THE PEBBLE

I wanted to write a story giving life to an inanimate object. Here it is.

"What's this?" The man picked up the smooth, beige egg that lay on the mantelpiece.
"It's a pebble."
"I can see that!" A shiver of irritation passed from his palm into the pebble, making it vibrate uncomfortably. "But why is it here?" The woman's voice came again. "Stella picked it up. She wants to paint it."
The warm hand replaced the trophy on the mantel shelf. The fireplace was constructed of York stone, the only material in the room with which the pebble felt some affinity. Its first resting-place in the cottage had been the wooden table. The pebble had known driftwood, salted and seasoned by the sea, but that dark oak from some alien grove, polished with beeswax, was a far cry from the seashore.
When the girl, Stella, had picked up the pebble from the beach her warm flesh had seemed intriguing, so much softer and more tangible than the heat of the sun. The pebble had experienced the touch of naked feet before, but fleetingly. Now the girl was letting it rest in her padded palm, turning it over, stroking it with her thumb. For a few moments the pebble felt special, the chosen one, then it was dropped into the darkness of a bag, a darkness - far removed from that of the night sky - in which there was a crude animal smell not unlike that of the dog that had once squatted on its home patch.
It took the pebble a while to understand that it was being kidnapped. It had known towels and garments, flung down carelessly, smelly vegetable fibres that soon became impregnated with the odours of sea-salt and sea-weed, but this was different. There was a swinging motion that bore no resemblance to the usual rough and tumble in the breakers, a disorienting defiance of gravity, followed by the shocking realisation that the sound of the sea was fading, for the first time in its existence. It was losing its heartbeat.
Then the light had come again, bringing with it another world, crammed with strange objects and peculiar smells. An older woman's hand had cradled the pebble's flat ovoid, then the man's. Did they have any idea how many strokes of mother ocean had caressed its substance towards that satined shape? Did the girl realise that she had interrupted the agelong process of perfecting its form and texture? The pebble knew in its flinty heart that it had not yet reached its fullest point of being, that state of mineral exaltation when, enlightened by the eye of heaven, it would sing the same song as the sea. After that, it would be content to let itself slowly disintegrate until, smaller than a grain of sand, it would be reabsorbed into the eternal brine.
All that was now impossible. A different destiny awaited the pebble: its fate was in the hands of the girl, Stella.
For several days the pebble remained on the mantelpiece, along with the harsh brass candlesticks, with their sickly wax tapers, and the papers stuffed into the Indian cedarwood letter rack. The pebble could tell that the other objects had been denatured through continual contact with human beings. The wood had almost lost the flavour of the forest, and only faintly did the candles hum of the hive. The latest arrival on the mantelpiece was determined not to share their shame.
It was soon obvious that peace descended on the cottage whenever the two women were alone together, only to be shattered by the man's presence into barbed remarks and splintery questions. The woman had once loved the man, and out of their union had come the girl, Stella. The pebble was familiar with the cycle of procreation from the fishes that had swarmed over it at high tide, but up to now it had appeared as an endless fertility dance, brood upon brood. This sterile arithmetic of one plus one makes three was perplexing, disturbing. Even more strangely, each of the procreators appeared to claim exclusive ownership of their progeny. Was that why friction and discord reigned whenever the trio were together?
One afternoon the weather changed. A rainstorm lashed the stone walls of the cottage and the pebble envied them their wind and water bath, for there was a tang of the sea in both. The girl said to her mother, "I'm bored. What can I do?"
"What about your pebble?" came the reply. "I thought you were going to paint it."
"Yes, I was." The girl picked up the pebble with sticky-sweet fingers. Once a drop from an orange ice lolly had fallen onto its surface as it lay on the beach, the same sticky sweetness. After that the salty tide had been a welcome baptism.
"Use the acrylic paints, Stella. Then the colours will be nice and bright. What are you going to paint?"
"I don't know yet."
The pebble knew. It had a flash from another stone carved with mystic runes, on a hotter shore at a distant, more primitive time. The message was received, but not fully understood. Understanding would come only with the completion of the painting.
Soon the pebble lay on two sheets of pappy newspaper, and Stella began stroking the paint onto its pale skin, working with intense concentration. She drew an oval in the middle, then wavy lines all around it like the sun's corona. As she sat back to inspect her own artistry, the woman came to look over her shoulder.
"Oh, how clever! You've really brought that stone to life, Stella. Put it back on the mantelpiece to dry."
The pebble felt very different with a face: now its destiny was written in its inscrutable features. It was beginning to belong to the human world, but in an altogether different way from the abject submission shown by the other occupants of the mantelpiece. It could feel the first stirrings of untried potential, like a foetus quickening in the womb. The hand of the girl had transformed it into a thing of power, whose emanations were affecting the outside world. No longer did the woods and waxes and linens and papers merely impinge on its consciousness, like the waves. Now it was capable of making an impact itself: look to your molecules you candles and chairs, curtains and cushions! This was the message flashed from ancient times, 'Raise the stone, and there thou shalt find me. Cleave the wood, and there am I.'
Stella was pleased with her handiwork. When she was alone in the room she would step up and gaze at her pebble as if into a mirror. Then her father came home and she waited, expectant, for him to see this latest proof of her cleverness. At last he came to pick it up, his brown eyes staring down, wide with recognition.
"This is marvellous, Stella. It's Medusa, the Gorgon, isn't it? How witty of you to have painted her on a stone."
Stella made quite a pet of her pebble, taking it up to her bedroom to act as a prop in her games, but always returning it to the mantelpiece afterwards as she liked everything to be in its proper place. She enjoyed scaring her friends with it, "One look at her and you'll be turned to
st-o-o-one!" She seemed disappointed when it didn't happen.
Within the pebble, however, something was happening: a mindless struggling towards life. It had been given a gender, a name, a title. Clearly the pebble was now identified with the women of the house and had some role to play, although as yet she was ignorant of its nature.
Gradually the process revealed itself: the mystery of transmutation in reverse. Through her newly-acquired face the pebble wielded the serpentine power of Kali the Destroyer. Under her subtle influence flowers began to dry and harden in the vase instead of wilting softly; fruits were petrified in the bowl to form a still-life; even the cat grew stiffer in its movements, more monumental in repose. After being acted upon for centuries, the pebble began to know what it meant to be alive.
Even so it was some weeks before the pebble suspected that she might be affecting the people in the cottage as well. Between the man and the woman the pebble perceived a chilling distance, a cold crystallisation of the remains of their love. They hardly conversed or looked at each other, although they continued to communicate with their child, each acting more cloyingly loving towards her when the other was present. The atmosphere in the cottage became charged with hoarded resentments and unspoken accusations which even young Stella seemed to sense, for her face wore an absent, troubled expression much of the time.
Then one night there came another storm, this time inside the cottage. Like sparks off flint the words flew across the room, flashes of pure hatred, rumbles of murderous intent. The gorgon-snakes fed off the black energy and became more virulently green, giving the pebble a faint metallic taste of raw passion as if her substance were shot through with a vein of iron. Fuelled with anger and blinded by her own distorted vision that had turned frailty into evil, the woman groped her way along the mantelpiece; her hand closed on the pebble. With all her manic strength she hurled it at the man. It missed and went crashing through the window into the shadowed garden beyond, where it landed beneath a rosebush.
There was quiet after that. Next morning the man appeared at the door, the basilisk stare in his onyx-brown eyes a reflection of his calcified heart. Soon afterwards he went away and did not return.
Stella found her pebble some days later and that afternoon she took it back down to the beach in a bucket. Stella was teaching herself to skim pebbles across water. She sent several flat stones bouncing over the waves then picked up the Medusa pebble. She had made that one for her father. After a brief hesitation she pulled back her arm and threw that too.
Mother ocean received back her tainted child impassively. The process of disintegration would continue just the same, perfect and imperfect alike. All would come to nothing in the fullness of time. It was only on the surface that the hurly-burly occurred; in the pristine depths all was serenity.
The snakes became sea-serpents and wriggled away. The painted features were blanked out. An ordinary pebble dropped like a stone, was concussed on the seabed and lost consciousness.
©Viv Doyle 2017
Photo courtesy of Pixabay