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It looked like a shell, half buried, but as she dug through the sand around its edges, she found it was something completely different, something she’d never seen before and thought only existed in stories. She had to be imagining - it simply couldn’t be a floppy disk.
Not that Miranda, at the tender age of thirteen, even knew the term “floppy disk”. Her first thought was that it might be a 3D-printed sculpture of the “Save” icon on her word processor. But Phoebe, knowledgeable, cultured Phoebe, rolled her eyes and explained.
“It’s a storage device from like 1980-something,” said Phoebe as waves crashed behind her. “Kind of like a USB stick.”
“But what’s a USB stick?” asked Miranda. Miranda blushed as she looked into Phoebe’s eyes for something other than annoyance.
“Back when phones and the internet were dogshit, you could use these devices to move stuff from one computer to another,” Phoebe said. But her dry voice turned more fluffy and gentle as she continued. “I only know this ‘cause my mom told me. It’s kind of useless these days if I’m being honest. We aren’t archaeologists, right?”
Phoebe smiled at Miranda and noticed Miranda’s slow exhale, her reddened cheeks, her upper teeth upon her lower lip. Was ignorance of floppy disks Miranda’s only source of embarrassment?
“What if we were archaeologists?” asked Miranda. “What treasures would we discover together?”
She breathed in the mixture of fresh sea air and Phoebe’s sweet perfume, while admiring the sunset atop Phoebe’s red, lustrous hair.
“Let’s find out,” Phoebe said. She took Miranda’s hand and they ran across the beach together, back to Phoebe’s house on the shore. Miranda had no idea what would happen next, but if it was with Phoebe, did it really matter?
That said, it was a bit of a disappointment that they spent their evening trying to actually read their antique device. After hours of plugging in the wrong cables into a decrepit beige box, the girls were finally able to view the PARTY.JPEG older than the two of them combined.
“Yeah we should definitely party after - OH FUCK!” Phoebe said.
The decades-old image was of Phoebe’s mom, grinning in the nude with three male companions.
The bolded sentences are from the “Complete the Story” writing prompt book. I tried combining those sentences with Joy of Writing’s prompt, “Embarrassed”.