Object #5

Brown and Green Ashtray, McMaster Canada, model 93.

Edward

At least they let him keep the ashtray. He’d worked at the firm for the last fourteen years, hacking away at endless contract disputes and minor clerical. He’d taking up smoking the third year in, the year of his promotion from clerk to real office. That’s when they’d given him the ashtray. He liked the way the cigars filled the room with haze, let him play at hardboiled detective, digging through files. They stopped letting people smoke in offices shortly after he was laid off. He suspected this was why he was allowed to keep it.