Time Capsule

The key had been in his family for decades, passed down from generation to generation with a promise to open the shiny metal box in one hundred years. They sat down together, a man and his boy, on the hundredth birthday of the tin, and they jiggled the old cumbersome key into the lock.

They expected photos, old toys, and newspaper clippings – really anything except what was inside.

The father pulled the single item out of the box: a shiny rock. What a disappointment. All that time that passed, a hundred years, and for what? Keeping the secret of a rock? Was it a joke? A hundred year old joke?

There was nothing on it. The father turned the stone over in his hand. One, two, three times. He passed the stone to his son and put his hand on they boy's shoulder.

“Sorry, son, wasn’t as neat as I thought it would be.”

They raised their eyes away from the stone, and their world shifted. A mist settled and cleared. The neighborhood was gone. Fields of cattle and cattails sprang out before them. The home they had lived in for years, the first built on their block, looked shiny and new: trees were only young saplings, mortared bricks still dried in place, the swimming pool just a grassy yard.

They burst through the back door into the house. 
A woman yelled.

“Willy, you better fix that door latch! The wind's gone and thrown it open again.”

The father recognized her from an old sepia photo they had framed in the den. It was his great grandmother.

“Hold on Maude, I’ll get to it. I just want to finish this up and put it under our house.”

The father and son slipped into the next room. It was certainly where their living room was supposed to be, but the furniture was all different. Old rockers and simple chairs sat around a small handmade coffee table with a large radio against the back wall. 
The man in the room was his great grandfather, Willy. He sat at a desk, polishing a rock in front of a small metal tin.

The father and son eyed the rock still in their possession.

“It’ll be great Maude. Remember you and I went back to England a hundred years ago? Well, we have to keep the tradition going. A hundred years from today someone…grandsons of grandsons, will get to come visit us, if only for a moment.”

The world shifted again.

“Did you hear me, Danny?”

They were back in their own living room.

“Danny?”

“Yes? What is it?” The father called to his wife.

“Can you fix the latch on the screen door? The wind just blew it open.”