Rivers and Rocks

            We sat around my white wooden table and as we tried to bear the uncomfortable intrusion of silence, we caught each other’s eyes in an almost comical exchange of nervous glances. When she had first arrived at my door, I was neither surprised nor underwhelmed. She wore a stiff red dress, two painfully tight brown braids bound with ribbons of the same color, and carried a black hatbox. Though she possessed an unremarkable face with round features, typical of a young child, the elfish glimmer in her blue eyes was quite piquant. She walked in without a word, closing the door firmly in the face of the stern old woman from the Orphanage who had brought her to my doorstep, and took a seat at the table where we now sat facing each other.

            Though I had no idea of exactly what she had faced before her stay at Claddagh Central Orphanage, her grave face and heavily bagged eyes told a story of childhood too soon lost.

          “Would you like some tea?” I asked her, pulling words from the air in an awkward attempt to engage her. I felt a piece of hair slip from my loose bun that I had hurriedly assembled. It fell over my eyes and broke the earnest affect I had been attempting to create.

           “You are rather ordinary aren’t you?” She asked as a reply. She had not set down her hat box and used it to accentuate her statement by dropping it heavily onto the carpet. It made a dampened thump and with that she raised her eyebrow, expecting an answer.

           I chose not to respond and focused my attention of sticking the runaway piece of hair back into its pin.

           “I don’t know what to call you,” she stated, as if nudging me with her words.

            “Hmm. Call me Mari,” I replied. It was not my real name but rather a title I had chosen to mark a new beginning, something I hoped to have by providing lodging for this little girl. “Do you have something you go by?”

            “I used to go by a river every day as I walking home from school. Would you like to hear that story?” She said, leaning forward slightly.

           I folded my arms on the table to assure her of my interest. She smiled widely, an expression that made her solemn face much kinder, and without a breath, began her story.

           “As I said, every day I would walk by this river on the way from school. It wasn’t a special river; it just did what it was supposed to do. I liked it because it ran beside a mountain, it was a mountain river you know, and every afternoon the mountain would cast a shadow on the river and the path and keep me out the sun. Anyways, it always stayed to same. Day after day this river just ran like a machine.

               One day though, as I walked I noticed it was running slower and I thought that today was the day the river had finally broken down. Day after day after century, after millennium…it’s bound to break someday. But as I went further upstream I noticed that a huge boulder had landed in the center of the river. It was a granite boulder, big and grey and it was sitting in the middle of the river forcing two little streams to trickle from each side. This wouldn’t last I saw, as pieces of sticks and leaves were starting to block up those places too. Suddenly, the boulder opened its deep dark eyes and asked me to smash it.

                 “Smash me to pieces,” it said, “Before this river stops running.” It looked like it was crying and through the mist I could see each piece of stone that made up that granite. Had the boulder once been a little pebble, free to roll around anywhere it wanted? Was it all that rolling around that caused it to pick up the other stones and then all of the sudden become this gigantic mass of pieces that weighed him down until he couldn’t move, obstructing the natural way of things with his goliath body?”

            She stopped speaking and looked at me, searching for some sort of confirmation of understanding. I smiled at her, wondering about this talking boulder that sat crying in the middle of a river it was slowly killing.

           “What became of it?” I asked, suddenly feeling a rush of compassion for this strange monstrous stone.  

            “I left it there. How was I supposed to smash it? The best I would have done would be to shake some dust from between the cracks! So I guess the river died, but it wasn’t my fault. Anyone would have chosen the same option. Anyway, I don’t go by that place anymore. What should I go by now?” She gazed up at me with a sense of vulnerability, having suddenly shed her stiff shell during the telling of her story.

            “If I’m Mari, it would make sense for you to be Lapis,” I told her, taking her question the way I would have understood it. “Mari and Lapis…what an odd couple we are.”

            “I would like some tea now,” she said after whispering her name to herself.

             As she sat there with her tea she slowly poured a tiny bit of it out of the cup and onto her saucer. Before the advancing liquid could cross a third of the thin porcelain plate, she quickly blocked it with her thumb. The tea parted and continued trickling onwards to where it pooled at the edge.

             I thought about the talking boulder. Perhaps it had never killed the river. Such ageless systems could never be destroyed by such a fleeting interference. One day the water would wear the stone away and all that would be left would be one tiny pebble to be carried away on the swift arms of the current, finally free from the past that had held it back.