Ripples 6 by KimB

[Editor's Note: Ripples is a serial story.
The author makes no guarantees as to completing the serial.
Publication dates are located in the left side menu.]

06 Peppers and Pins

From a drawer, she retrieved a small plastic container and lid.

The kind you get at fast food places for holding hot peppers or dressings. Once washed, they become useful for holding the miscellany that seem to accumulate in every drawer: odd coins, paper clips, brads and push pins. Packaged with cork boards, now long discarded, the colorful pins never seem to get thrown away. Lingering on in drawers; loose pins waiting for an unwary finger.

Carefully, she placed the tiny black and red item in the container and snapped the lid on. She placed it next to the phone.

Now she had two items to consider.

She frowned to herself for a moment then returned her attention to the phone.

Big dogs first, she thought.

With the protective cover removed, she could see more details. Faint engravings. A logo. A manufacture's name. Stenciled patterns. On one edge, neatly hidden in the stenciled stippling, some barely discernible text.

Through a scratched magnifying glass, retrieved from the drawer while avoiding some colored pins that had escaped their repurposed container (the lid having popped off), she peered closely at the minuscule text.

She could see:

A name followed by a mixture of numbers and letters.