I consented to rolling all the way down the mountainside if pushed off the first precipice because it is only a well-founded reaction to the impulse. A stone as I am may drive up from the mantle and shrivel out of liquid into solid, not unlike those wild berries that have pitched themselves from the brambles over and over onto the dirt, and sit on the edge for eons until some living thing proposes an action. Yesterday I consented to going back down, not to the mantle, to the valley, but I did not anticipate a rolling car and two beautiful people and a plunge through glass and blood spreading from the ruined lap of one and wretched screaming from the other. I consented to rolling all the way down the mountainside because many other stones have done the same and led beautiful lives being sculpted smooth by the river below, but I now know it was a mistake. When I was lifted out of the scene, I expected to be taken to trial as the living things do, guillotined, electrocuted, put in solitary confinement, however they sort themselves in such situations where consent was made and bad things happened. Instead, I was lain on the side of the road along with other barrier stones like a fool. I am much smaller than them, but they have never killed. It was my first deal with a living thing, my first consent in all my billions of years, and I wish I had agreed only to roll a yard or two. Now I just sit and wait and hope that someone will offer to take me back up the mountain.
Thomas Barr is an emerging writer based in New York City and from Tennessee. This is his debut fiction. He is working on a dystopian novel that might end up belonging to literary realism after all. Find his work and connect at tabarr.com.