If you are interested in the plot, some people find it easier to understand what is happening if they go back to read the intro.
Thanks to IM_skittles for helping me with editing.
Chapter 1 – Serafina's treasure
It was an ordinary summer day when I chose to stop at Arlen's antique corner. The moist heat enveloped me like a blanket and clung to my skin suffocating me. Looking back, I should have taken it as a sign to go home, but I kept looking through the piles of unwanted items from years before I was born.
I blame it on my mom, God rest her soul. She raised me on a million fantastic stories of magical objects that had the power to transform the ordinary into something unusual. Some part of me wanted that gift of mystery to turn my ordinary life into something more.
I wanted to be more than just another cog in the wheel, just another employee trudging through my day to get to where I could spend the money I had earned by selling my time. I wanted something back for those days, something that could not be found in another latte or glass of wine.
I don't remember when it started, actually. It was a whim. I walked into a store on the way home and sifted through the dusty junk in search of treasure. Even though months passed with no magical piece, I kept looking. Somehow I knew I would find it. I wish now that it had not found me.
It was in the back, which was a room I seldom visited. It was hard to get to in that crowded store. I mostly concentrated on the new things, the things in front that had just been acquired from estate sales and such. That day I had just started looking when a stranger came in. He was purchasing the antique ottoman in the back room so the shopkeeper went to the back to clean it off.
Maybe it was the grave impact of the dullness of my life that made me volunteer to help. I had been coming for months and although we rarely talked, I felt close to the owner. In any case, he accepted. A few minutes later I was heaving boxes and lifting books.
I knew the moment I touched it. I ran my finger across the worn plastic where a hundred other fingers had brushed a hundred times. My finger rested briefly in the cool ring of metal and I felt this tiny shock. Images filled my mind of women carting around this beloved object, of writers creating their first novel. Stories popped into my mind of the janitor who was able to write award winning poems because he had used a special typewriter. In my mind I was accepting the Pulitzer prize.
"How did you get such an amazing idea?" they would ask. I would smile and rest my hand on the keys.
"Are you going to stand there all day or are you going to let me get this man's furniture out of my place?"
I blinked for a moment, the words slow to register in my brain. I wrapped my arms around that treasure and walked back to the cash register. I was afraid to put it down for fear I would lose the one chance I had at an exciting life. If I had known what that meant, I would have left it and never come back.
He tried to talk me out of it. I don't know if he knew or if he had another buyer. I steadfastly refused. It was mine and nothing was going to take it away.
It must have been that very first night that I put it on the kitchen table before turning to get a glass of wine. My buyer's remorse filled me before I could open the bottle.
"I should have spent the money on something more practical. What I really needed was to save up money for a new table, not another object to set on top of it."
The cork popped out easily in my hands releasing the faint juicy scent of cherries and dried fruit. As I poured it into a glass, my mind kept on its negative path. "I should have saved the money for a new place to live."
None of these things changed the reality. The typewriter still sat innocently on the table as I swirled the deep red liquid in my glass. I felt the weight settle on my shoulders as I sighed. I would never be anything but a single girl in a crappy apartment in the not-so-good part of town.
"What's wrong with me?" I said to my empty apartment, "It is nothing but a mass of metal and plastic. It's not going to change anything. It probably doesn't even work."
I looked around my place, filled with these tiny adventures: the paperweight from the rare book store, the pen from the antiques dealer, the desk from a garage sale, the dusty guitar from the pawn shop. My life was filled with tiny objects that I had a feeling about. I had never been transformed into the person in my dreams.
Instead, my life was filled with a strange collection of objects that didn't belong together. Nothing ever seemed to turn out the way I intended. I figured this was going to be yet another amusing story about how I had bought a piece of junk to fulfill a fantasy.
I stopped myself. There was no point in this line of thinking. I should see if my new artifact worked and then go about my life. It might at least inspire me to keep up on the correspondence that I complained about. I took a deep drink from the glass and let the dark sweet liquid drain the day from my body while I rummaged through the apartment for a blank sheet of paper.
The roller complained as I loaded the paper, but I finally got it in. I settled down on the plastic coated seat of my metal chair and looked at the blank page.
"What do I write?"
After sitting for a while I finally recalled the sentences we had to learn to type in high school typing class: The big brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. As I pressed on the keys I felt the satisfying click of the metal die on the paper. It made me smile slightly as my fingers missed one key and a few of them got stuck together. I had to reach in to untangle them.
"This is why people use computers these days." I thought as I looked at the device. I rolled the paper up to look at the words.
For the most part it seemed to work. The "o" was a little light on one side and the keys were a little stiff. The j and u smeared where my fingers had brushed the carbon tape as I unstuck the keys, but they were still readable. A faint line marked the paper where the roller had rested on the white background. It was almost unnoticeable unless you were looking for it. I figured that it would get better with time.
