The Ruby

They say time is linear, a straight path, but grief twists and turns, refusing to follow a straight path. I lost my grandmother three months ago. She was the only parent I knew. She was a ballerina who travelled the world performing Swan Lake to princes and kings and children who had parents with fat wallets.

The ballet gene did not run through me. I wasn’t as graceful and disciplined as her. I took after my father’s side of the family with my short stature and white blonde hair. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see my grandmother’s eyes looking back at me, even though I yearn to see her familiar face reflected there. Instead, I see a stranger, framed by the silvered glass, her eyes reflecting a future I haven’t yet lived.

I’ve been dreading the day I had to clean out her belongings, as if sorting through her scarves and tea tins would somehow finalise her absence. Each folded blouse feels like a stitch being undone in the tapestry of my memory. Grief lives in her objects, in the scent of her old perfume trapped in coat collars, in the creak of her favourite chair when no one’s sitting in it.

I thought I could be logical, efficient, and get it done quickly, but I paused over every drawer, as if she might be tucked inside. Waiting, smiling, asking me why I looked so sad.

I was folding sweaters into boxes when I found it, half-crushed beneath a stack of old quilting fabric, inside a crumbling shoebox in the back of my grandmother’s closet. The air smelled like mothballs and lavender. My fingers brushed soft velvet, and then something solid, very small, cold, and unnervingly alive.

It was a ruby. The size of a quail's egg. It had a teardrop-cut, set in a tarnished gold clasp with strange markings I didn’t recognise. No letters, no numbers, just curves that hummed against my skin like music I couldn’t hear. I held it up to the light. It didn’t reflect. It absorbed. The room dimmed by a hair’s breadth. That was the first sign.

I didn’t mean to activate it. If activate is even the right word. I was sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor; the ruby cupped in my palm like an egg of flame. The surrounding air thickened. No wind, no thunderclap. It was a slow unspooling, like a film slipping from a reel.

The room blurred, then the ceiling stretched. The walls breathed, and then the world blinked. When I opened my eyes, I was still in the same room. At least I think it was the same room. The wallpaper had changed. It was now a pale green damask. The hand-laid oak floor was gone, replaced by carpet. A soft thrum filled the air, mechanical and low. It felt like the home was breathing in its sleep.

I could hear voices downstairs. I moved cautiously, clutching the ruby like a lifeline. Light flooded the stairs, and he stood there.

I can’t explain how I knew he was meant for me. It wasn’t his face, though he was beautiful in a quiet, unfinished way. It wasn’t his stance, though he looked at me like I was a detail he’d spent years trying to recall.

It was recognition. Not memory, but proximity. It felt as if the space between us was about to collapse. He didn’t startle or speak. He just looked at me.

“Where... am I? Or when am I?”

He stepped closer, his voice careful. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Neither are you,” I countered.

He smiled, faintly. “Touché.”

The living room was familiar, but softened by time. Art déco lamps stood beside sleek panels of futuristic glass. A piano hovered inches above the ground, silent and waiting. This was my grandmother’s house, but transfigured. A hybrid of past and future, the bones unchanged, the soul had grown strange.

“I found a ruby in the closet. When I was cleaning out my grandmother’s things,”

“Then it worked.”

“You know what it is?”

“I should.” He lifted his palm, revealing a matching stone. “I’ve been waiting with mine for years.”

The air rippled between us. “I don’t understand,” I said.

“I do. I just didn’t think you’d come this soon.”

“Time, it turns out, isn’t linear. It’s personal. Each ruby is a node, a fixed point in the network of a life. The user doesn’t control where they go, only when. You touch it, and you are pulled not to random eras but to moments that matter. To inflection points.”

“This isn’t real.”

“You don’t travel through history. You travel through your own story. The ruby knows what you need and sometimes, what you fear.”

I gaped at him awkwardly, wearily, but intrigued.

“My name is Wren, though I suspect you’ve never heard that name.”

“No, but I’ve felt it.”

He exhaled, long and quietly. “Then the bond’s already begun.”

I stared at him. “What bond?”

He gestured for me to sit. “My ruby brought me to your time, once. It was years ago, for me, but only weeks ago, for you.”

“That’s impossible.”

He gave a slow, crooked smile. “Yes, most truths are.”

“I don’t remember meeting you.”

“You wouldn’t. You hadn’t found the ruby yet. I saw you then, the real you. Just for a moment. It was enough to ruin every version of the future that didn’t have you in it.”

We sat on the velvet couch like it might vanish. I asked questions I didn’t know how to ask. He answered like every word cost him a year. In this future, I was gone. I had been for a long time.

“You disappeared, without warning, without a trace.” He said.

“When?”

“Before we ever really began.”

That’s when I felt it... the pull. The ruby warming in my palm. I wasn’t meant to stay.

“I don’t know you. I think I’m not supposed to be here.”

“I think you know me. Deep in your soul, you always have.”

The ruby’s pulse quickened. He was right, whatever it was deep within me, a throbbing lust. I knew something was connecting us.

“Time doesn’t care if we’re ready. It only cares if we’re honest.”

“Then be honest with me now. Tell me what happens if I stay.”

He looked at me, no, not at me, through me.

“You’ll forget this. When you return. Until the moment you’re meant to remember.”

“And then?”

“And then it’ll be your turn to wait.”

I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave a man whose name I’d never heard but had always known. The ruby was glowing now, and I could feel the room beginning to dissolve. The edges of the future fraying into fog.

“I’ll find you again,” I said.

“You already have.”

“Remember,” he said, and the word rang like a bell struck from within.

When I opened my eyes, the shoebox was gone. The closet was darker than before. My hands were empty. Somewhere, deep in the marrow of my bones, a name I had never spoken hummed like a promise: Wren.

I did remember him. I searched for weeks. I found nothing. No records, no photos, no mention of that future. Cruelly, I kept dreaming of him. I kept dreaming of a couch I never owned and music I hadn’t heard. I dreamed of a man with eyes like falling twilight who spoke to me like the years had been counting down to a single moment.

Once, only once, while walking past a dusty old shop window, I caught my own reflection. Except it wasn’t mine. It was me, older, wiser, smiling. A ruby at her throat. Just behind her… A man was waiting with a crooked smile.