The Ring From the Pawn Shop Wanted to Go Home

I bought a ring at a pawn shop, an old gold band with a small dark stone, cheap and lovely and clearly older than anything else in the case. The man behind the counter sold it to me quickly and did not quite look at it, which I noticed later, when I noticed a lot of things later.

The dreams started the first night I wore it. I dreamed of a house. A specific house, an ordinary house on an ordinary street, that I had never seen in my life. Each night the dream came back with more detail, sharper, richer: the colour of the door, the shape of the porch, a particular tree in the yard, a window with a light on, and always the overwhelming feeling that I needed to go there, that something in the house was waiting for the ring, that the ring wanted to go home.

It got into my waking hours. I would catch myself, driving, having taken turns I did not decide to take, heading in a direction I had no reason to head, toward the part of town I dreamed about. I would come back to myself at a red light with no memory of choosing the route, the ring warm on my finger, my hands steering me somewhere.

I finally took the ring off and really looked at it, and inside the band, worn but readable, was an engraving. Not initials. An address. A house number and a street, the street I had been driving toward, the house from the dream.

I drove there in daylight, ring in my pocket, telling myself I would just look. It was the house. The door, the porch, the tree, all of it exactly as I had dreamed. And an old woman was sitting on the porch, and when she saw me get out of the car she stood up, and put her hand to her mouth, and said a name that was not mine, the name, I think, of whoever had worn the ring before it reached that pawn shop.

I gave her the ring. I did not keep it, did not sell it, did not want it a second longer. She held it and wept and thanked me and did not explain, and I did not ask, and I drove home and slept without a single dream for the first time in weeks. Some objects are not cursed so much as lost, and some of them will steer you across a whole city to be found.