“Please open,” she begged, while holding the stone to the damp walls.

As hoped for, the walls parted, revealing an opening through which powdery ash drifted. The smell of sulphur wafted in. Christina gasped and coughed violently. As she stepped into this strange ashen world, screams of pain drifted to her ears. The sight was terrible. Flaming rocks fell treacherously like bullets from a gun, erupting from a big mountain overlooking a lake.

“Where am I?” she screamed above the roar of the monstrous volcano.

“Rotorua,” shouted a young man holding a black suitcase over his head.

How had she travelled here? Then it dawned on her – the pink stone had taken her back in time to the 1886 Mount Tarawera eruption when the pink and white terraces were destroyed.

Running for her life, she joined the fleeing crowd. Shrieks of fear pierced the air and people dropped lifelessly to the ground.

Suddenly Christina halted – the man with the suitcase lay helplessly on the ground, blood soaked his shirt and his left leg was oddly bent.

“Help me,” he pleaded desperately.

As she looked into his clear blue eyes, Christina’s heart stopped. She recognised this man. He was Grandpa! Her mind flashed back to a memory of her sitting by a blazing fire sipping hot cocoa while Grandpa told his story of the heroic girl who saved him during the Tarawera eruption.

I am that girl, she thought in awe, relieved to know he would live.

Yet Christina understood his condition was grave. Turning around, Christina searched for help.

“Need help?” enquired some men behind her.

“Yes,” she responded with relief flooding her like a wave washing upon the shore.

The men were using a horse and cart to transport the wounded to the Rotorua Sanitorium hospital and were quick to gently lift Grandpa into the cart. After Grandpa was safely in hospital, Christina planted a tender kiss on his cheek.

“I love you,” she whispered.

Then she was gone, running back to the time-machine cave. Touching the still shining stone to the rock, she entered the cave and minutes later, she was back on Grandpa’s farm. High above her a tui sang a clear note and her eyes misted over with tears. Minutes later she burst into her Grandpa’s home where they were visiting, shouting urgently, “Grandpa!”

She threw her arms around his neck, and sobbed quietly as she poured out her story.

Before I could reply, Mom interrupted. “Close the door, please! You’re letting the AC out!”

I complied and led Eva upstairs to my tidy bedroom. She sat in the middle of the floor, setting the briefcase beside her. I settled down across from her.

“So,” I said skeptically, “a time machine, huh?”

Eva beamed with excitement. “Yep! Let me show you!” She opened the briefcase, revealing a tangle of wires, clock gizmos, and buttons. “Hold on to the machine, okay?”

After I had grabbed the handle, Eva pressed a few buttons while clutching the “time machine.”

Apparently finished, she looked straight at me. “Hold on tight.”

With that, she pressed one final button, and the world exploded.

We spun in circles, still holding the briefcase. Red and yellow clouds swirled around us, obscuring my view.

Without warning, we slammed into hard dirt, and the clouds vanished. Dazed, I rubbed my eyes, still unable to believe what was obviously true—the briefcase really was a time machine.

Eva was shaking my shoulder. “Come on, get up! I have a foolproof plan!”

I slowly rose. “A plan for what?”

She grinned. “To make us rich!”

Eva’s plan was to buy something expensive and sell it as an antique in the present. We had travelled to the year 1786, and she thought something from then would be worth a lot.

We walked on the road to the nearest city until we encountered a friendly wagon-driving farmer. He gave us a ride despite, as he put it, our “odd garb”. As the cart rattled through the streets, I noticed the lack of electricity. It was strange seeing buildings in the eighteenth century when I was so used to the twenty-first. When the farmer let us out, I asked him if there were any furniture shops nearby.

He told us about Cooper & Sons Fine Chairs, just around the corner. I thanked him as Eva lugged the briefcase out of the wagon. We started toward the shop, and the farmer drove away.

Soon, we reached the store. Its chairs didn’t look “fine” to me—they seemed a little rickety, but who was I to judge eighteenth-century furniture?

Eva selected a chair. “How much is this one?” she asked the clerk, a spidery, grumpy-looking man.

He sniffed in disapproval. “It’s fifteen dollars, though I doubt a scrubby girl like you has enough to buy this exquisite chair.”

“We’ll take it,” Eva said.

The clerk sniffed again. I wondered if he had a cold. “Payment up front.”

Eva produced some bills from her pocket. She handed fifteen dollars to the spidery clerk.

He held them delicately and examined them. Then he sniffed again. “What mockery is this? Do you mean to tell me that this is your payment? These green papers?”

I suddenly realized our mistake. Eva’s bills were from our time.

“Unless you have real money, you should leave,” the clerk said nastily.

Eva took back her money. “Let’s go,” she said. I followed her out the door.

“Well, that was interesting,” I said as we stepped outside. “We should probably head back to our time. We can’t buy anything here.”

Before Eva could reply, a figure hurtled past, snatching the briefcase.

“No!” Eva cried as he pulled it from her hand. My heart sank as we took off after our only hope for returning home. The thief was fast, even while carrying a time machine.

Soon, Eva slowed down, and I passed her, even though my body was screaming for a rest. If I let the thief escape, we would be stranded in 1786.

After what seemed like an hour of running, the thief started to slow down. He didn’t have any choice—we had come to a dead end. I cornered him, snatched the briefcase back, and started back toward where I had left Eva.

She caught up before I got there, and I shoved the time machine at her. “Take us home, please.” Eva didn’t argue, and I held on as the clouds enveloped us again.

When we landed in my bedroom, we both started laughing. I asked Eva, “That was a foolproof plan?”

She smiled sheepishly. “Maybe not.”

Anyway. That was sort of her high point, because after that she decided to start introducing people to other people. The guy who wrote Hamilton to Alexander Hamilton himself, for instance. That made the news. The current president to the last handful of historically really great presidents, which also made the news. The current guys at Disney to the original founders—that one really made the news, and half their planned sequels and live-action remakes got canceled on the spot. And I’m sure she did other stuff that didn’t make the news, too, and I just didn’t hear about it.

The real problem started when she decided she wanted a pet dinosaur. Now, before you immediately leap to the conclusion that she wanted a sweet little T Rex, I’m going to inform you that Aunt Reivan wasn’t drunk or anything when she made the decision. She wanted something that she could vaguely classify as an exotic lizard or something. Smaller than a komodo dragon. She settled for a microraptor.

Now, I don’t know how familiar you are with microraptors, so I invite you to imagine the scene. It’s late. The tree cover in this neighborhood is dense. You’re hurrying along down the sidewalk, hoping you don’t walk into anything, when all of a sudden there’s this bloodcurdling scream. You stop short, wondering if you imagined it. Then you glimpse a flicker of black in the air above you. At first, you wonder if it’s a vulture, until you realize it has four wings. It swoops down at you, emitting a warbling shriek of fury, and you scream and run for your life. It follows you, and it’s a lot faster than you are. You feel it coming right at your head, and you duck, and then you hear behind you: “MICHAEL! BAD BOY! YOU GET BACK HERE THIS INSTANT!”

You turn, and there in a puddle of moonlight is this old lady, wearing a bright red shirt and hot pink jeans, and she’s waving a cane at this gigantic four-winged bird thing. It circles around and lands on her shoulder, and you realize it’s got a lizardy head and a mouth full of teeth. Definitely not a bird. It rubs its head against the lady lovingly, and she smiles pleasantly, until she notices you staring. “What are you looking at?” she demands, and you back away, stammering apologies, and run for your life. “The youth these days,” you hear her scoff from behind you. “Not a patch on the seventeen-forties, am I right, Michael?”

Yeah, after the first dozen reports, animal services finally came out to investigate the four-winged lizard monster. They found it pretty quickly, and since Aunt Reivan didn’t exactly have a microraptor license—or I think the closest they could get was ‘exotic, endangered (since it’s clearly not extinct) large bird’—they tried to confiscate it. This was a mistake.

Have you really lived until you’ve seen an animal control officer get attacked by a crystalline kangaroo-dragon-thing from the year 3100?

Yeah, the National Wildlife Federation got called in over that one. And the military. I mean, how else are you supposed to deal with an army of extinct animals? Those two mostly got in each others’ way, though, because you can’t just shoot a dinosaur! Nor can you let a dinosaur eat a civilian!

I’m hoping they finish up soon. I miss Aunt Reivan.

—End

“Interesting,” concluded the woman wearing gloves and a white coat who had received the stone from the man with a shovel covered in dust and sand. “I wonder…” she trailed off as she poked it and prodded it from all directions.

“It’s just a rock,” sneered the man who thought the woman was a waste of time.

“What a waste,” thought the sneering man’s and woman’s superior.

The woman said nothing as she held the rock and witnessed the foundations get laid for the building she worked in every day.

“It’s not just a rock,” she mumbled the next day as she blew a strand of hair from her eyes. “It could be more,” she whispered as she studied it under lenses meant to magnify it tenfold.

“It could be more,” she repeated, taking samples and studying the tiny parts of it she had no name for.

“It can’t be more,” said her superior, tired of all work and no gain.

“It will be more,” the woman quietly told herself, pulling out the stone any time only her eyes were in the room.

“It’s more than a rock,” she affirmed, as she began building something small with many wires and bits and bobs from the multitude of scans and tests she had done.

“There will be more than a rock,” she said, wrinkles forming in her face as she frowned in concentration, breaking and reconstructing bits of stone and wires and metal. “There will be,” she breathed out, as she added the final touch to her creation.

“It isn’t more yet,” she said, holding up her creation as the room wavered around her then stopped.

“Stupid rock,” said the sneering man as the corner of his eye caught the woman holding it up.

“Stupid rock,” his superior agreed, before frowning at the woman.

“No more rock,” snapped the superior at the woman, but in complicated words that were about money and greed.

“No more rock,” agreed the woman, who then left the building with her creation in a gloved hand, never to return.

“It’s just a rock,” said the spindly man she knew and approached about it.

“It’s not just a rock,” he whispered as he dropped her creation with wide-eyes and agreed to help his friend.

“Was it ever just a rock?” murmured the woman from a dimly lit basement as she held her creation and saw the dusty basement shiny and bright.

“Is anything ever what it seems?” countered the spindly man in there with her, who witnessed the success of her creation, who she never should have trusted.

“It should have been a rock,” moaned the woman when the past was no longer the past, but changed for the betterment of the spindly man.

“It never should have been more,” repeated the woman, tears in her eyes as she stole her creation back with a hole in her stomach and wavered from the spindly man’s sight upon touch.

“It will just be a rock,” said the woman weakly, reducing her creation to its barest form as she walked in a place that should have been the past.

“It’s just a rock,” she told herself as she dropped it where the sands could hide it better than she ever could.

“It’s just a rock,” echoed the wind, watching—every single time—from above as it swirled the sand around the dunes like a storm swirls the sea.

The wind has never been bothered by eternity.