master list of love lost objects

by Darci Schummer

NOFX CD: 1998

You picked me up at the fucking mall. I was 17. I wore a bodycon dress with lace overlay and heels. On my lunch break, we ate gray moo goo gai pan from a Styrofoam container, then you lurked around Hot Topic as I straightened clothes and showed posers belly rings. You gave me your phone number before leaving, my hometown a stop on your way back to Minneapolis.

You were 24. You charmed my mother by playing Monopoly with us, and my parents never asked your age. You took me to my first punk show—The Vandals & The Aquabats—put me on the guest list since you were in a band, then flirted with girls my age in front of me. Still, I jumped into your arms after, ground myself against your soft stomach, shoved my tongue in your mouth like my life depended on it. I drove the 90 miles home, terrified I would get lost, terrified I would miss my exit.

A couple months later, you ghosted me. “Fuck Goat Boy,” my friends said, using their secret nickname for you. Scouring the internet, I found an interview in which your bandmates joked about you loitering around local high schools. “Man, fuck Goat Boy,” I said to my friends.

I left a last message on your landline: Do you have my NOFX So Long and Thanks for All the Shoes cd?

I am sure I paused then. I am sure I left dead air on the recording, my breath held, waiting.

Avail T-Shirt: 2001

You picked me up at the House of Rock. I was newly 21. Your indie band was playing a show in my hometown. The music was forgettable, but I nodded along and swayed anyway. Afterall, you had been voted one of Minneapolis’s best new bands that year. You were a big deal in your Canadian tuxedo, and by proxy, I was a big deal in my flame print dress, my red glitter heels.

I drank too many pints at the show, so you loaded me into your old blue truck, insisted I sit in the middle seat, and drove us to my apartment.

“Band dudes are the best, sweet pea,” you said. You were 25, which seemed sophisticated, wise.

A month later, I visited you in Minneapolis. We listened to the Descendents, fucked on clean, yellow sheets. You said you loved me, which we both knew was a lie. You cancelled your next visit, left a rambling apology on my answering machine asking me to call back.

I called and called. You never answered. You never called back.

Finally, I resorted to USPS, mailing the Charles Bukowski book you had lent me (of course you only read Bukowski) and a request: If you have my Avail tour t-shirt, can you send it back to me?

Years later, after I moved to Minneapolis, I saw you at a show. You trailed me like a hungry puppy. You stared at me from across the room.

Tear It Up T-shirt: 2003

You didn’t pick me up, and you weren’t in a band. We met while working at the mall, and four years later, you asked me out. I was 23. We had been together awhile when we went to your friend’s cabin. It was winter; Wisconsin wore white like a wedding gown.

You overslept in a top bunk with your pitbull. I milled around the cabin, never completely comfortable with your friends. I didn’t clean my skin for days, only applied more makeup to hide my face.

We drank can after can of cheap beer, cooked terrible food in cast iron pans, crashed local dives. But on a hike in the Chequamegon National Forest, I touched a frozen waterfall. You drank from a clear, cold stream. We interlocked our freezing fingers.

When the weekend ended, I couldn’t find my beloved Tear It Up t-shirt. I scoured the cabin; we searched your Chevy Blazer. It had disappeared.

Years later, you died, leaving your wealth behind—guitars, ephemera, guns, clothes, cars. Your father found and developed an abandoned roll of film. He sent me the pictures with a note. I think these are yours, it said.

I scrolled through them. I saw the Blazer, the dog, your blue jeans draped over the back of my chair. I saw myself through your camera’s eye, felt again that acute density between us, and I catalogued everything that had vanished with you.

Photo of Darci Schummer

BIO: Darci Schummer is the author of Six Months in the Midwest (Unsolicited Press), The Ballad of Two Sisters (Unsolicited Press), The Book of Orion (Bottlecap Press), and the forthcoming story collection Keystone Species (Unsolicited Press 2027). Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, Folio, Jet Fuel Review, MAYDAY, Matchbook, Necessary Fiction, Sundog Lit, and Pithead Chapel, among other places. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and Best of the Net. In 2023, she was the artist-in-residence at the LaPointe Center for the Arts in LaPointe, Wisconsin, on Madeline Island. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and the Creative Writing Director at Colorado State University Pueblo, where she also curates the Southern Colorado Reading Series.