I hadn’t planned to stray from the main path in Petra. The tourist crowds flowed like a river through the Siq, smartphones raised to capture the Treasury’s familiar facade. But something—perhaps the way the shadows bent around a narrow side passage, or the sudden scent of cardamom and age—pulled me away from the stream of visitors.
The passage twisted through rose-colored rock until it opened into a small courtyard I wouldn’t have believed existed. Weathered steps led to what might have once been a temple antechamber, now home to a peculiar collection of artifacts spread across a worn carpet. Behind them sat an elderly woman whose eyes carried the same rose-gold tint as the surrounding stone.
“You’ve come for the coin,” she said in English tinged with an accent I couldn’t place. It wasn’t a question.
“I’m not looking for—” I began, but she was already reaching for a wooden box carved with spiraling patterns that seemed to shift when I tried to focus on them.
“Three times you passed my courtyard today,” she said, “though this is the first time you noticed it.” She opened the box with hands that reminded me of tree roots, strong and marked with the passing of age. “The coin has been waiting. It grew tired.”
From the box, she withdrew a Nabataean drachm, dark with age but still carrying an unmistakable weight that seemed to exceed its physical mass. The profile of a king—or perhaps a god—was worn to a whisper on one side, but the reverse showed a pattern I’d never seen before.
“The coin collects stories,” she said, placing it in my palm. “Stories that need to find each other. Stories that are looking for a home.” Her eyes crinkled at the corners. “Like people, sometimes stories lose their way. They need help finding where they belong. Some stories are only half-finished, waiting for years, centuries even, to find their completion in another time, another place.” I tried to offer her money, but she waved it away with a laugh that sounded like the wind passing through ancient corridors. “The coin will take what it needs. They always do…”
The first story came to me three days later, in a small spice shop tucked between a modern bank and a coffee house in downtown Amman. The coin grew warm in my pocket as I passed the doorway, where the scent of cardamom and star anise hung like invisible curtains. Inside, towers of colored powders rose from brass bowls. An old man sat at a wooden counter worn smooth by generations of hands. His name was Ibrahim, and when the coin practically burned against my thigh, he looked up from his brass scale and began speaking as if continuing a conversation we’d been having across lifetimes.
“My grandmother,” he said, measuring saffron with fingers that never quite touched the delicate threads, “was a keeper of lost recipes. Not the kinds you write down, but the ones that exist only in memories. Recipes that contained not just ingredients, but fragments of the stories they came from.” His hands moved through the spices like a conductor leading an invisible orchestra.
He told me about a wedding feast she prepared in 1947, in a summer when the stars aligned in patterns not seen since the Ottoman Empire. She had combined seven spices – he wouldn’t name them – in proportions so precise that when the bride and groom tasted the main dish, their eyes grew wide with recognition. They began to speak of shared meals from other lives: dates eaten in Andalusian gardens, bread broken in Mongolian tents, wine sipped in forgotten kingdoms. “The strange thing,” Ibrahim said, carefully replacing the lid on a jar of crushed rose petals, “was that others at the feast began remembering too. The best man recalled serving the couple pomegranates in ancient Persia. The bride’s mother remembered kneading dough beside them in a medieval Damascus kitchen. For one evening, all their past lives gathered around that table, drawn together by my grandmother’s spices.”
When he finished speaking, I noticed the coin had acquired a faint scent of saffron and cardamom, an aroma that seemed to shift between past and present with each breath. Ibrahim smiled, recognizing something in my expression. “Some recipes,” he said softly, “are really just keys to memories we didn’t know we kept.”
Two weeks later, in a back alley of Cairo, where the streets grew so narrow they seemed to fold in on themselves, the coin led me to a woman who repaired broken watches. Her tiny shop was the kind of place you might walk past a hundred times without noticing, until suddenly it had always been there. Through the dusty window, timepieces lined the walls—pocket watches, wristwatches with cracked faces, and grandfather clocks that seemed too large to have fit through the door.
The watchmaker sat at a workbench beneath a copper lamp. Some clocks ran fast, others slow, and a few seemed to tick in a rhythm that had nothing to do with seconds. When I entered, she didn’t look up from the delicate gears spread before her, but she held out her hand for the coin as if she’d been expecting me. “Ah,” she said, running her thumb over its surface. “This one knows about time too, just like my watches.” She looked up, her eyes holding the same intricate patterns as the watch movements scattered across her bench. Without prelude, she began telling me about her father’s discovery in 1923.
“It was a Tuesday,” she said, adjusting jeweler’s glasses that magnified her right eye. “He came home from his shop—this very shop—and noticed that the tea was pouring itself back into the kettle, and the newspaper was unprinting itself page by page.” She picked up a small screwdriver and began adjusting a pocket watch that ticked counter-clockwise. “That’s when we learned about our house’s peculiarity: every third Tuesday, from midnight to midnight, time flowed backwards.” Her family adapted to these reversed days, learning to walk backwards up stairs, to begin conversations with goodbyes. “But the real gift,” she said, “was in the undoing.” Her father had kept a ledger of things they’d corrected: a sister’s broken heart, mended by reversing the moment she read a letter; a mother’s tears over a family heirloom, restored by walking time back to before it shattered.
“The most difficult part,” she continued, now using silver tweezers to lift a gear smaller than a grain of rice, “was remembering what we’d undone when time flowed forward again. We had to live with two sets of memories—the ones that happened, and the ones we carefully unhappened.” The watches in her shop showed different years—1923, 1957, 2012—all ticking simultaneously. She caught my glance and smiled. “Time isn’t as linear as people think. It’s more like a conversation between moments. Sometimes they answer each other out of order.”
The coin in my hand had begun ticking softly, and when I looked closely, I could see tiny clock hands had appeared around its edge, some moving forward, some backward. As I left her shop, I could have sworn I saw her reach for a teacup before it fell, her hand moving with the practiced grace of someone who had learned to catch things that hadn’t yet begun to drop.
In Istanbul, where the city folds itself around the Bosphorus, I met a street cat. She appeared first as a shadow, then solidified into fur and whiskers, only to become almost translucent again. She weaved between worlds as easily as she weaved between the legs of passing tourists, and when the coin grew warm in my pocket, she fixed those metallic eyes on me. She led me through winding streets until we reached a quiet stretch of the Bosphorus where an old fisherman sat mending nets. His hands moved in patterns that reminded me of a ritual, each knot tied with the precision of prayer. The cat disappeared into a patch of afternoon shadow and didn’t emerge again.
The coin hummed against my skin as the fisherman looked up, his eyes the same shade of deep blue as the strait before us. Without introduction, he began telling me about his grandfather, who had fished these waters in the last days of the Ottoman Empire.
“It was during Ramadan,” he said, his fingers never stopping their dance with the nets, “when the moon was so full it seemed to pour extra water into the strait. My grandfather cast his nets and caught a fish unlike any other – scales that shifted color with each movement, and eyes that held centuries of shipwrecks in their depths.” The fish, he told me, spoke in perfect Ottoman Turkish. It knew every secret the Bosphorus had ever kept: Byzantine galleys laden with gold, merchant ships swallowed by storms, modern freighters that had slipped beneath the waves. It knew where emperors had dropped their signet rings and where lovers had cast letters that were never meant to be read.
“The fish offered my grandfather any treasure from the deep,” the fisherman continued, tying another knot. “Enough gold to buy a palace, enough pearls to outshine the stars. But my grandfather was wise in the way that poor men often are. He asked instead to understand the languages of all sea creatures, ‘Because their stories,’ he told the fish, ‘are the ones history books always forget.’” His grandfather spent the rest of his life listening to the tales of the strait. He learned of dolphins who still remembered carrying the messages of Roman spies, of oysters that sang lullabies to their pearls in voices older than humans, of schools of fish that passed down memories of sunken minarets through generations.
“The sea creatures, they don’t tell stories like we do,” the fisherman said, holding up his net to check his work against the setting sun. “They speak in currents and tides, in the taste of salt and the pressure of depths. Each tale flows into the next like rivers into oceans. My grandfather said listening to them was like hearing the world’s oldest poem being endlessly rewritten by waves.”
As he spoke, I noticed patterns appearing along the coin’s edge – delicate waves that seemed to move in the fading light, tiny ships that sailed in endless circles, and what might have been fish scales that flickered like distant stars. When I held it to my ear, I could hear something that might have been the whisper of ancient tides. The fisherman nodded at the coin as if recognizing an old friend. “Some stories,” he said, casting his mended net out over the waters, “can only be told in the language of depths and distances. Some truths can only be learned by listening to the voices that swim beneath the surface.”
A young girl in Beirut lived in an apartment that sat between two centuries – the building’s facade was modern glass and steel, but its inner courtyard belonged to an older time, with stone arches and walls thick enough to hold centuries of stories. The coin led me there on a Thursday afternoon, growing warmer with each step up the winding staircase to the third floor.
She couldn’t have been more than twelve, but her eyes held the wisdom of an antiques dealer. Her room was ordinary at first glance – a bed, a desk, schoolbooks – until you noticed the walls. They were covered with keys of every imaginable shape and size, hanging from delicate threads at varying heights. Bronze keys, iron keys, silver keys turned black with age, modern keys still bright. They moved slightly even when there was no breeze, turning slowly like compass needles. “They find me,” she said, noticing my gaze. “In marketplaces, in abandoned buildings, sometimes just lying on the street as if they’ve been waiting.” She reached up and touched a large iron key with a butterfly pattern on its bow. “This one came from a house that was demolished last year. But it remembers every door it ever opened, every room it ever guarded.”
The coin practically hummed in my pocket as she showed me her collection. Each key, she explained, held fragments of the lives it had witnessed. A small brass key remembered a wedding trousseau locked away for safekeeping, the bride lost to war before she could claim it. A delicate silver key still guarded the secrets of love letters hidden in a desk drawer during the French mandate. A heavy iron key recalled the smell of spices from a merchant’s storeroom in the Ottoman era. She lifted a small copper key from her desk. “This one is my favorite. It opened a music box that played Lebanese lullabies. The box is lost now, but sometimes, very late at night, I can hear the key humming those same tunes.”
“The strangest thing,” she said, reaching for another key, this one modern but worn in a way that suggested ancient patience, “is when they recognize each other. Sometimes I’ll find a key that remembers a door, and months later, find another that remembers being the spare copy. When I hang them close together, they vibrate like tuning forks.”
The coin in my pocket had grown warm enough to feel through my clothes. When I showed it to her, she nodded as if confirming something she’d already known. “It’s collecting stories too, isn’t it? Like my keys collect memories.” She pointed to its surface, where I noticed a pattern I hadn’t seen before – tiny keyholes appearing and disappearing as the light shifted, each one seemingly deep enough to peer through if only your eyes could focus properly.
As I left, I heard the soft clicking of keys behind me, like quiet conversations. The coin had gained weight in my pocket, as if it too now carried the burden of locked rooms and lost secrets, waiting for the right moment to reveal what lay behind its newly formed keyholes.
It wasn’t until I met another collector in a centuries-old Damascus cafe that I began to grasp the true scope of what I carried. He too had a coin, though from a different era, and his eyes held the same haunted recognition I’d begun to see in my own reflection. The cafe owner’s grandmother had been a dream interpreter in the 1800s, but rather than explaining dreams, she collected the ones people wanted to forget. She kept them in small glass bottles on shelves that lined her bedroom. When she died, all the bottles were empty, but her descendants swore that on certain nights, they could still catch glimpses of forgotten dreams drifting through the cafe like motes of dust in sunlight.
“They’re not really coins,” he explained, as the afternoon call to prayer echoed through the ancient streets. “They’re more like… anchors, holding stories in place until they can find their proper endings.”
“Each story changes the coin,” he continued, watching the way our coins seemed to resonate when placed near each other. “They leave marks only other collectors can see. Patterns within patterns, stories within stories.”
I rolled my coin between my fingers, feeling its familiar weight. “And what happens when all the stories find their way back?” He smiled, a gesture that seemed to complete a question I hadn’t known I was asking. “That’s the beautiful part—stories are never truly complete. They keep finding new beginnings, new climaxes, new ways to be whole.”
That night, I dreamed of the old woman’s courtyard again, but this time it was filled with people from across centuries, each holding their own coins, each following threads of tales through the labyrinth of time. In the dream, the walls of Petra themselves opened like pages of an infinite book, revealing not treasures of gold, but chambers of untold stories, each waiting for the right moment to be found.
When I woke, the coin was pulsing gently against my palm, and in its worn surface, I could see fragments of all the stories it had collected—the saffron wedding feast, the backwards-flowing Tuesdays, the talking fish, the keyless doors, the bottled dreams—all swirling together like stars forming new constellations. And somehow, I knew it wasn’t nearly finished collecting.
The coin was warm again, and I understood: somewhere nearby, another story was waiting to be found.