The Blessing of the Boulder by C.K. Bickford

There’s this thing about rocks. They sit. That’s it. In desserts beneath glaring suns they watch the world around them bake and boil. In the crashing waves and hidden riptides of oceans and seas they stay stubbornly, steadfastly, still. In forests, prairies, bogs, and fields they wait as one becomes the next or another. At the bottom of mountains, touched by peaks only through shade and shadow. They sit and the world happens. To them. Through them. At them. Never with them.

All right there’s one more thing. Sometimes, rocks are moved. If they’re lucky. A landslide might pull them from a cliff. An earthquake could send them tumbling. Mostly it’s hands though. Picking them up and flinging them. Crushing them to points and tying them to sticks to slash or stab. Sometimes they pick them up just to set them somewhere new. New is nice.

The reprieve is always brief. Maybe that’s another thing. Maybe it’s just part of the same.

I had a beginning. Now I sit. That’s it. Until.

Until a crack of lightning, a thundering voice, and a groan. The groan of branches reaching. Oceans drying. Of nature doing something it isn’t meant to, but that man has found a way to force it into. The groan of a boulder grinding against grit as two hands push it up a mountain.

I had a beginning. I sat. Now I move.

Each rotation is a battle. Each rotation is a wonder. Part of me that had only ever felt the smothering grip of dirt reels at the vastness of space above it. A part that had only known emptiness is embraced by the earth. I didn’t know it could be so soft.

 Stars fall and gather on the ground, crunching beneath me as two shivering hands push onwards. The palms drip with sweat, slipping against me beneath a fiery sky. The world changes. I change with it. A new crack. A missing piece. Leaving bits of myself behind, but finding more of myself in the process.

The summit nears. I crunch against stones I’ve never met, blasted by frigid air you can’t know when sheltered by a well-meaning mountain. There’s another groan. This time, of a boulder reaching for a precipice it was never meant to touch. It’s just there, almost there, almost—

I fall.

Crashing against the mountain, careening down my own trail, I hit a bump and suddenly I’m in the air. Every part of me is light and free and spinning out of control beneath the sky and atop the earth and beneath the sky and atop the—

I sit. So that’s it now. I had a beginning. I sat. I moved. Now I sit.

There was something wonderful though, even in that fall. I can sit happy, I think. Until.

There’s a groan. The groan of a boulder pushing up a mountain. The groan of a man that always finds a way to push. It doesn’t matter that it’s always the same. It was always the same before. At least now I fly.

Even in the failure, while I’m careening down that hill, the whooshing air whispers my gleeful “again, again, again,” as the two hands sigh and whisper, “Again. Again. Again.” That’s another thing about rocks. We fall alone. But the hands and I, together, we rise.