The human found me beside a dirt road about fourteen miles outside Drewsey, Oregon. I, along with other rounds and broken bits of obsidian, went into the backseat of the Jimmy. That’s a GMC. I traveled away from what had been my home for many years. I landed in the extremes of Eastern Oregon, about ten miles from Vale, county seat of Malheur County. She placed me on a slowly rotting cottonwood stump among other obsidians she had discovered. 

     I could watch the yard toads come and go, gulping down ear wigs, flies, slugs, mosquitoes, whatever they could fit in their mouths. I observed field mice sneaking by and into the cracks and crannies of the house. I wanted to warn them of traps but they ignore the voices of the rocks or cannot hear us. After all, it’s believed we are dead, that nothing lives in us, that we are nothing at all but pretty, useful or in the way.  Sometimes we are valuable, worth fighting wars over or erasing entire groups of people to obtain us. Humans are very weird in their obsessions and hates. 

     But I wish to speak of love, not human hate. 

     My love lives across the way. On yet another stump, with a giant crack down the side that allows the long grasses to penetrate upward in their quest to brush the sky itself. 

     She is a hunk of agate — pink, orange, streaky brown; fair as sunrise over dry hills in late summer. Her songs burble out when the sun finds her each morning, if there are no storms that hide the sun. The heat warms her back and curls along her sides. Her fondest wish is to be turned over to toast her belly. The one who found us and placed us just so never seems to hear this wish as the human yanks the grasses from the lemon balm that spreads out as fast and far as it can. 

     I scream — my love needs to toast her belly — with no attempt at poetry or niceness. The human cannot hear me.  

     We are just rocks to her — just things to place on stumps slowly returning to the dirt. They rot beneath us and we all have to wonder if we will just fall to the earth as well. Perhaps we will sink into the rot, have the little mushrooms hide the world from us.

     Some of the others around me have gone to sleep. We cannot die, even when smashed to dust. Something remains conscious no matter what. Perhaps we are cursed? 

     The stories of the humans suffuse us, littering the very air, the soil, the water, the volcanoes and gorges and mountains and seas. We pass along what we hear in the great lonely stretches, laughing at the nonsense. Not laughter as humans would know or recognize but we rocks chuckle back and forth like the tick of water over stone backs in a stream bed. It’s rather like that. I’ve never been near a stream that I remember but other obsidians have assured me that our laughter is a watery tinkle over rock skin sound. 

     I can hear the agate singing. 

     It’s a sunny June morning with thunderheads building up over Vale. One of the dogs wanders by, heading toward the corner of the fence, where she barks at anything that moves. There used to be three dogs but one has disappeared. She used to lay by the water bucket, near my stump, and sigh, her red-brown hide stretched too tight over her skeleton. I think they took her somewhere and left her. She has not been seen for some time now. Molly. The woman who found me called that red-brown dog Molly. 

     The agate, or Sunshine, as I call her, sings about light on her belly. I try to sing back but my voice is tiny and muffled by the other obsidians that crowd around me. 

     Sunshine goes silent. 

     Where are you, her voice calls out, indignant and powerful. Stop singing when I sing! I sing in the mornings! Let me sing!

     My entire self grows smaller for a bit. I grow afraid to speak at all now as the other rocks chuckle. But my love for this agate, this Sunshine, overcomes that. 

     I wish you to sing!

     My voice is a scratch of spider thread rubbing against the iris leaves; nothing much at all. I try again with all my might.

     I WISH YOU TO SING.

     Two spider threads that rub against the columbine stems! 

     Who is that, she calls and somehow, manages to turn herself a smidge toward all of us on the stump across from her. There’s perhaps ten feet or more distance. She could move herself and tumble down the side of her stump. We rocks can migrate but we’re slow and obstacles delay us even more. But she’d be immobile on the flat plain of grass, dirt, weeds and dog track. How would she roll herself up my stump to confront me? 

     I pretend that she’s a magical witch rock with powers, rather like one of the human stories they so love to tell each other. 

     I’M OVER HERE, I scream with every bit of sound I possess, which is not much at all. Obsidians are quiet things, made of glass and fire. We often have no need to sing or speak or any of that. Some roundels even remember the mountains that blew up around them, forming from the debris. I do not. My memories go back to strange waters receding into the earth and a cold, so cold it cracked the earth. Or perhaps that’s a human story I plucked from the air. 

     Are you the big handsome chunk of mountain glass by the broken plastic chicken?

     Oh! That is not me, I am a small round that peeps through the rest like the field mice peep through the grasses the mower does not slice off. 

     I hear the other fancy rocks that came from somewhere called Nyssa laugh and jeer, adding their voices now. 

     Oooh the obsidians are calling today. Oooh the obsidians want to rub and roll with us. 

     I concentrate. I force myself upward and upward. The rocks around me give way just a tiny bit and I move, I move and I know Sunshine sees this, sees me. The catcalling stops. A blackbird yanks a skinny worm out of the earth near the rosemary plant. The rocks beneath me suddenly shift. I fall downward, down the hole in my stump where I will only witness the slow rot of the wood, not the garden and faucet and sky and Sunshine. I hear the chuckles of the other rocks around me. I despair but I force myself upward as hard as I can, trying to roll over the backs of the others, trying to remain atop the pile of obsidian, not be lost beneath it. 

     I love you, I love you, Sunshine— this I repeat over and over to give myself strength. She has taken up the catcalling but she is not kind or sweet. She is not a wild rose that blooms a week or so. She is not the lilac that blooms a couple days but leaves behind the memory of delicate blossoms dispensing deep smells that the bees still seek even in August. 

     Where are you, little black rock? Roll over here, let’s see you!

     I fall over the side of my stump.

     I fall into the mud and dead leaves and tangle of weeds the human has not yet cleared. I rest for a day or two, so exhausted I wonder if I will waken after I fall asleep. Sleep does arrive for me if I overdo it or exert myself too much. I go away, I become aware of the world again. Perhaps I will not return from wherever I go when I sleep. Perhaps that is death? I am content to die if it means I am a bit closer to the agate I love. I am full of corn. I am covered in corn. I never understood why love should be corny but humans often create phrases we rocks find unknowable puzzles. 

     I am corny for Sunshine.

     Rain drops. The ground shudders as thunder explodes just above the tallest part of the ancient cottonwood near the house. I wait yet in the mud, noting a small toad hiding against the tin side of the house, for the storm to pass. It waits beneath the heavy leaves of the purple and white iris. Birds call back and forth but have taken to the trees or gone to ground to wait out the storm as well. 

     I try to roll myself toward Sunshine’s stump. 

     My strength seems gone but I have to keep trying. What else is there? I hear the other obsidians grumbling at my wanting to travel at all. But I cannot wait for the human to move me or for something to happen, years from now, that will get me closer to the one I love. 

     I also cannot explain this love nor do I want to. She is something to me. That’s all I need. 

     It takes years.

     It takes me two years to get to the faucet. The dog bucket once ground me down into the earth but I pushed myself upward and upward and toward Sunshine and her collected others on the stump with the split down the side. I watched the thyme and German oregano grow and be harvested, to be replaced by delphiniums that had to be propped up with odd sticks and blue yarn. I watched the old black dog sit down and not be able to get back up and be carried away and not come back, like Molly.

     I watched a young dog upset and then delight the other dog and watched it chase the cat about until the cat scratched it quite badly and the new puppy avoided the cat. I rolled myself ever closer and closer as the dog drama played out. 

     There, the edge of Sunshine’s stump felt against my side.

     Old leaves fluttered by me in the wind. The pumpkins ripened nearby, competing with the raspberry bushes for sprawling decadence. 

     Sunshine?

     My voice so tiny and weak, yet I spoke to the one I loved. Is that courage or foolishness? Perhaps it is both. 

     It’s a cloudy day, Sunshine called out. I was asleep. I’m very old. I was asleep.

     I rested against her stump, content to know on sunny mornings she would sing. I could witness the sky and the travelings of toads, mice, and birds nearby. I wished somehow to roll upward, defy reality itself and present myself to the agate I adored. I wished for bird wings and mouse claws and cat strength and dog height. I wished to be more than some small round of obsidian.

     I’m here, I whispered so as not to wake Sunshine on this cloudy, windy day. 

    I’m here I’m here I’m here. 

[Ann Wuehler has written six novels — Aftermath: Boise, Idaho, Remarkable Women of Brokenheart Lane, the House on Clark Boulevard, Oregon Gothic, the Adventures of Grumpy Odin and Sexy Jesus and Owyhee Days. “The Blackburne Lighthouse” appears in Brigid Gate’s Crimson Bones anthology. “The Snake River Tale” was included in Along Harrowed Trails. “The Ghost of John Burnberry” appears in Penumbric. “The Caesar’s Ghost Quest” made it into the October 2023 World of Myth. “Cassie’s Story” was just accepted by Great Weather For Media. “Mouthpiece” will appear in the Horror Zine’s summer 2024 edition. ]