The Stone

By Peter Bowden


They said the stone had been here before names were given to mountains, before rivers learned their curves. It sat where the world’s spine broke the surface, a single gray breath rising from the earth. Men passed it with spears once. Later, with plows. Later still, with questions. No one remembered who placed it there. They only remembered that it had never moved. Moss learned its alphabet on the stone’s skin. Rain wore its soft handwriting into the cracks. Time leaned against it the way tired travelers lean against a wall, and even time seemed to rest.

At night, the stone gathered stories. The wind brought them. So did footsteps, prayers, and the long sighs of those who had lost something they could not name. Some swore the stone was once a god, punished into silence. Others said it was the first thought the world ever had, hardened. Children pressed their ears to it and claimed they heard the sea, though no sea lived for hundreds of miles. Old men touched it with trembling hands and felt the weight of every road they had not taken. The stone did not speak, but it remembered.

And so the years passed, and the empires, and the small, bright lives between them. The stone remained. Not to command. Not to judge. Only to witness. For in a world that breaks and builds and forgets, there must be at least one thing that does not move, one heart of earth that holds the shape of forever. And if you listen, truly listen, you can hear it still, telling the slow, patient story of being.


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