Clearing the shelf

The most optimistic serum had turned the color of weak tea.

Priya Shah held the dropper bottle up to the bathroom bulb and tilted it. It had been clear when she bought it, three winters ago, at one in the morning, from an ad with a countdown timer. It had cost more than her first car payment. It lived at the far left of the shelf, which was where the most hopeful things went, and she had used it for eleven days.

It went in the trash bag.

Outdates

At work, the first week of every month, somebody walks the pharmacy with a scanner and a bin and pulls outdates: anything expired, anything expiring soon, anything opened and undated. You don't argue with the bin. You don't decide a vial is probably fine because you remember what it cost. You read the date, and the date decides.

Priya had done that walk a few hundred times. It had never once occurred to her to do it to her own bathroom.

It was the first Saturday in January, grey and quiet, and she was sitting on the bath mat with her back against the tub, a kitchen trash bag on one side and a shoebox on the other with Nisha written on the lid in marker. Nisha herself was propped against the tissue box on the back of the toilet, on video, from her kitchen, eating cereal out of the box.

"Nothing unopened goes in the bag," Nisha said. "I'm serious. I'm watching you."

"You can see the bag?"

"I can see your face when you look at the bag."

The phone was pointed straight up at Priya from below, under the bathroom bulb, which is the least flattering angle available to a human being. She noticed that the way she'd notice the weather, and didn't move it.

Descending order

She went left to right, because that was the order the shelf was in.

After the tea-colored serum came a gold-capped bottle she had bought the week after a cousin's wedding, where she'd untagged herself from six photos before the reception ended. Then an eye cream in a box three times the size of the jar. Then a vitamin serum that promised radiance on the front and, on the bottom, printed a tiny open-jar symbol with 6M inside it, meaning six months after opening. She had opened it two summers ago.

Bag. Bag. Bag.

The three shampoos were next, and she lined them up on the floor so Nisha could see. Each one promised more volume than the last, in bigger letters, at a higher price. The most expensive said VOLUME so large the rest of the words had to squeeze onto the back.

"That's a cry for help," Nisha said.

"It was a cry for help in a very nice font."

The cheapest one, with the smallest letters, was the one she'd actually been using since the summer. She kept it. The other two went in Nisha's box, because they were barely touched and Nisha had never met a free thing she didn't want.

The far end

At the far right, where optimism ran out, were the things that had done their jobs. The sunscreen, most of the way through its second tube since August. The plain cleanser and the plain moisturizer the dermatologist had named at her second visit, in the voice people use to recommend something boring on purpose. A comb.

She'd built the shelf backward without realizing it. The hopeful things on the left had been the ones she stopped using. The dull ones on the right were what she'd reached for every morning since before the Sunday photos, and they were nearly empty.

Those stayed where they were.

The box

The jade roller was last, still in its box with the plastic window. It had been a birthday present from a coworker, four years ago, and Priya had never opened it, in the same way you don't open a book about a problem you aren't ready to have.

She slid the tray out. The stone was green and heavier than she'd expected, and cold, and the little metal frame squeaked when she turned the roller with her thumb. She ran it once along her jaw, the way the diagram on the box showed.

It felt like having a cold spoon pressed against her face. It was perfectly pleasant. That was all it was.

She laughed, and Nisha said, "What," and Priya held it up to the phone.

"Oh, Kiran wants that," Nisha said, and turned her head. "Kiran. Auntie has a rolling pin made out of a rock."

A seven-year-old's face filled the screen, very close, all nostril and interest. "Can I have it?"

"It's for faces," Priya said.

"I have a face."

It went in Nisha's box.

Room

When she was done, the trash bag was heavier than she'd have guessed, and the shelf held a sunscreen, a cleanser, a moisturizer, one shampoo and a comb, with a stretch of bare white paint between them that she hadn't seen since she moved in.

Nisha had gone to break up something happening to the cereal. Priya sat for a minute with the phone face up on her knee and the call still open, looking at the ceiling of her sister's kitchen.

She had meant to put something on the shelf to fill the gap. Instead she went to the living room, cut a length of runner off the pothos on the windowsill, the one that had grown across the frame of every Sunday photo since the spring, and put it in a clean jam jar with some water. It fit on the shelf next to the comb.

That evening Nisha sent a photo without a caption. Kiran at the kitchen table, tongue out, flattening a slab of green play dough with the jade roller.

Priya saved it. Then she brushed her teeth, standing in the middle of the mirror, under the bulb, with the little jar on the shelf beside her.