Lip Salve

The tin of lip salve in the picture has sat there by the crossing for a few days now.

How did it get there? That’s the sort of question we like to ask on Inspiration Thursday.

The most likely explanation is that someone dropped it, then someone else found it and placed it on the box so that the owner might see it and retrieve it.

Of course, it could be a spy sending a signal to another spy, or an advanced monitoring device placed there by aliens. That could make for an exciting story, I suppose, but I don’t think that’s as interesting as thinking about what’s really going on here.

The crossing is just outside a local shop. I go there four or five times a week to buy bread and milk and so on, and I imagine that the owner of the lip salve does the same. They must have seen it by now, so why haven’t they taken it back?

Examining motives always makes for a better story. Why would they take it back? It’s lip salve. It’s been sitting out in the bad weather. Kids might have done something to it. Would you want to put suspect salve on your lips? Really, if the owner has seen the tin, they should have taken it and thrown it in the bin.

And what about the person who put it there? What did they expect to happen? Did they think through their actions? Did they believe they were doing someone a good turn, or were they just going through the motions, like in the bag of food waste? If they really wanted to be helpful they should have thrown the lip salve in the nearby bin. Or maybe they couldn’t be bothered to walk that far.

Or perhaps I’m just overthinking it. It was just a helpful act. Whatever, it’s the sort of thing to think about when writing a story.