list but there were no contacts saved. She pressed the menu button and a grid appeared with small icons. She pressed on the envelope which indicated messages. There was only one message from a number whose name was not saved. She opened it.
“ if i tell you, i will never ever hurt you and that i love you, what will you say to that?”
The message didn’t make sense to her. She hit the back button. She then pressed the games icon. There was only one game. Snake. She began playing it and in a minute she was addicted to the line trying to eat the dot. After 20 minutes of playing, she moved on to the other items in the tin box. A small test tube type bottle corked at the end with a grain of rice inside. As she looked at the rice, she found her mom’s name written in red on it, which was magnified by the glass.
She moved on to the two photographs, the only two things left in the box. One was the photo of a thin boy with a charming smile, curly hair and brown eyes. In the other she found her mother with the same boy, smiling, like she had never seen her mom smile. It looked like her mom was having a hearty laugh while the boy was saying something in her ear. She saw light in her eyes and a warmth in her smile. And then she noticed the pendant. The same seahorse, small and dainty, hanging from a thin gold chain.