"Sinking Stones"- by Madelyn Wong
There’s a stone inside my pocket the size of my heart. I found it when I was seven, but started carrying it at thirteen, its solid shape weighing down my every step. It’s nothing like my sister’s stone, smooth like a pebble by the steady stream, the one she leaves on her nightstand while she sleeps, the one she painted pink despite its natural slate gray color I once envied. My stone is a rock, with sides so rough they sometimes snag on the inside of my pants pockets and cause the fabric to pill, but I’m convinced its jagged edges will weather with time.
I found my stone not by a steady stream, but a roaring river. They say that rushing currents make rock sides even, which we’d learned in first grade, so I found its coarse appearance strange. I thought, maybe, it had come from someplace else, each of its edges a mark of where it had been. There were grass stains on the lighter part that wasn’t touching water. It looked lonely and out of place next to its oval-shaped cousins, so I took it home.
I put it in my desk drawer beside my collection of broken seashells and paid it no mind for six years. It only stayed there because I was too lazy to take it out. If I ever were to open the drawer after that day, it was to ogle at a gem I’d found from the ocean and hold its spiral shape up to my ear to “hear” the water rushing.
At thirteen, I was reminded of my rock as I flipped through my mother’s photo album of our vacation to the Catskills. I pulled open my desk drawer that afternoon and was relieved to see it still standing there, and I began to bring it with me everywhere. It was heavier on some days than others. Most of the time, I never noticed it at all, but it seemed to weigh me down the most on my way home.
I slowly began to notice other people carrying their own stones, too. I thought perhaps I had started a new fashion, but no one at school even knew about my stone, so how could that be?
My friend is lucky- her stone is made of quartz. It is pure white and she wears it around her neck so that everyone can see. I’m not sure if my father has one, but my mother’s is a boulder- the biggest I have ever seen. It’s so large she can’t carry it around, so she keeps it in the basement and only checks on it once a year.
I was walking by the pond near my house the other day when I saw a classmate of mine standing by the water’s surface, knees slightly bent. I feared the worst, taking a step forward before I realized she was crouching slowly, her palms cupped in front of her. Feigning a casual stroll by the water, I walked closer to her so that I could see what she held in her hands. An escaped frog, I assumed. Or maybe a goldfish she wasn’t allowed to keep anymore.
What I didn’t expect, as I stood feet away from her, close enough to see, was a stone. She held with such fragility I thought it might be glass; it had a sort of bluish tint to it, after all, yet it seemed to weigh her fingers down. The best explanation was that she was giving her stone a bath; I did that sometimes and left dirt in the sink, so maybe that was why she’d come out to nature. Except I didn’t speak to my stone, ever- I knew it wasn’t alive, so why was my classmate whispering to hers?
I couldn’t hear what she said, and it happened so fast I had no time to stop her. Instead, I watched in horror as she let go of her stone, parting her cupped hands and letting it drop. I knew without looking that her stone would sink- that was just science, but the knowledge of her heart dropping to the bottom of an algae-crusted floor made me want to cry, as she was doing now.
At seventeen, I reached into the pocket of my sweatpants, exhaling in relief when my fingertips grazed a rough, crooked surface.
Then they took it from me, and threw it in the water.
