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The book was in a carton of other tattered old books that Ginger’s mother got at an estate sale for a quarter. The books were to be re-sold at the flea market, but her mother allowed her to pick one to keep. "Are you sure you don't want one of the nicer looking ones?" Her mother asked, watching her drag the book from under the others, digging for it as if she'd known it was there somehow.
"No, thank you. I like this one." Ginger held the book up to take a good look at it. At first glance it didn’t look like much. It was a thin volume bound in frayed brown fabric. The words “Uncle Charlie's Travels” were embossed across the front. She felt a little fizz of excitement, the way she always did when she got a new book.
Ginger took the book out to the front porch and curled up with it in her favorite spot, the porch swing. The July heat still simmered, but a cool breeze heralded the coming evening. The shrieks and squeals of the littler kids running through the sprinkler in the backyard punctuated the drone of a lawnmower down the block as Ginger settled in to read.
The book was written in a charming, old fashioned style. At first Ginger thought it was a storybook, as Uncle Charlie’s niece greeted him after his return from an international voyage. But as she turned the pages, she realized it was actually a text book that hid lessons about geography and culture in clever little stories of Uncle Charlie and his travels.
In the first story, the niece, Violet, serves her uncle a cup of coffee, leading him to tell her a story about how coffee beans were cultivated in far-off Colombia, weaving in facts about the country and its history.
The book was published in 1889, exactly one hundred years earlier, so the stories described a world that only faintly resembled Ginger’s own.
Ginger felt the power of her imagination drawing her back in time. Just as she was about to lose herself in it, her father's voice broke through her reverie. "Ginger, dinner!"
Ginger slid the book behind the bib of her overalls on her way to join the rest of the family at the picnic table in the back yard. The twins, Marilyn and Jonas, were still in their bathing suits, dripping water from the sprinkler over the table as they vied to be the first to reach the charred looking hotdogs their father had just taken off the grill. "Ew! Don't get water on me." Ginger leaned back, away from the twins.
"You two behave, or no 'smores after dinner," their mother admonished. Properly motivated, the twins settled down and the family began to eat.
"There were a couple of other things in that box, if you want them." Ginger's mother said, as she squeezed yellow mustard onto her hot dog.
"Sure, I'll take them." Ginger quickly agreed.
"Don't you even want to know what they are, first?" Her mother laughed, but Ginger shook her head emphatically. "I'll take them." She loved cool old stuff, and already knew she would like whatever it was.
"It's just junk, mostly." Unlike Ginger, her mother didn't subscribe to nostalgia. If the items she picked up at garage and estate sales to re-sell didn't have monetary value, she wasn't interested. "I think there was an old tea cup, a tin whistle and some kind of a map. It's practically falling to pieces, I almost tossed it."
After dinner, while the twins were jostling to each be first to toast marshmallows over the cooling coals in the barbecue, Ginger helped her mother carry the extra paper plates and the condiments inside. Her reward was the extras from estate sale box, which her mother had left sitting on the kitchen table for her.
Ginger sat down and slid the book out from its hiding spot. She set it down next to the tea cup, picked up the map and carefully unfolded it. It was a world map, but with countries she had never heard of, like Bulgaria and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She smoothed it out over the table top, then picked up the whistle and looped the cord around her neck. The cool metal in her palm made her think of the child who may have once played with it, trying the patience of a long-ago parent.
Lastly, she picked up the tea cup. It was made of thin porcelain, with a delicate blue and white floral motif; it was a miracle it hadn't been broken. She imagined a woman in long Edwardian skirts sipping tea from it, possibly with the long-ago occupants of this very house.
Ginger re-opened the book and spun the whistle absently on its cord as she read. The yellow pool of light over the kitchen table and the peals of laughter out in the garden from one of the twins as a sparkler fizzled to life faded into the distance.
Ginger was far, far away, spinning through time, listening with Violet as Uncle Charlie recounted looking up in awe through the steel lattice of a brand-new Eiffel Tower at the 1889 Worlds Fair as dozens of hot air balloons lifted off into the Parisian sky.
#FlashFiction
#MagicalRealism
#TimeTravel
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