The Rocks
“Oh,” she said, staring out the window as the rain tapped gently on the glass, asking to be let in. “The rocks are back.” And she was right, though Harold wanted to point out that they had never left, that they had simply been scattered on the ground yesterday instead of stacked up as they were now.
The rocks were huge. Harold was certain he could budge one if he tried. He had tried, after all. But he was equally certain he couldn’t lift one, at least not more than a few inches off the ground, and certainly not with the sort of muscular stability it would take to play Jenga with them.
They stood there in the wet. Three pillars. About a dozen rocks in each. Maria smiled at them.
Harold flexed his hand around his knife and cut into his pancakes with a style of viciousness usually reserved for crimes of passion. He didn’t like how quickly she had accepted them. How quickly they made her smile.
As a child living in the house, he had always assumed it was neighbors playing pranks. Adults were so much stronger, then, and it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that one or two of them were occasionally playing a game. As he grew older and matched their size, that theory lost out to a host of others, before he finally settled on simple bewilderment. Bewilderment gave way to a month-long period of wonder, and then firmly settled into resentment, where it had stayed for the past 8 years.
When his mother took ill, it was Maria who suggested they move in with her so she wouldn’t have to go to a hospice. Maria, being a nurse by trade, was, of the two of them, the authority on these kinds of matters, so he packed his bags and loaded hers in the car. The rocks were on the ground then, and he wondered if he had imagined the whole thing as one of those stories one tells oneself of childhood, but the first morning, there they were, stacked.
Maria hadn’t noticed them being scattered as they had gotten in late the night before and thought they were simply marvelous. Local color, sculpture, found materials. She took pictures after a lunch spread with Harold and his mother. His mother smiled, though if it was at Maria or the rocks, Harold couldn’t say.
She wanted to call police several days later to report the vandals, but Harold told her it wouldn’t matter. That was two years ago.
After his mother died, the rocks moved less frequently. Harold wondered if there was a connection. If the property was mourning. Then he remembered he was supposed to be ignoring the rocks, like a rival sibling, waving his arms in the backseat, coming close, but never quite touching him.
She leaned over and kissed him.
“We should move back to the city,” she said, her hand on his cheek.
He grasped her tender fingers in his scratchy palm. She drew his hand to her belly.
“I don’t want to have to explain the rocks to her.”
Harold’s eyes went wide and Maria smiled for him.
