The book was tiny. It had arrived that morning without a return address, in a padded envelope with Thai stamps. I knew of no one who might have sent it. The book itself revealed no author or title; on its cover were delicate interlinked gears, each labeled with both a number and a sigil, connected to a small clasp that held the book closed.

I first tried to turn each gear in numerical order; attempting a reverse order proved equally unsuccessful. As did beginning in the middle and working either up or down. I looked to the runes for a clue on how to proceed, but could discern no pattern. Then it struck me: whoever had sent this book obviously knew who I was, possibly intimately. I rotated the gears clockwise, corresponding to the digits of my birth date and time, two each for the month, day, year, hour, and minute. A low electric hum vibrated through the mechanism, and the clasp popped open.

The title page simply read: The Happiest Day of Your Life. The story within detailed the vacation I'd taken to Bali with my wife six years earlier, accurate down to the clothes we wore, the tourist spots we visited, the locals with whom we interacted, and the food that we were eating the night that I proposed. In light of the years of marriage that had followed -- years full of both laughter and sharp words, love and resentment, deep passion and inadvertent cruelty -- I wondered: had that really been the happiest day? I'd gotten food poisoning the day after, but that evening, we sat in candlelight and moonlight, served Balinese cuisine by waitresses who seemed to float above the floor, entertained by Balinese dancers precise in their movements, and the whole experience had been quite wonderful, possibly transcendent. Would I never live through something so remarkable again?

Finished, I closed the book, and the clasp snapped shut. Attempts to open it again via the gears failed, and so I put the book aside, and joined my wife in bed. The next morning, I could not find it no matter where I looked, and after an hour of searching, realized I never would. The strange gift was, I assumed, on to the next person, and then the next, bringing truth in all its terrible wonder.