An Earthly Pendant

“Welcome in!” 

Ian startled at the high, screeching voice right beside him. Turning from the chipping green paint of the door to the shop, he saw the parakeet three feet away, in a cage suspended from the ceiling. Little clawed toes clutched a shit-stained wooden bar. Feathers ruffled as the parakeet’s wings twitched and tiny, beady black eyes locked with Ian’s own. 

“Welcome in, welcome in, never mind him.” This, an old woman behind the cash register. 

“Never mind! Never mind!” The parakeet squawked. 

Ian imagined what Matthew would say to or about the bird: some impossible combination of cutting wit and warm sincerity. Ian just gave a quick half-smile to the old woman that he hoped displayed his complete ease with the situation. The shop was lamplit and dim, curtained against the summer day. The low hum of electric fans came from every direction, but they were no match for the desert heat. Ian grabbed a fistful of his t-shirt and dabbed at his forehead. 

Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined the place with barely three feet between them. Potted succulents, mosaics, saguaros, and little skulls of animals decorated the walls and the endcaps. The countertop where the old woman ran the register was piled so high and so constantly with papers and folders that there were only two columns of empty space from which she had a line of sight with the rest of the store—one for checking out, one for greeting. Now that he stood at an angle from her, she was invisible. Ian didn’t see or hear anyone else in the store. It was just him and the bird. 

Ian started down one of the aisles and his hindbrain half-expected the shelves to start rolling toward each other, closing in on him. The parakeet jumped from its wooden perch and onto one of the iron bars of the cage. Metal creaked as it swung. Ian’s gaze ran over the contents of the shelves like a tracking floodlight, but he couldn’t seem to focus on anything. There were stacks of old paperbacks, CDs, cassettes. Cassettes? Christ, how old was this place? There was a little wooden chess set, missing a white bishop. There were lots of little statues and toys. Cowboys and army men, roadrunners, lizards. 

“Looking for anything today?” The old woman’s thin voice warbled across the store, barely carrying over the sound of the fans. 

“Looking! Looking!” The parakeet cried.

“Oh, nothing in particular. Just a birthday present.”

“Who for?”

“A very good friend.” Ian paused, but a feeling he couldn’t name made him keep talking. “He loves thrifting, but he goes all the time on his own, so it’s hard to find something he hasn’t already perused. I’d never heard him mention this place so I figured I might find something he wouldn’t expect. That’s what he always says is the point. The stuff you don’t expect.”

The old woman laughed. “Your friend is wise. And you’re right, I’ve never seen him in my shop.” 

Ian stopped, frowned, opened his mouth, closed it.

“I hope you find something special.”

“Find! Find!” The iron birdcage creaked as it swung.

Ian ran his finger through the dust of the wooden shelf. He stopped when his eyes fell upon a little painted statue of bearded Jesus, hooded, hand raised. Ian smiled as he thought back to first semester, he and Matthew in their dorm, just getting to know each other. The religious studies elective they shared had discussed Pascal’s wager that morning. Afterwards, lounging on their tiny beds, Ian and Matthew bonded over how stupid the idea was. The next day Ian came home from class to find a printed picture of Jesus—one of the ridiculous, pale-skinned and blue-eyed ones—taped over his bed, with the words “just in case” scribbled in black sharpie. 

The Jesus statue would be a good callback, but it was a bit too redundant of a gesture. Ian picked up the statue anyway. 

The moment his fingers wrapped around the smooth wood, the shop disappeared from around him.

He was back in the dorm, his freshman dorm he hadn’t seen in two years. He was sitting on his blue twin bed. There was Matthew laying across his own, one leg hanging off, lazily holding a paperback above his face. God, Ian had forgotten how weird that dorm smelled. 

Matthew stared at him—that’s right, Ian had just asked a question.

“I’m not a betting man,” Matthew said, laughing. The breeze ran through their open window and brushed aside his dark hair. 

Ian nodded sagely. “And isn’t gambling, like, a sin? The whole thing seems like a doomed enterprise.”

“Indeed it is,” Matthew said. “Indeed it is.” 

The memory was gone and Ian was back in the shop, holding the little statue of Jesus. He whipped his head from side to side, but no one was there. He pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the time. He hadn’t lost minutes like in an X-Files episode, or anything weird like that. Ian thought back to the memory—it wasn’t anything all that special, or a forgotten moment returned to him, but he was entranced all the same. It was real. Not real like a memory—he had literally been there, back in time. 

How was that for something Matthew wouldn’t expect?

Ian set the little statue of Christ back down on the shelf. He counted to ten, whispered his full name out loud, pinched himself, and listed the last several presidents in reverse chronological order. His mind seemed fine, the world around him real. He started down the narrow aisle again, inspecting the shop’s wares with newfound ardor.

Should he touch every object to check if they contained a memory? No—he’d reached for the Jesus statue because it had reminded him of Matthew, of that moment. He was sure it wouldn’t work for any old object, only something symbolic to him, to them. To check his theory, he reached out and picked up an old book on native Southwestern wildlife. Nothing happened. It was just a book.

Nothing caught his eye in the rest of the aisle. He reached the back of the store, turned to an adjacent shelf, and continued the search. Ian shuffled down the cramped walkway, passing wooden skulls painted for the Day of the Dead, dreamcatchers made of sinew and beads, and books, more books. The next item to catch his eye was a necklace—or perhaps a large bracelet meant to be worn double-wound, like prayer beads. Ian was careful not to touch the object until he was ready for another supernatural experience. The thin metal chain glinted in the soft lamplight. Ian leaned down and saw eleven pendants hanging on the chain: one for the sun, the moon, and each of the nine planets. It was either older than Pluto’s reclassification, or the maker was just obstinate. Either way, they were skilled. 

Ian extended his index finger and pressed it softly against the surface of the Earth.

Stars wheeled overhead, countless in number and infinite in separation. The hard root of a tree knuckled into Ian’s back, and he ignored it. Matthew lay beside him in the near-total darkness of Mount Lemmon. The preternatural silence was broken by the low groan of the building-sized telescope mount shifting, like the creaking yawn of a sleeping giant rising from its Earthly slumber. Ian was painfully aware of Matthew’s breathing, close enough not only to hear but to feel tickling the hair on his neck. 

Footsteps nearby. Ian and Matthew rose at the same time, not startled, but responding in unison to the same unconscious instinct. No one was coming towards them, just other people wandering off to find solitude, or to find togetherness. Matthew walked to the edge of the clearing and Ian followed him. They stopped before a break in the tree line that opened up a perfect view of Tucson spread out distant and beneath them, a field of twinkling yellow lights.

“The lights of the city below look just as distant as those of the stars above,” Matthew said, hardly more than a whisper.

“Yeah,” Ian said, because he couldn’t think of anything else. 

Ian was back in the shop, finger pressed into the painted blue metal of the earthly pendant. God, he was stupid. He should have said something right then and there, on the mountain overlooking the city. Now here he was instead, putting a totally normal amount of thought into a birthday present for his friend and roommate. Maybe the necklace was the move. Remember this? Ian’s gift would say, when Matthew touched it and saw the memory. Now, I’ll say what I should have said then. But would he? 

Ian made a sharp heel-turn and paced up and down the aisle, suddenly claustrophobic again. The necklace was good. He’d do his due diligence searching the rest of the store, and come back for the necklace if he didn’t find anything better. 

The items became stranger as Ian searched aisle by aisle. 

Pale yellow bones and fangs of unidentified animals. 

Stone sculptures of faces without eyes. 

Wooden birds with human legs.

The books got older—on the far side of the shop, the titles changed from English to a majority Spanish, then mostly to Latin, then to languages he couldn’t identify. The shop started to smell older, too. 

“Doing all right?”

Ian nearly jumped into the ceiling as the shopkeeper’s call interrupted his contemplation of a headless warrior of stone.

“Right! Right!”

Ian muttered a curse against parakeets under his breath. “Yes, thank you! I think I know what I’m getting.”

The old woman’s response was indiscernible. He doubled back, squeezing down the aisle to the back of the shop and making his way back to the shelf where he’d found the necklace. For a moment he thought it was gone, then he caught the familiar twinkle of the chain and the planets all strung in a line. Ian crouched down to look at it again, and beheld the deep blue storms of Neptune, the ochre desserts of Mars. 

He became terrified that he had imagined the necklace’s power, the perfect preservation of his memory. Ian reached out desperately and pressed his finger against Mars. Nothing happened. Maybe the planet mattered—Earth. It had been Earth last time. He tried the blue planet, to no avail. He tried the rest and met the same result. 

Clutching the necklace in his fist, he hurried to the shopkeeper’s desk, his breath coming faster. 

“Hello?” He fought down the panic and confusion and made his voice small, calm. He was sure he still looked like shit.

The old woman moved from behind the stacks of paper and stared into Ian’s eyes from behind thick-rimmed spectacles. “How may I help you?”

“Does this necklace, um.” What the hell was he supposed to say?

“Um?”

“Um! Um!”

Ian winced at the parakeet’s screeches. It would be terribly rude to leave now without buying anything, after looking for so long. 

“Never mind. I’ll take this.” He set the necklace on the desk. 

“Ah!” The old woman’s eyes shone behind the thick glass. “A fine piece. I’ll give you that one for thirty.”

“Thi—” Ian bit his tongue. “Great.” He reached into his back pocket for his wallet. 

“Thirty! Thirty!”

Ian left the shop, the necklace stuffed in his pocket, and called Matthew while the Arizona sun beat down on him in waves. 

“Wanna go up to the mountain again tonight?"