Red had very few possessions; even though he lived in the stark white room, with it’s stark white walls, clean linen curtains, sterilized furniture, white pillows filled with white feathers—Red knew there were white feathers, because he had torn one apart frantically searching for a colour. The nurses had taken it away in the end. Red sighed; the disinfected room was his. But it didn’t belong to him. Red knew exactly what belonged to Red and they were in a box, a white box—he didn’t want it that way, but it was left behind in one of the other rooms he was placed in. That box held six things, that helped him remember his name. A ruddy shell, from a beach he had never been to, a comic book the color of the fire truck—he had seen that once, he vaguely remembered that fire truck, he didn’t know where it came from, but the people that marched out took him here—a rosy discarded soapbox, rubber soles and a postcard with tomatoes on them. He didn’t even know where it was from. He would wait for all the nurses to leave and take a box from under his bed, he would open it, look at all of his collection, close it and put it back again. That evening he searched, his hands reaching into the darkness and there was nothing. His cries brought the nurses, who—perplexed—said there was never a box to begin with.

AN: 249 words (I managed to fit it all in, yay!).

Based of a prompt in which I have to write about shells, comic books, soapboxes, rubber soles and postcards. I cheated a little.