Word Count: 585
It was just out of reach, the stone that would be my salvation. I had two very similar to it at home but I needed a third. Two were sufficient to get me just about any guy I wanted; three would get me the man I let slip away.
I’m a great believer in symbols and good luck and bad. I believe I have an ear for the parallel universe where the path not taken, the fork at the road, the decisions we all make every day can play themselves out. It’s a gift from my older brother, though he didn’t realize what he did at the time. We were fighting over the last handful of Legos and he swatted me away so hard I fell down. Since then, as my mother confirmed, I learned a new way of seeing things. The impact of choices. She said I should simply have gotten up and walked away. While he still would have ended up with the building blocks, I wouldn’t have this gift of seeing the future more clearly had I not banged my head.
It wasn’t always easy to see the future, as a matter of fact, I don’t see it until after a selection has been made. No, it’s not the most helpful, but it does let me go back and make changes if it’s obvious I’ve made the wrong one. With letting go of Adam, I immediately knew I’d made the wrong one.
Every magic trick needs a prop. The stones, in this case, were my prop. The first one I’d found on a sad lonely walk through the park the day after he left me. It caught my eye, a small lump of pink quartz out of place in the grass, almost lost from sight beneath some shrubbery by the trail. At first I thought it was just a plastic toy of some sort, but when I picked it up and felt it’s rock-candy surface, blinking bright pink in the sunlight, I knew it was a sign of some sort.
But he still wouldn’t answer my phone calls, would avoid going to any of the places we’d gone together and which I haunted now. Then last summer, at the beach, I found another one. The same size, the same slippery yet sharp edges in my hand. This time it only took a week before I realized I needed a third.
And here it was, two feet over my head, embedded in a stone wall that surrounded the library. It appeared to be loose, as if as an afterthought by the stonemason, but to me it was the button to unlock the door between time.
That night I went down to the library, stood at the wall near the stone, stepped up on the folding chair I had brought with me. I reached up, felt its polished diamond-like edges, pushed at it and found it was loose. I pried it free with a nailfile, put it in my pocket and hurried back home.
I washed it carefully, buffed off some sandy grains of mortar that clung from the wall. It was perfect!
I brought out the small box that I kept in my dresser drawer, opened it and took out the velvet bag and withdrew the other two stones. I set them together on the coffee table, just touching one another, and closed my eyes, imagining what would have happened had I not told Adam to leave.
Then the doorbell rang.
