The Story of the Vanishing Ring

A lost thing, when found, takes on an attitude all of its own, distinct and insistent. Like a curious smell.

On the morning that he found the ring nestled between the rocks at the bottom of the shallow parts of the sea, the mountains were still wearing their skirts of gray-white fog. Above the ridges, early morning clouds hover like a smokey wreath. This image would go down in my microfilm of memories as something right out of a children's fantasy book--cheerfully mysterious, safely bizarre.

It was a plain gold ring, almost certainly a wedding band. It did not beg to be found. Glinting defiantly under the 7 o'clock sunshine, it dared you to claim it.  Small, it also challenged you to speculate. 

Was it from some young bride, now distressed at the loss? What would she tell her new husband? Would he bite her head off for her carelessness; or would he worry about the money with which to get her a new one? If they were superstitious, would they be filled with uneasiness?

Or, it could have come from a once-lover with fingers grown too thin from the ravages of sickness, heartache, the general misery of life--who knows? Maybe the loss of a plain, unengraved ring was the least painful of all that she had to bear. Or, maybe it was the one last blow that snuffed out all light?

Then again, the ring may not have just innocently slipped off a finger. What if it was hurled to the waves by a once-loved: in despair, in bitterness, in rage--who knows--where it landed smack among the rocks, hated and soon forgotten?

What if there was no romance, no mushy tale around the ring, no noble context? What if it came off the finger of a drowned person whose skin had sloughed off from decomposition--whatever was left that was not eaten by fish? It was a horrifying thought. But then, even rattling finger-bones dropping an anonymous ring into the depths of the ocean were once the warm hand of a human being. And humans always carry stories with them.

They say all lives are intertwined and that we create our own meanings. As its finder slipped the ring on my little finger in jest, I knew that yet another story has been mapped out.  I was never one to wear a ring, but for that moment the anonymous band of gold was mine. I thought maybe we would have a tale to share soon.

So I wore it the whole day. The whole day, it kept winking at me as it caught every light that shone. It was pretty. But, strangely, not on me. 

Driving home from the beach later that night, I glanced at my hand and the ring was no longer there. It just somehow slipped from my pinky finger, unnoticed. It just somehow became lost again. 

It was a strange little ring, I told you. Vintage Twilight Zone material. I close my eyes and I can see it flashing... gleaming... getting lost and found over and over... having its story told again and again.