The orange plastic box lives in a pencil case, a blue roll made of twill weave and pearl cotton, held together by a top zipper fraying at the seams, edges creased and covered in lint. The box hides under empty, leadless mechanical pencils, dried out ballpoint pens and one rollerball pen, a highlighter with a more grey than yellow felt tip, an eight gigabyte USB stick containing school documents from before the days of Google Drive. It once was a bright orange, smooth and slick slide-to-open sort of box, without ink stains and dark blemishes from years of who-knows-what. Now it slides open with the exact normal force applied while holding the edges of the boxes just gently enough so it can slide, just tightly enough so it doesn't go flying. The inner container jolts, a movement of stutters, rattling the paperclips inside.

Once, there were a full thirty paperclips, metal wiry ornaments too small to properly hold together a stack of papers. Now a few remain, cluttered together, in the dark of a zippered and worn pencil case, and even though they are no ordinary paper clips—they are horse-shaped paper clips with folded tails and triangular ears so horn-like one could mistake the horse for a unicorn and thin legs rounded at the bottom with hooves—time suspends them in purgatory, where objects no one uses nor throws away go.

Most of the paperclips had disappeared in attempts to force them to execute their functional purpose. But essays and portfolios and exam papers returned with staples, the original horses decorating the corner of the packets abandoned in the void where missing (or stolen) Morning Glory pencils go, so the paperclips retired from functional stationary society. Only one vanished paperclip's fate is truly known: a boy had stolen one clip from the box, unwound the metal wire into a 'Y' shape and tied a cut rubber band to the fork, a makeshift slingshot for taunting the girl he liked. The slingshot had failed, the paperclip's metal too thin and soft to hold up against the aggressive transformation of elastic energy to kinetic energy. The metal, a horse turned inside-out, whose face and body and legs and tail had been straightened and bent into lines as best as a tiny child's hand could, could not be bent back into a horse, and, in the trash can of torn post-it notes and snapped pen caps, what was once useless and pretty and indispensable became disposable.