The Button Box

The button was unremarkable. Small. Wooden. The kind that might have fastened a cardigan decades ago. Mirran had almost passed over it entirely, but something about the way it sat in her grandmother’s cookie tin made her pause. She’d been sorting through the estate for three days now, finding buttons where there should have been biscuits. Memories where there should have been recipes.

She held it up to the afternoon light filtering through the cottage window. Two holes. Worn smooth. A faint smell of old paper and rain.

The world tilted.

---

Mirran learned quickly that grandmother's magic had rules. She couldn’t change anything. Her hands passed through objects like smoke through silk. She made no sound. Left no trace. She was more like a thought that had wandered into the wrong decade.

The wooden button always took her to the same place. A bookshop called Hartley & Sons, on a rain-gray afternoon. She’d checked the newspaper someone left on the counter during her third visit. October 15th, 1974. A Tuesday.

She shouldn’t have gone back after that first time. One visit was curiosity. Two was indulgence. This was her seventh visit in as many days, and Mirran was beginning to understand that she had a problem.

The problem had a name. Kate.

Kate, worked in the back corner where the poetry books lived. She moved with the careful grace of someone who’d learned to take up exactly as much space as she needed and not an inch more. Kate, who wore her brown hair in a braid that was always coming slightly undone by midafternoon. Kate, who was currently shelving books with the intense concentration of someone trying to solve a problem that had nothing to do with alphabetical order.

Mirran stood where she always stood, by the philosophy section, close enough to watch, far enough to feel slightly less of a voyeur. Rain drummed against the shop windows. The smell of old paper and mustiness of well-loved books wrapped around her like a familiar coat. Sensations, impressions pressed into the fabric of the moment itself.

A customer asked Kate something about Sylvia Plath. Kate’s whole face changed when she smiled. Not the polite customer-service smile. Genuine and a bit crooked. Mirran felt that smile like an ache in her chest.

This was foolish. This was worse than foolish. Kate had been in her twenties fifty years ago. She’d be in her seventies now, if she was still alive at all. Mirran was falling in love with a moment. With a ghost. With someone who’d finished living this particular Tuesday before Mirran was even born.

She should stop coming here.

She pressed her thumb against the button in her palm. The anchor that would pull her back. But… not yet. Just a few more minutes.

Kate finished with the customer and returned to her cart of books. She picked up a volume of Mary Oliver and ran her fingers along the spine with tenderness. She moved to shelve it. But she didn’t. She stood there, book in hand, perfectly still & turned her head.

Not toward the door, where the bell had just chimed. Not toward her coworker calling from the front desk. She turned toward Mirran. Turned and looked directly at the space where Mirran stood invisible. Fiffty years out of phase with the world.

Kate’s brow furrowed. Her lips parted slightly, as if she might speak. The book in her hands trembled.

Mirran’s heart stopped. The magic didn’t work this way. She’d visited a dozen different moments now, scattered across decades. No one had ever sensed her. Magic didn’t work this way.

Kate took a step forward. Then another. She was close enough now that Mirran could see the small scar on her chin. The way her eyes were more gray than blue. The tiny embroidered flowers on her collar. Close enough that Mirran could see the confusion & hope moving across her face.

“Hello?” Kate whispered.

The word shouldn’t have been possible. The whisper shouldn’t have crossed fifty years like a message in a bottle finally washing ashore. But Mirran heard it. Felt it. Felt the whispered breath on her skin.. And Kate—Kate was looking right at her. Through her, right?

Mirran stumbled backward. Her hand clenched around the button. No, she thought desperately. Not yet. Not now. Not when ~

Magic had its own ideas about mercy.

The bookshop dissolved like watercolor in rain.

---

Mirran landed hard on her grandmother’s cottage floor, gasping. The button burned hot in her palm. It cooled again. Ordinary wood. Impossible magic.

She sat there for a long time, rain pattering against windows. Fifty years. Her heart raced with a fear and an excitement she couldn’t quite separate.

Kate heard her. Sensed her. Seen her?

Magic didn’t work that way.

Except, maybe, perhaps it did. Perhaps it always had, and Mirran simply hadn’t been paying attention. Perhaps the magic didn’t care about rules at all. Only about moments and the invisible threads that connected them.

She opened her palm and looked at the button. It sat there innocently. It kept its secrets.

Mirran spent seven days falling in love with a woman fifty years gone. She’d told herself it was safe because it was impossible. She’d told herself she was just visiting. Just watching, just passing through someone else’s ordinary afternoon.

If Kate could sense her, if the wall between them was thinner than she’d thought, then this wasn’t safe at all. This was dangerous in ways Mirran didn’t have words for yet. Dangerous and terrifying and full of a possibility that made her hands shake.

She should put the button back in the tin. She could choose a different button tomorrow. Visit a different moment. Fall in love with a different moment.

Instead, Mirran closed her fingers around the wooden button and held on tight. She held on to the grain of it, the weight, the promise. Outside, rain fell in the present tense. Inside, Mirran sat on her grandmother’s floor and wondered what happened when someone fifty years ago turned around and looked for you.

Wondered what happened when you looked back.

The button grew warm in her hand, as if in answer. Or invitation?

Tonight, she would let herself imagine what seven words might sound like, if she could find a way to speak them:

I’m here. I see you. I’m here.

The button pulsed against her palm. Warm as a heartbeat. Mirran smiled despite herself.

Magic, had very little respect for what should and shouldn’t be possible.

And perhaps—just perhaps—that was exactly the point.

💞💫♥️🧡💛💙💝💜💫💞

My Year Built on Substack.

412 stories, series, and poems shared on Substack.

412 pieces of my heart offered to the world.

Multiple awards, including several TIF medals and 2nd place in the Horror category of the Poetry/Tif Eye See You contest.

Three anthology publications by year’s end.

A victory in Bradley Ramsey’s First Indulgence Prompt Challenge.

⭐️⭐️ The view ahead? Even brighter.⭐️⭐️

2026 will be my year of arrival: four anthologies, The Outsider and The Dust Whisperer novels ~ six publications in one year. Six dreams made tangible.

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