The Rock

This will be my friend’s Secret Santa gift. The requirements are that a gift must be found or made. I’ve done both, finding a rock and making a story:

This is a rock. But wait until I tell you the story of this rock. It has a history. You may ask yourself why I’m not keeping a rock with history for myself, but stories are meant to be shared, and this rock has done its time with me (like a penitent) and now it is time for it to move on.

This rock was collected in an occupied country by a young man of about fifteen. He’d seen his uncle lose his job across the border, and the thing is, without a pass for a job, you couldn’t get across to look for a job. Lose your job, lose the pass, lose the pass, lose the possibility to find a job.

His uncle was now offering services for those who could still get across the border to earn real cash. If they stole something (because that was the only way to get even the slightest bit ahead) it then needed to be fenced, and his uncle would connect a buyer with the seller for a small fee. It was mostly small electronic goods that could be slipped into a pocket, but some of the cleaning ladies would grab things as large as a toaster (a bit useless with the lack of reliable electricity where they lived, but it was nice to show off), skillets, memory sticks (with possibly exploitable information) and one time a slightly drugged but very beautiful pure white Persian cat.

The village argued all day over the cat, which was too small for a pair of gloves, and no one needed a hat that left bits of fluff falling into one’s eyes. While the discussion of what the cat would soon be reduced to dragged on, the object in question woke up enough to jump out the window. It now lived out by the massive pile of refuse that had grown up around the village, since there were no services to take trash anywhere and there was just as much useless plastic here as in any other place in the world.

Because of the trash, the whole village was going to be cleaned up and out, quite thoroughly. Bulldozers were announced for the following week. It seems that toxins from the trash were leaking into the water table, and poisoning those who felt they had more right to live there than the ones who’d been there before they’d arrived, which included the boy and his uncle’s family.

When the bulldozers arrived at the border of the village, the women had mostly already put what they could carry on their backs and were beginning the long trek to other relatives, just as they had welcomed the relatives who had arrived in this village when their own had been destroyed.

The boy, the young man, didn’t want to leave. It wasn’t that he loved this place so much, but it was where his parents were buried, and his sisters. He could objectively see that the only hope for the place was revving its engines at the edge of the village, but he didn’t want to go. So he picked up a rock, this rock, and threw it at the bulldozers. Then he was arrested, and no one has seen him since.

And you may ask yourself, how do I know that it was this rock? The answer is….

I don’t. None of this is true.

Except that it felt true, didn’t it? And that’s the tragedy. A story so sad, and so awful, and so very wrong, also feels so entirely possible, rational, feasible.

So take this rock home and give it a better story. It was the rock that stopped dead the front tire of your bike and made you fall off, and Rachel helped you up. It was the first time you’d ever spoken to her, and the rest is history. It was the rock that held down the piece of paper for your aunt, when your mother was expecting her for tea, but her water broke, and she needed to get to the hospital to give birth to you. It was the rock that you put under your first tiny model rocket, to raise it above the till so you could see its silhouette in the window when you woke up. Maybe it’s that rock now.

(The cat survived, by the way.)