Artifacts

Scruples and Sundries, Notions, and What-Nots

ARTIFACT:

An object made by a human being, typically an item of cultural or historical interest.

Anyone can collect pottery shards in the clay, even to the point of reassembling indigenous pots. Anyone can follow living people and collect what they jettison from their lives, as so much trash and detritus.

These are physical things.

I, however, collect metaphysical artifacts. Both of cultural and historical interest, but not to the person discarding them. But that doesn’t mean I’m interested in scavenging for things like lost tempers, missed opportunities, or unrequited love.

No, what I find most interesting to collect are scruples.

It’s amazing how easily such a firm life-principle is tossed out when an opportunity presents. For me, noting the droppings of one’s rock-solid principles is an epistemic exercise, revealing as honest an appraisal of the one discarding them as can be tabulated.

You are what you eat, they say. But no! You are NOT what you’ve left behind. You are a creature of attrition, not contrition.

Is honesty a scruple to live by? If convenient, unload it and walk away a dishonest opportunist. It is both sad and funny how scruples lost redefine the scrupulous on the fly. There they go, receding away from you and never looking back.

I was standing in line at the bank when I glanced down and saw someone’s scruple lying on the floor there, getting tramples by others’ feet as the line advanced toward the teller’s window. There, at the front of the line, was a man cashing his elderly father’s Social Security check.

“Do you have permission to cash this?” the teller asked him.

“Of course! See the endorsement on the back of it?”

And just like that, there evanesced away his father’s replacement dentures.

I have to eat, too, thought the man to himself. If I don’t, then how can I make sure he does, too?

On the street corner I saw a woman I know from the neighborhood spot a glimmer curbside. She reached down and retrieved what looked like an antiqued—and very largely bejeweled—engagement ring. The emerald was lage, at least several karats. It was obviously an heirloom.

“Wow!” I said to her, admiring the stone.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Someone’s going to be some upset losing this.”

“Well,” I suggested, “keep an eye out in the Lost-and-Found section of the newspaper.”

“Oh definitely,” she said.

As she walked off, I saw a scruple fall to the ground, that I later identified as I’ll look in the Lost-and-Found, but not too hard.

A week later I read, “Lost, one large engagement ring that belonged to my grandmother. Extreme sentimental value. Reward.”

“Look what I found,” I offered the woman when I saw her on her porch that day. I showed her the announcement.

“Too late,” she responded. “I already sold it. Too bad that announcement couldn’t be printed sooner. I have my new large-screen TV now that I’ve been wanting.”

“Who’d you sell it to?” I asked. “It might not be too late.”

“No, it’s too late. I don’t remember who I sold it to.”

Another scruple fell between her feet. I’d come back later to collect it, for it would fit beautifully together with the other one she had dropped at the curb .

I was in the pharmacy in line at the cashier aisle. A teenage girl was in front of me and in front of her was a blind man. He moved along using his red-tipped cane, when a twenty-dollar bill fell from his back pocket. The girl scooped it up.

“Excuse me, young lady,” I said, “I think that belongs to the man in front of you.”

“Not anymore,” she explained. “If you can’t be careful with your money, it’s losers’ weepers, idn’t it?”

“Not really,” I answered.

“There are no laws against taking what someone else throws away.”

“True.”

I slapped the bill from her hand and it fell to the floor. I stomped my foot on it to claim it. “What about now?”

“You know that was mine. I didn’t lose it. You knocked it out of my hands.”

“Think about it, please,” I urged her. “Look, I have some extra scruples in my pocket here. Would you like one?” I lifted my foot to give her a choice.

“Not if it’s not worth more than twenty dollars,” she said, retrieving the money from the floor.

“It might be priceless,” I said.

“Next,” said the pharmacist.

“C’mon, lemme check out here. The line’s gotta keep moving. People need their medicine. That man’s gone anyway. He’ll never even know he lost it.”

“But we will.”

“Well,” she said, as she picked up her prescription, which I saw was a sleeping pill. Its price was less than twenty dollars, “you can let it ruin your day if you want. I’ll be just fine.”

Maybe, I thought. “Sleep well,” I wished her.

“Huh?” she said, but didn’t wait for an answer.

I’ve observed scruples for the many years I’ve been collecting them. They’re small in size and mostly unimportant in the daily activities of living. You certainly don’t need them to sleep at night—not at first.

But lost or discarded or refused scruples seem to mature fastest when they are no longer part of the life-fabric. They held together something before they’re gone. And their absence leaves a vacuum that can haunt you until you die. And perhaps there’s a special place for you to go when you do.

No one’s immune. Now that I’ve lost a few scruples of my own, I no longer collect these artifacts. It’s way too painful, and they’re way to slippery to hold. Now I collect druthers, which isn’t really much of a stretch away from scruples, except that they fold much more easily for hiding them.

FOR SCOOTS FLASH FICTION FRIDAY, written July 4, 2025, based on the prompt, “A character who collects artifacts.”

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A way to offer a one-time tip.

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