Things You Find in the Junk Drawer

A census, ranked by inevitability. Yours has these. Go look.

Entries
10
Category
Stuff
Updated
  1. A toothpick-sized screwdriver beside a pair of sunglasses missing one arm, on a white tile floor.

    10. A Tiny Eyeglass Screwdriver

    From a pharmacy repair kit, the size of a toothpick, with a spinning cap on top. It fixes a pair of sunglasses exactly once, after which the screw drops onto the kitchen floor and is never seen again.

  2. A small stack of faded paper coupons with dotted-line borders, curled at the edges, the printing blurred into shapes.

    09. Expired Coupons

    Two dollars off an oil change, a free appetizer with an entree, a pizza two-for-one. All expired. Kept because they were money, technically, and throwing out money feels wrong even after it threw itself out.

  3. A small yellow tape measure with a few inches of blade extended and curled, sitting on a drawer edge.

    08. A Tape Measure

    The small free one, with a lock that doesn't lock. It reaches exactly as far as the couch and then snaps back toward your fingers at speed. You use it to check if something fits, then buy it anyway.

  4. Silver paper clips scattered in a drawer, one unbent into a long wire with a hooked end.

    07. Paper Clips

    Fifteen of them, a few bent into abstract sculptures during phone calls. Nobody in the house has clipped papers together this decade. They're kept for resetting routers and ejecting SIM trays, a respectable second career.

  5. A coiled white cable ending in an odd, unfamiliar connector, lying alone on a drawer bottom like a question mark.

    06. A Charging Cable for Something

    A cable with a connector nobody in the house can identify. It belonged to a camera, or a speaker, or a phone from two eras ago. It stays, because the minute it's gone the device will turn up in a box, dead.

  6. A translucent plastic lighter with a sliver of fuel left inside, a few sparks jumping from it in a dark kitchen.

    05. A Lighter With One Flame Left

    A plastic lighter that sparks eight times for every flame. It is kept for birthday cakes and power outages, and it will deliver for exactly one of them.

  7. A bundle of disposable wooden chopsticks still in plain paper sleeves, held together by gravity in a drawer.

    04. Takeout Chopsticks

    Still joined, still in their paper sleeves. You eat with a fork at home, so they pile up like tree rings. One gets used every few years to stir paint, and it does a great job.

  8. Three small L-shaped hex keys of different sizes fanned out on a wooden drawer bottom.

    03. Allen Wrenches

    Three of them, different sizes, from furniture you assembled on the living-room floor. The furniture is fine. The wrenches are waiting for the day a bookshelf wobbles, which it will, and you'll use a butter knife.

  9. A black permanent marker with its cap missing, lying across a cardboard flap, a dried-out tip pointing at the viewer.

    02. A Sharpie

    Sanford · 1964

    Sanford launched it in 1964 as the first pen-style permanent marker, and one has lived in every junk drawer since. The cap is somewhere else. It still writes, faintly, enough for one moving box, which is all anyone asks.

  10. A loose pile of small clear soy sauce packets, some darker than others, filling the corner of a drawer.

    01. Soy Sauce Packets

    They arrive two at a time with every order and never leave. A dozen at minimum, some old enough that the sauce has separated into something darker. Nobody has ever reached for one on purpose. They are the drawer's bedrock.

Honorable mentions

  • A folded green banknote tucked in the back corner of a cluttered drawer, glowing slightly in a beam of light.

    A Folded Twenty

    In the very back, left by past you as a gift. It is the only thing in the drawer that has gained value. You will spend it on takeout and get more soy sauce packets.

Dishonorable mentions

  • A single amber cough drop furred with lint and stuck to a curled blank receipt.

    A Cough Drop With Lint on It

    One loose cough drop, unwrapped at some point, now furred in drawer lint and stuck to a receipt. It still smells like menthol. Nobody is that sick.

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