Have you seen it?

Her black fanny pack.

She does not realize her fanny pack is missing with her wallet, her license, and her car keys until AFTER her two children are buckled in the van and her husband is kindly asking if she’s ready to go.

She huffs up the stairs looking for her black fanny pack. She sifts through piles of clothes on the floor, and in the front closet and under the bedspread. She finds nothing. So she looks in the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room. 

She heads outside where her family is waiting to leave for the family reunion they said they wouldn’t be late to and tells her family, “it’s not anywhere” and that she, “looked everywhere.”

Her husband, holding the spare key to the van, asks if she wants him to look for the fanny pack. She avoids eye contact and says, “If I can't find it, you won’t be able to,” as she slips past him and plops into the passenger seat. 

They drive out of town in silence. 

As the car zooms down the highway, she retraces her steps and realizes the last place she had it was at the Harvest Hootenanny fundraiser event last night. 

She starts to groan. 

She tells her husband her revelation. He stares ahead to the road, and after a long silence says, "it will be okay.” She logs into her bank account to freeze their credit cards and calls the bank to tell them what happened.

They are now thirty minutes from town, too far to turn back if they are going to be on time to the family reunion they said they wouldn’t be late to, so she calls her friend, who is always helping her in a self induced crisis. Her friend says of course she will go downtown and look for the fanny pack. 

She calls the phone number on the Harvest Hootenanny website. The event organizers don’t answer because it’s Sunday, so she leaves a peppy voicemail thanking them for a fun event and if they, “just happen to find a black fanny pack, with a blue wallet and car keys (with a dozen other keys on it), it would be totally appreciated to give her a call back.” 

She remembers her boss knows the event organizers personally, so she texts her boss who emails the event organizers, who, because it’s Sunday, don't respond. 

She calls the police department to file a police report because most definitely if someone finds a wallet in a large field in the middle of town after a local fundraising event, they will return it to the address on her license— right?

The thought of her lost license makes her pause because she can’t remember if it has her current address or their rental house from five years ago, so she texts her old landlord just in case someone dropped it off at the old apartment. 

At first the landlord thinks it’s a spam message and responds, “STOP” before telling her that no one has found anything. 

The police officer calls back and asks her to explain what happened. She tells him she was at the Harvest Hootenanny eating dinner under the food tent. She tells him she was sitting in the fourth chair from the left and it started to rain so they packed up and rushed to the car and she left the fanny pack on the table and she’s sure of it because she had just taken her toddler to the potty—the green porta-potty— next to the tent and she had the fanny pack on her crossbody — she’s sure of it because she remembers clenching it against her belly as she held her toddler straight up and over the porta-potty seat so her toddler would not touch ANYTHING because you know how it is in a porta-potty. 

The police officer will pause for a moment before responding. 

He tells her to call the rec center next to the event where they have a lost and found for that area. He will tell her good luck. 

She calls the rec Center to check the lost and found. The teenager who answers the phone reluctantly agrees to look, puts her on hold, and comes back telling her bad luck.

Her friend calls her back and tells her they searched everywhere, but sorry they had no luck. 

At the family reunion, she keeps checking her bank statement, she see’s a charge for $85.35 from Amazon. She panics until she realizes the $85.35 was in fact her buying AirTags before pausing everything so this never happens again. 

She says goodbye at the family reunion and gets back in the car with her children and her husband to drive home. She slumps in her seat and says sorry again about the keys, sorry about the credit cards, and sorry about being so mean. 

When they pull into the driveway at home, she announces she is going to look everywhere again - just in case. 

She unlocks the front door and enters the house where she habitually hangs her jacket on the coat hook behind the door. She stops. There on the hook, undisturbed, is the fanny pack, which was most definitely not there before.

---

Thanks for the help

Brooke Smith

,

Karena

and

Hesam Panahi

!