Gwendy's Magic Feather

12

GWENDY HAS NEVER TOLD a soul about the button box. Not her husband, not her parents, not even Johnathon or the therapist she saw twice a week for six months back in her mid-twenties.

There was a time when the box filled her every waking thought, when she was obsessed with the mystery and the power contained within, but that was a lifetime ago. Now, for the most part, her memories of the box feel like scattered remnants of a recurring dream she once had during childhood, but whose details have long since been lost in the never-ending maze of adulthood. There’s a lot of truth to the old adage: out of sight, out of mind.

She has, of course, thought about the box in the fifteen years since it vanished from her life, but—and she’s just come to terms with this revelation in the last sixty minutes or so—not nearly as much as she probably should have, considering the immense role the button box played for much of her adolescence.

Looking back, there were weeks, perhaps even months, when it never once crossed her mind and then, boom, she would watch a news report about a mysterious, seemingly natural, disaster that occurred in some faraway state or country, and she would immediately picture someone sitting in a car or at a kitchen table with their finger resting on a shiny red button.

Or she would stumble upon a news teaser online about a man discovering buried treasure in the back yard of his suburban home and would click the link to see if any 1891 Morgan silver dollars were involved.

There were also those dark instances—thankfully rare—when she would catch a glimpse of old grainy video footage on television or hear a snippet of a radio discussion about the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. When that happened, her heart would skip a beat and set to aching, and she would tumble into a deep black hole of depression for days.

And finally there were those times when she would spot a neat black bowler’s hat bobbing up and down amidst a crowd on a busy sidewalk or glance over at an outdoor café table and spy the shiny dome of that black hat resting next to a mug of steaming coffee or a frosty glass of iced tea and, of course, her thoughts would rush back to the man in the black coat. She thought about Richard Farris and that hat of his more than all the rest of it. It was always the mysterious Mr. Farris that swam closest to the surface of her conscious mind. It was his voice she’d heard back in her office, and it is his voice she hears again now, as she sits on the sofa with her bare legs tucked beneath her: “Take care of the box, Gwendy. It gives gifts, but they’re small recompense for the responsibility. And be careful…”