Ramona’s Purse (Short Story)

Originally published September 9, 2025

Hi! I wrote a story! Please bear with me because it’s been quite a long, long time since I’ve sat down and attempted to write creatively. What started as an ode to my friends quickly changed into a story about a girl and what her bag means to her. I kept one of the five girls I was writing about, kept her gambling love and her big red bag (hi Moni, if you’re reading this), and changed the rest. Other than her big red bag and her love for gambling, it’s not based on anything or anyone at all, just the lil ideas from my brain! As an avid lover of “what’s in my bag” videos, the contents of a woman’s purse have always held meaning to me, and I found myself writing about that. I hope that you like it. really hope you enjoy.

Ramona is a gambler. She carries a deck of cards in her big red purse, none of which originally belonged to the same deck. She has a Pikachu king of diamonds and a Despicable Me ace of spades. One of her jokers is the Joker from Batman. She trades cards at casino tables when no one is looking and switches them around at poker nights with her boyfriend and his friends. One of her favorites was a Queen of Hearts queen of hearts, which she happened to find on the doormat outside her apartment. That night, she sat down on her beaten down leather couch with a bowl of popcorn and sherpa blanket and watched Alice in Wonderland for the first time in quite a long time, the favorite movie of a friend who passed away long before that day. Ramona also carries four of the same lip balm, but three different lip glosses. She wears the same lip balm her mother wore, a cherry flavoured tube she buys at the drug store every time she finds herself there. She has even more in her vanity drawer, endlessly worried for the day it gets discontinued, as almost everything does, and anxiously afraid she'll eventually run out. She also carries a tiny, tiny, green moleskin notebook covered in stickers and paint smears. Its pages are covered with drawings, ideas, poems, and ink stains- ink stains that match the ones her blue and black pens from various waitresses leave at the bottom of her purse. She keeps one of these notebooks in her purse, but she has a dozen more of the exact same one in her bedroom. She keeps her collection in a ribbon-covered hatbox she found at an estate sale. She first picked out this specific notebook when she was 10 years and zero days old. Every year, as part of her birthday gift, her father took his creative little girl to the craft store and let her pick out two things. For her 10th birthday, she picked out the tiny, tiny, moleskin green notebook. Her father wondered, if of all the sketchbooks and notebooks in the store, why she would want the smallest of them. Ramona’s answer was simple: this size, she can fit in her coat pocket. Ramona continued to pick out the same notebook for every year afterwards. After the third year, her father began to discount it as a gift, and she could pick out three things. She still does. Ramona was a young teenager then, after all, and her father was lovingly able to provide for her more for her than he could before. That birthday, they finally got to move to an apartment where Ramona didn’t have the only bedroom, her father left to willingly sleep on the couch. In the 365 days that followed, every year, Ramona would write down her every thought. She wrote poems about her mother and her goldfish named Bubbles. She wrote about the neighborhood cat called Goober and the crazy old lady called Candi that lived next door, who wasn’t really so crazy. She wrote down lists of her favorite movies and books and activities she wanted to do with her father. She drew endlessly, sketching the clouds she saw when she opened her blinds and the people she saw at church on Sunday. She scribbled the names of the boys she loved and the girls she loved. It was her life on paper. She did so every year until she filled it up, and then on her birthday, her father would buy her a new one, and she would start the process over again. Thrown next to her tiny, tiny, green moleskin notebook is a pair of oversized, tortoiseshell sunglasses she’d had since age 15- the first thing she bought at Lucky’s, with a plain black case for them she borrowed from her father when she lost her magenta one. She borrowed it years ago now, with no sign of ever giving it back, but her father never minded. It’s since been covered with vintage stamps found at her very last trip to Lucky’s, years ago. Lucky’s was an antique mall that she frequented often with her friends in high school. She hasn’t seen the inside of those walls in quite a long time. Ramona hasn’t seen her friends in quite a long time. She keeps a picture of them, the four of them, folded into a square in her tangerine wallet. Duct-taped together like it was in her youth, her tangerine wallet is overflowing with business cards from art galleries, movie tickets from matinee Sundays, fortunes from various Chinese restaurants, lucky pennies from train station sidewalks, and library cards from every county she’s ever lived in. Ramona carries two pictures everywhere she goes: the first, of course, being the film strip of her friends in her tangerine wallet. In the top picture, they’re smiling- Ramona and Jane at each other, Lolo and Stevie at the camera. In the middle picture, Lolo and Ramona are making peace signs with their fingers while Stevie and Jane make a heart together. In the bottom picture, the four best friends stare straight into the camera, as serious as possible, yet each of them have a hint of a smirk hiding in their stature. Serious was never really possible with those four. The strip was five, maybe six years old, and it has never left Ramona’s duct-taped, tangerine wallet. Ramona, Stevie, Jane, and Lolo took these photos in high school, sitting in the booth at Lucky’s while they waited for Lolo’s brother to pick them up one sunny Tuesday. It was the same Tuesday that both the cast would be announced for the fall musical ( Jane didn’t get the role she wanted) and the starting lineup for the soccer team would drop (Stevie made it, again). They jumped on the train to Lucky’s right after the final bell rang. In retrospect, it was the most formative day of young Ramona’s life. Jane didn’t have a passion for the stage, but she did, however, find a passion for the backstage during that fall. She spent endless night drawing and sewing and crafting, designing the costumes that would go on to win the Young Stage Performer's Award in Best Costume Design. It was the only award that their musical had won during the musical theater award ceremony for state high school students. Jane lived the closest to Lucky’s, and after their antique adventure that Tuesday, she was dropped off first. Stevie had a passion for soccer. It would eventually fizzle out after college, as most athletic dreams have the displeasure of doing, but before then, she was a star. The best forward from the first day, Stevie’s talent and hunger drove her to her pick of undergrad schools and scholarships. She just had to have chosen the school farthest from the girls, but eventually, Stevie would find her way back to their hometown city. There, the only remaining connection she had to the field were the Saturdays she spent coaching her niece’s team, where every kid got a medal at the end of the season, no matter the outcome. She was dropped off second, only a few streets south of Jane’s house. Lolo and her brother dropped off Ramona last, and Ramona doesn’t know what they discussed on the rest of their car ride home. If she had to guess, she would say it probably had something to do with their band. Wonderland was their favorite thing to discuss. Beautiful Lolo with a rockstar voice, she wrote the lyrics to the songs Johnny wrote the chords too. Once a month they, along with their neighbors, a pair of twins in Johnny’s grade, played at a local outdoor restaurant, where Ramona, Jane, and Stevie would share bottomless french fries as Lolo sang and Johnny played the guitar. Ramona would often catch Lolo always looking back at Dylan and his drums, while Danny was in his own world on the bass. Ramona imagines that they were kicking around song ideas or planning out their next rehearsal on their way home that day, but Ramona could never really know what they talked about. Lola and Johnny never made it home. It was the most formative day of the girls’ young lives, the last day of Lolo and Johnny’s. The second picture Ramona carries in her purse lives inside whatever book she’s reading on the 50 minute train ride to work. At the moment, it’s sitting on page 178 of a collection of essays, written by different women across the world. It was recommended to her by her boyfriend, who says he borrowed the copy from his younger sister, a quiet girl closer to Ramona’s age than he is. Ramona knew this wasn’t true; she knew every nook and cranny of his sister’s one bedroom apartment and had never seen this book before. Ramona was at his sister’s apartment quite often, much more than he would ever be aware of. There were a lot of things Ramona’s boyfriend wasn’t aware of, like what really happened when she went to Savannah last summer or how close she really is with his sister. But it didn’t weigh much on her conscience, as Ramona suspected there was much she wasn’t aware of, either. On page 178 of the collection of essays lies a photo taken by her father, of a 21 year old Linabel Ramona Ortiz. In the photo, Linabel was seven months pregnant, with a little Ramona growing inside her. When Ramona was seven years old and found the photo while snooping in her father’s closet, she kept it. It was the only remnant she had of a mother that she would never know. Taken in their small, perfect, cramped, beautiful, messy, love-filled one bedroom apartment, Linabel smiled up past the camera. She was looking at Ramona’s father, a 20 year old Rafael Domingo Ortiz, after a quiet, unassuming doctor’s visit. When Ramona was a young girl, she often asked her father what was happening in the photo, Rafael typically too heartbroken to tell tales of their old life. But sometimes, he would talk about how he had just finished braiding Linabel’s long black hair, learning how for when their little girl was born. Ramona found that he would only share the memories of that photo when he was braiding Ramona’s hair, so she frequently found herself sitting in school classes with two long braids, matching the memory of a mother whose photo she was in, but would never remember. Linabel died from complications with childbirth when she was 22. The big red purse that held all these items closest to Ramona’s heart belonged to beautiful Lolo with the rockstar voice. She forgot it in Ramona’s shopping bag on that Tuesday trip to Lucky’s, the last time any of the four girls would go. When she found the bag, Jane, Ramona, and Stevie took it as a sign that it was an angelic gift from their dearest friend and closest sister. It’s the only purse she owns. It doesn’t quite match the red of the sweater Jane made her for her 18th birthday, but it was close enough. She wore them both when she and Jane flew to see Stevie play soccer at her faraway university- as far as she could get from the haunting life that she used to live in this city with her first love and his sister, her sweet, sweet friend. It was the last time she ever saw either of them. With Jane throwing herself into creative projects and Stevie channeling her anger into scoring goals, Ramona was left to her solace. She was no stranger to the experience of mourning and grief, never getting the chance to know her mother and her father suffering a fate quite as shattering. But for the first time, Ramona had to experience mourning and grief firsthand. This time, she didn’t grieve the idea of a mother or grow up watching someone mourn the love of their life; she was grieving a girl and a boy that she grew up with and loved endlessly. With Lolo gone, and Jane and Stevie just as unreachable, Ramona was reserved to care for them through the film strip folded into her duct-taped, tangerine wallet. It’s tucked behind her still-vertical driver’s license, which she only used to get into casinos, since she doesn’t have a car. She tries to get in cars as infrequently as she can. That’s why she carries a book of word searches, cross word puzzles, and sudoku games. She loves word searches the most, and she does at least one of the three brain games every morning on the 50 minute train ride to work. Usually, when she finishes her word search or cross word puzzle or sudoku game, she pulls out her book and reads a chapter or two. After that, she tends to catch a creative bug or remember what she needed to add to her grocery list, and she reaches for her tiny, tiny, green moleskin book. When reaching for her tiny, tiny, moleskin book, she sometimes grabbed her contact book or her harmonica instead. The polka-dotted contact book was filled with the numbers of the guys she would never call: guys she meets at bars, clubs, casinos, and coffee shops. She would have them write their information down in her book, and never look at it again. She found it was a much safer practice than saying no thank you, and much easier than giving them her number or having them put it directly into her phone. Sometimes when she pulls out this book, she finds herself in the mental dilemma of wishing she put her boyfriend’s number in the contact book instead of her phone, but then again, she never would have met his sister if that’s what she did. When the train car is empty, or when she’s walking along through the park to get to work, she’ll pull out her harmonica purposefully and fiddle with a tune. It’s almost always Billy Joel, and it’s engraved with her name on it. It was a Secret Santa gift from a work Christmas party some years back, when she first started, given to her by a coworker she had never connected with before. Now, they go out and take smoke breaks together with a third coworker, who Ramona gave a custom lighter to that party as their Secret Santa gift. More than a reminder of a fun work party or her only work friends, Ramona carries her harmonica in case she’s ever out and about and hears the opening notes of “Piano Man,” which happens more often than one would think. It makes her a favorite at parties and karaoke nights. That and, of course, her camera. A small little nikon lives inside Ramona’s big red purse. It’s the same Nikon that her father was using when he took the picture of her mother that she keeps inside her books. On it’s memory card live pictures of her father at his domino games, her old goldfish circling his tank, her old friends singing in the car, her boyfriend’s sister laying in her bed, the barista that hands her a cup of coffee every morning, the woman at the thrift store who helped her choose between the brown skirt or the creme boots. Everyone she meets at the casino, whoever wins at her boyfriend Friday night poker games. It seems as though all the people in Ramona’s city exist in her small little Nikon. If not in her small little Nikon, they exist in a drawing taped together in her tiny, tiny, green moleskin notebook. For some, being Jane, Lolo, and Stevie, they exist in her wallet. For her mother, she exists in her books. For her father, he exists in everything Ramona has, and everything Ramona is. For Ramona’s boyfriend’s sister, she exists in the handful of love letters written on sticky notes that are buried deep, deep, deep in the the bottom of Ramona’s big red purse. Deep within Ramona’s big red purse lives everyone she has ever had the pleasure of loving. In her big red purse exists the memories of people and places she would never see again. In her big red purse, Ramona carries the contents of her love and her life, everything she could ever need. If you were to wonder what’s most important to Ramona, just look inside her purse.

With love, Willianny