Rock, Fire, Water

Edge City/November 2024

Before Maeve, Hastings had been very, very lonely.

Maeve from the geology club. Maeve with her feathered red hair, flecks of gold in her green eyes.

He kissed her one night after a hike, her face flickering in campfire light.

 “Your hands are your super power,” she said, “They make me feel safe.”

He admitted his fingers had grown sensitive from all the rock work.

Touch was important, maybe more than sight.

He ran one finger along her face, neck, grazing a tender earlobe.

Fourteen months later, he removed a hunk of diopside from a larger piece of rock, carved it into two small tear drop shapes, attached them to thin wires.

He pushed them toward her across a table in a crumpled paper bag.

“I made them. They’re black star diopside,” he said, looking at her expectantly.

He wanted her to know what he was trying to say, to ask.

A tear ran down her cheek. She stood suddenly, excused herself.

Hastings sat like a stone, scratching his beard. He’d never known what to say, and he knew this frustrated her, and everyone else.

Still, he did not follow her. He lingered there with the sun streaming through the café windows, inhaling her spicy scent hanging in the space she’d left behind.

***

Somehow, the stones prepared him for the loss. The stones, with their endless presence, their wisdom attained from the ages, also revealed some opposite state, a terrible emptiness. His own parents had died, his aunt and uncle who raised him had been distant. There was so much depth and history and beauty in stones, and there was perseverance, hope. He could hold them in his hands, comfort himself, guarding against the void.

Years later, when he heard Maeve died in a fire, he believed the stones he’d given her had survived. Not long after that, on one of his many lonely hikes, when the long green tremolite fingers drooped down from a ledge and tapped him on the shoulder, he was not surprised.

“It’s me,” Maeve said, and Hastings wept with joy.

***

At the library where he cared for the Geology department’s famous collection, there was an old emeritus professor named Dr. Spawn who liked to talk of the old days, his dead wife, his children who never called. Hastings was the perfect coffee partner, sitting slowly chewing the cake with which Spawn lured him from his dusty office every Wednesday.

“It always sounds to me that you’re talking to someone in that office of yours,”  Spawn said repeatedly.

“Naaa, just the radio,” Hastings said, brushing crumbs from his threadbare flannel shirt.

Spawn nodded.

Hastings didn’t tell him about his companionable Maeves, the countless golden specks, the variations, multitudes of rocks lining the walls who chittered and jabbered, sharing long stories about the origins of the universe, space, and time, and love, of course love. They filled his mind with beauty and light, his nostrils with the smell of spice.

Spawn yammered on about his own Earthly experiences while Hastings itched to return to the more vibrant conversation of his Maeves.

“You want to come over to my place? For dinner this Friday? I can get a pizza?”

Spawn looked sadly at Hastings for a moment.

Hastings’ heart broke recognizing the depth of the man’s loneliness.

He was lucky to have all of his beautiful stones, his Maeves.

Spawn had nothing but rotting paper and wood and fading memories, bitterness.

“I don’t think so,” Hastings said, a kind of numb haze suffocating him.

When he returned to his office, the Maeves judged him in a tomb of expected disappointment, abrupt, endless silence.

***

Time passed.

Hastings had taken a leave of absence, spent most days in his quiet trailer, in bed.

One morning a ray of weak sunlight inspired hope. He trudged up the hill searching the ground until a twinkling occurred near his right boot. He produced a small brush, dusted the sparkle’s source.  He touched, explored, reveling in the juts and crevices of quartz. Its brilliant bits, like golden foil stuck to each end, revealed identity: a Herkimer Diamond. He held it to his cheek, ear, he smelled it. Half relieved by its stoney silence, its lack of Maeveness, he slid it into his pocket.

Back at the trailer, Hastings found a teenager sleeping in a shaft of sunlight in the folding chair he kept beside the door. Her long red hair touched both sharp shoulders. Her mouth turned in a frown as she slept.

He surveyed her, excited anxiety tickled his arms like bird feathers.

She startled, wiped her mouth with a hand, stared at him with green gold eyes.

“Hastings? Hastings Smith?” she said.

He nodded.

“I’m Lilly. My mother was Maeve. Maeve Gravely.”

Maeve’s face suddenly emerged from Lilly’s.

“I don’t have money for you.”

“I don’t want money,” she said, her face cold as stone.

“Then?”

“I was hoping you’d want to meet me. Um. Maybe I could stay?” she said, looking around sheepishly, “I’m good with plants. I could grow a garden. Grow you vegetables?”

With no words available, he reached in his pocket, pulled out the Herkimer Diamond.

She turned it in her hands, squinted up at him in the late afternoon light.

She seemed to realize this was all he would offer, all he’d say, so she sighed, shoved the stone in her backpack.

He considered offering coffee but noticed her studying something, a phone?

“The Uber’s coming.”

He didn’t understand at first. She spoke some other language.

 “You might need to walk down the road a bit,” he said.

Her back turned. She moved away, shoulders hunched.

After she gradually disappeared from his sight, he crouched to the ground, gasping, listening, his hands sifting, searching through the sea of small rocks beneath him.

Maeve! Lilly?

He wanted to call out, to be heard, for the girl to come back to him, but he could only find his damned predictable silence.

***

Eventually he made a circle of his best stones, piled fragrant branches and old wood, set it ablaze. He held his hands out to the warmth, his spirit rising up, colluding with smoke.

Perhaps chances in this world were plentiful, like stones, he thought, appearing steadily, one after another, when the time was right. He’d have to be patient. He’d have to keep watch. Perhaps someday he’d be offered another chance to drink the water of words, and he’d take that chance without hesitation and he’d douse his charred remains. He’d reach across the table and touch Maeve’s lone tear, and he’d become that tear, and he’d be alive, healed, at last.