It’s A Mystery

A mystery within a mystery. Solving it could prove difficult.

Otis Turner had just turned ten years old in the summer of 1940, and he was certain he’d found a clue.

“Look, Roscoe! I found a clue. It has to be a clue. I mean, what else could it be?”

Roscoe, his faithful hound and constant companion, wagged his tail. Otis held up the strange object. It was smooth and black. Roscoe promptly licked it.

Otis frowned.

“You’re probably right. It’s not a clue after all. At least not the one I was looking for.”

He examined it more closely.

“Let’s think about this. It’s about six inches tall, three inches wide, and weighs less than half a pound. It’s got glass on the front and metal on the back.”

The object revealed no secrets.

Otis checked the time on the shiny wristwatch he’d received for his birthday. His eyes widened.

“Gee whiz! It’s almost time for The Adventures of Superman!”

Stuffing the mystery object into his pocket, he sprinted home with Roscoe racing behind him. Whatever the thing was, it could wait.

Days became weeks. Weeks became years.

The object sat in a drawer, then a trunk, then a dusty box in the attic.
Every so often he’d pull it out and wonder what it was.

No one knew.

Then, in 2012, his grandson stared at it in disbelief.

“Grandpa… where did you get this?”

Otis shrugged.

“Found it when I was ten.”

His grandson’s face turned pale.

“Grandpa, this is a smartphone.”

Otis laughed until he realized the boy wasn’t joking.

A smartphone.

Technology that shouldn’t have existed for another seventy years.

Suddenly, the mystery wasn’t what the object was.

The mystery was how a smartphone had found its way into the hands of a ten-year-old boy in 1940.

And that was a question nobody could answer.