A box of paint stir sticks

Thin lengths of poplar roughly the size of a tongue depressor and rather less finished at the edges, the stir sticks sit loose in a cardboard box beside the register, free for the taking, prone to a splinter along one side that most customers discover only afterward, by hand. Their purpose is singular and brief: dropped into a freshly shaken can, worked in a slow circle to fold the last un-mixed pigment up from the bottom, then set down on a drop cloth or a windowsill or the edge of a step stool to dry into a stiff, colored paddle that is rarely thrown away immediately and rarely kept on purpose either. Households accumulate them in a drawer or a coffee can in the garage, dried purple next to dried white next to a green no one recalls choosing, evidence of projects otherwise unrecorded. A single stick can be reused if wiped promptly, though almost none are; the effort of cleaning a free object exceeds its replacement cost by such a margin that reuse is functionally theoretical. The box by the register restocks itself from a larger box in the back, thousands of identical sticks cut to the same specification by a supplier no one at the counter could name. Take one. Take three. No one is counting, and the box does not seem built to be counted from in the first place.

Doreen Fitch