By Rod A. White
The alley off Lima’s Jirón de la Union looked like a scene from the past. Shayla spotted the sign in the hodgepodge of others, hand-lettered and sun-bleached: Sellos Únicos. Souvenirs del Alma.
Perfect, she thought.
She angled her phone’s camera to frame the shop’s warped doorway and hit record. Her growing subscriber base expected exotic travel location authenticity, and nothing said authentic like a creepy, handmade, rubber-stamp store on a Lima side street.
A chill raced up Shayla’s spine when she ducked inside. The shopkeeper was old and thin, with ink-stained fingers and eyes that catalogued everything they landed on. His workshop was a chaotic museum of tiny items: stamp presses, magnifying glasses, jars of pigment in a variety of colors. Hundreds of custom seal rubber stamps lined the walls.
“I trade stamps for stories,” he said with a gravelly voice when she entered.
“That’s, like, a really odd payment request,” she said, thinking of all the views she’d get from this encounter. “But sure. A story’s good. Whatever it takes.”
His mouth curled into a smile, but his eyes remained cold. “Tell me about somewhere you’ve dreamed of going,” he said. “Tell it well. The better the story, the richer the stamp.”
Shayla closed her eyes and lingered on a vision that warmed her soul. “The Cappadocia region of Turkey. I’ve always wanted to ride in one of those hot air balloons at dawn, the land below splashed with the sun’s golden light.” She opened her eyes and smiled.
The shopkeeper nodded, then bent over his workbench. His hands moved like a pianist’s, and he produced a breathtaking seal twenty minutes later—a tiny landscape with a balloon-dotted sky, carved in obsidian rubber. He pressed it into her passport page with ink that shimmered violet and gold.
She held it under the light. “This is genuinely beautiful. What do I owe you?”
He offered her a cold glare. “You have already paid, my dear.”
Shayla blinked and was in a cave hotel, lying on a bed fitted with sheets of Turkish cotton. Outside a carved-stone window, balloons drifted through a tangerine sunrise. Her passport and phone lay on the nightstand as if she’d stayed there the entire night. She panicked. How had this happened? She logged onto the internet and found that there were no flights booked in her name and no record of her entering Turkey.
She had somehow jumped.
Unsure of what to do, Shayla roamed the narrow alleys, seeking anything that would appease her frantic viewers awaiting another fix. She videoed an enthusiastic carpet merchant in the Göreme market who insisted she take one of his glossy brochures before she moved on. She glanced down at a stamp on the bottom and blinked. Suddenly, she was back in the same Miraflores hostel room with no memory of the transit between. The brochure was still clutched in her hand, but the image on the cover had become a photograph of Lima’s skyline.
She went back to Sellos Únicos, told her story, and the shopkeeper gave her another stamp.
Ten more times, stamps sent her to exotic places: a fjord, a night market in Hanoi, a salt flat in Bolivia. And each time, another stamp found her—on a tourist luggage tag, a hotel receipt seal, or on museum admission tickets. All of them sent her back to Miraflores and the odd shop.
She documented everything. Her videos, although shaky, sleep deprived, and increasingly desperate, were gaining viewers in a way she’d never expected. Every upload now became a plea for answers disguised as travel content, annoyance and drama shining through. Her followers argued endlessly over whether she was faking it to increase followers, suffering a breakdown, or somehow impossibly telling the truth.
After every jump, Shayla found herself standing once again before the shopkeeper, compelled to share her experience with him. This obsession drove her to investigate who this old man could be. She found him on a reverse image search, standing in the background of a 2009 travel blog photo in Budapest, and again in a 1987 Peruvian newspaper archive: same face, same ink-stained fingers. Not a day older or younger.
Shayla tried to understand, but her mind grew foggy. Every place she’d visited since Cappadocia felt dimmer in her memory, flatter, like a faded postcard. Details she once loved to highlight in her videos—the smells, the sounds, the thrill of new places—were gone. Before finding Sellos Únicos, traveling had made her happy. But now, it only brought her grief. And that frustrated her.
Shayla marched back to the shop one last time.
“I’m done telling you stories,” she told the man. “Is that really what it takes to become famous?”
He looked at her with cold, calculating eyes and replied, “At last, you’ve asked the right question.”
He didn’t ask for a story this time. He simply snatched her passport and pressed a stamp into it before she could stop him. The ink bloomed on the page in its mysterious violet-gold.
She bent over to inspect it but found it wasn’t a landscape or some faraway scene. It was her face, her eyes, her hair, the curve of her jaw.
“Where does this one send me?” she asked, her voice shaking.
He capped his inkwell and began tidying his bench.
“It makes you viral, my dear,” he said with an evil glint in his eye. “You’ve become the destination.” He paused. “You were always better content than the places you captured.”
Shayla found herself in the alley, the shop gone, and her passport opened in her hand to the final page. The violet-gold stamp was still wet.
“Look! There she is!” a voice cried out.
Shayla turned and saw dozens of faces crammed together in the alley opening, all glaring at her with crazed eyes.
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