o.

Shortly after we moved into the house, Josh spent an afternoon raking the back yard (remember - all trees, no grass). I don't know why he did this, as it didn't seem to accomplish much, but he was very proud of the act. Doing this, he unearthed various bits and pieces of the previous owners' lives. A bottle cap here, a mangled bird feeder there. It was like the arrowheads that some kid in your second grade class had found out near the creek, except not at all exotic. Apparently, us humans are just not capable of not leaving our crap all over the place.

Once we got the dog, even more of this stuff started cropping up. Maybe this went back two or three owners, because it had been too deep to be uncovered in a cursory raking. No, it needed paws. Paws that used to be white but were now kinda orange, thanks to that red dirt we have around here. We'd catch her chewing on something mysterious and have to take it away before she broke her teeth on it.

Some of this stuff was more of the same - plastic bags, broken glass, disposables that hadn't been properly disposed of. And then she started coming up with odd metal things. They look like parts from some kind of mechanical monster. I only engineer non-tangible things, so I have no idea what it could have been. Probably a time machine. I started collecting the more interesting items as a sort of art piece: Remix Archaeology.

I noticed that you could use the "artifacts" to spell out words, specifically the name of Josh's band. I thought it might make a neat picture for their website, but we needed an 'O'. We had one already, and we could just use that one again with a little photo-editing, but I felt that it would be truer to the spirit of Remix Archaeology if we could have a different object. I don't know why, but considering that sculptures consisting of crap my dog dug out of the yard is a relatively new art form, I figure I can make it go however I want.

A couple of weeks ago, Josh mentioned that Remix had found another 'O.' How thrilling! I asked what it was, and he sort of shrugged. Well, that makes sense. It's not like I could tell what any of the other pieces used to be anyway. At home, we were on the back porch, enjoying the ridiculously mild weather. I asked about the new artifact. He went inside to get it, saying that it was small and he hadn't wanted to lose it. He came back and put it in line with the rest of the letters. It was tiny compared to the other letters, and I felt bad that I would have to tell him this piece would not be acceptable for my purposes. It was also very shiny.

O.

I picked it up, and it was on my finger before I had a chance to turn around and see him kneeling before me.