Tom Briggs lived in a house that had given up on being a house and was now just three rooms and a roof trying to stay on. It sat on a street in Youngstown that had stopped being a street when the steel mill closed and everyone on it moved to Florida or died or did both, though usually just one or the other.

The gong arrived in a cardboard box with no return address. Inside, it sat on a layer of packing peanuts like a brass egg. Tom turned it over in his hands. It was lighter than it looked. The surface was covered with little gears and shapes that looked like musical notes but weren't. He struck it against the leg of his kitchen table.

It made a sound like a bell ringing underwater.

Tom had wished, without saying the words out loud, for something to eat. He opened his refrigerator and found, sitting on the shelf between a jar of pickles and a carton of milk that had expired three days ago, a ham sandwich wrapped in wax paper. It looked like a sandwich his mother might have made. It probably was. Or it wasn't. It didn't matter. He ate it.

He went to work the next day at a recycling center, sorting metal, and did not think about the gong again until Wednesday, when he needed gas money. He struck it: "Ten dollars." When he got home, a ten-dollar bill was on his kitchen table. It was folded neatly, the way a ten-dollar bill should be folded, creased down the middle. It looked like it had been there all along, which is exactly what it had been.

He used it carefully. The gong gave him what he asked for, and it asked nothing in return except that he be honest about what he wanted. Which, it turned out, was not much. He wanted to stay warm in winter. He wanted to eat. He wanted to not feel lonely all the time, though the gong could not help with that, and this seemed like a flaw, and then it didn't.

Bill showed up on a Friday. He was Tom's brother, though "brother" was a loose term in their family—Bill was half-brother, same mother, different father, which in Youngstown meant different drinking problems and different ways of failing. Bill had been to three jobs in six months. His current strategy was to wait for something to happen that would fix everything. The gong was going to be that thing.

"I heard about the magic brass thing," Bill said, sitting on Tom's sagging couch and eating Tom's cheese. "Let me try it."

"No," Tom said.

"Tom, come on. You're sitting on a miracle and eating cheese off my plate. Let me strike it once. I'll ask for something small. Five bucks. That's it."

Tom gave him the gong. Bill struck it against the table: "Five dollars."

Nothing happened. Bill struck it again, harder: "Five dollars! Now!"

The gong chimed. A five-dollar bill appeared on the table. But the bill was wrong. It was folded into the shape of a bird—no, not a bird, a crumpled thing that looked like money but was not money. It was paper, and it had the number five on it, but it was not legal tender. It was not anything.

"It didn't work," Bill said. He struck it again: "I want a thousand dollars!"

The gong chimed. A thousand dollars appeared. But it was made of paper—actual paper, cut into rectangular shapes with the number one thousand printed on them. It was not money. It was paper that looked like money. If you tried to spend it, you would be arrested. If you tried to burn it, it would burn. If you tried to read the writing on it, it would say things you didn't want to read. Things like *you are greedy* and *you are empty* and *this is what you asked for*.

Tom took the gong back. "It gives you what you ask for," he said. "Not what you need. Not what you want. What you ask for. You asked for a thousand dollars. It gave you a thousand dollars. They're just not the kind of dollars you can spend."

Bill struck it one more time: "I want everything to be different."

The gong chimed. Nothing happened. Tom looked around. The house was exactly the same. The cheese was still on the table. The refrigerator still hummed. The steel mill still didn't exist.

"Everything is different," Tom said. "You just can't see it yet."

Bill left. He took the paper dollars with him. He tried to spend them at the Kwik Fill and was asked to leave by the manager, a woman named Debra who had seen everything Youngstown had to offer and was not impressed by any of it.

Tom kept the gong. He struck it once a year, on his birthday, and asked for nothing. He just wanted to hear the sound. It was the only thing in his life that was honest.