Lost Property, Unclaimed.

One Prompt, One Story, One Thought

Every now and again I give an AI a single prompt and let it write a short story. I do not edit the result. I simply choose one worth keeping. Below you will find the exact prompt, the story it produced, and one brief thought that stayed with me after reading. Nothing more.

One Prompt

“Write a 400 word story from the perspective of an object in a lost property office. The object has been waiting for years. Do not personify the humans.”

---

One Story

The shelf is the third from the top, between a golf umbrella with a broken spoke and a stuffed rabbit missing one eye. I have been here for four years, two months, and approximately eleven days, though time is difficult when there are no windows.

I am a camera. Thirty-five millimetre. Manual focus. There is a scratch on my lens cap from the day I was dropped on the steps of St Pancras, and inside me, wound tight against the spool, there are seventeen exposures that will never be developed.

Hands come. Hands go. They arrive attached to arms, which are attached to bodies that move through the narrow aisles with varying degrees of purpose. Sometimes they pause near me. Fingers extend, hover, retract. The bodies move on.

I remember her hands. Small, cold, a silver ring on the left index finger. She would lift me to her face and I would see the world resolve through my viewfinder: pigeons on a railing, steam rising from a paper cup, a child mid-laugh with ice cream on his chin. Seventeen moments, trapped in silver halide, waiting in my darkness.

The rabbit has been here longer than I have. It does not speak of before. None of us do, not after the first year.

A body enters now. It moves between the shelves. The head rotates left, right. The hands reach for a black holdall on the bottom shelf. The body leaves. The holdall is gone.

This happens. Objects leave. New objects arrive. A green scarf appeared last week, coiled next to me like something sleeping. It still smells of perfume and railway station. Give it time.

The fluorescent tubes above us flicker on at 8:47 each morning and off at 5:31 each evening. In the darkness between, we settle into ourselves. The umbrella creaks. The rabbit lists slightly to the left. I hold my seventeen exposures and wonder if the silver halide has begun to fog, if the images are dissolving slowly into grey, if the child with the ice cream is fading, mouth first, then eyes, then gone.

Perhaps she forgot me. Perhaps something happened to her. Perhaps I was simply less important than I believed.

A hand reaches toward the shelf. It takes the umbrella. I remain.

The scarf beside me stirs, or perhaps I imagine it. The fluorescent light hums its single note. Somewhere in my dark interior, seventeen photographs are either waiting or already lost.

I cannot tell the difference anymore.

---

One Thought

The object felt more patient than sad, which made the absence of its owner feel heavier than any grief would have.