Skipping the Rocks

The rock sailed through the air, skipping as it hit the water. One... two... three... four... five... plop...

The boy picked up another rock, feeling the weight in his hands, and in a smooth motion cast it out into the water, the rock skipping as it went, one... two... three... four... five... six... plop.

The boy stood there and looked out at the water. How many more rocks were to be casted out, how many more must he throw.

He looked to where the rocks skipped, and the ripples that moved out from the centre, how the ripples came together from where it skipped

He looked forward to where the rocks sunk, no ripples came from these spots, they just sunk to the bottom, waiting to be washed up shore again.

The boy picked up a handful of rocks, and in a quick motion flung them down the beach. He watched as some hit the water and skipped tiny bits, leaving small ripples radiating outwards... He saw many more of those rocks never skip, but sink straight to the bottom, just sinking, waiting for a day when they would come back to shore, waiting for a day the boy would follow through.

The boy looked to the sand. He saw where many of the stones had left craters in the sand. He saw the impressions they left and how the sand had now buried them slightly.
He looked out upon the waters and saw the ripples continuing out from every spot a stone had skipped. He saw the earliest ripples now hitting the sand, taking a bit of it away, eroding back the line between the sand and the water. It was a slow process, but it was happening
The boy thought back to days when he stood on a small patch of sand, and the water stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see. There were few stones, for they were all skipping off to infinity. Now all that was behind him was a seemingly unscalable mountain, a sheer rock face, one that seemed as if it could last for all time. To his left and right there was only sand, with pebbles and rocks of different sizes strwn about. Only to the front of him was there water.

The mountain had raised up out of the sea some time ago, he did not remember how. At some point after that the sand then raced forward, leaving a desert, with just a small pond. For a long time the boy had thrown no tocks of stones or pebbles, the ripples had all but stopped.

It took a long time after the desert had taken over before the boy cast a pebble into the pond again. When he did, he saw the ripple go throughout the pond, and erode some of the sand. The boy had forgotten why he threw the stones. He slowly stood up to the barren desert, and began to again cast the stones into the pond.

The pond is now a sea again, the ripples pushed back the desert. Yet the mountain remains. Perhaps one day after all the stones are gone and are skipping off to infinity once again, maybe then, the mountain will sink back into the sea.

The boy thought back again. How had the mountain come to rise from the sea? How had the desert covered his world? The exact moment the mountain began to rise did not seem to come to the boys mind. What the boy could recall was a wave, higher than the sky itself roaring towards him, wiping out everything he had, the continuing off forever behind him.

That was it... the boy remembered everything. He has built that mountain from the stones that were on the sand. It had not risen out of the sea, as he had like to think, it was his own doing. Then without the stones, the water receded, leaving other stones.

The boy threw another stone into the water, watching skip once, twice, then sink. He had forgotten in his years in the desert how to skip the stones as far as he wanted.

The boy wondered if things could ever be how they used to. Regardless if they could or not, nothing is ever solved by doing nothing.

The boy walked up to the mountain and looked closely. He saw the individual stones that made up the mountain, and pried one out, then another, and so on, until he had a handful.

The boy walked back to the water, skipping the rocks, one by one, as far as he could, watching the ripples combining and strengthening. He went back for more rocks from the mountain.

The strange thing was, that as the boy continued to do this for some time, the ripples in the sea moved outward faster, and changed how the shoreline ran. As the mountain came down, the boy's world changed.

The mountain is still there today, though smaller now. The boy, now a man, continues his work. His methodical skipping of the rocks, they skip further and further now, the retrieval of rocks from the mountain, and back to skipping them. The cycle will continue until the mountain is gone and he can see what lies on the other side.



Until next time...