Small Pebble

For the first time in many, many millennia, I am going to cause a scene. I’ve got plenty of energy for some much-needed divine intervention.

I watch from a distance as two opposing forces meet with malice and bloodshed, weapons brandished, nothing I haven’t seen before. So typical, it makes my whole being seethe.

Thousands of years ago, men like the ones obliterating themselves right now would invoke my name, trembling, around hearthstones before storms and battles. They'd chant into ceremonial flames, forging iron to blade.

It’s almost sweet, now, how they would call on me to safeguard communities before natural disasters, and to assert freedom from fate at the hands of others beneath my holy stars.

Now, I am mentioned offhand by scholars. I am referenced as a predecessor to other, more important gods. Hah! They have no idea that every time my name is spoken, written, or thought, I shudder, my energy still unclaimed. Power rolls through me in thunder, spilling into the skies. Lighting is on the tips of my fingers, ready for me to execute the truth—what I was created to do, those endless years ago.

They feel like minutes, now, and it’s like I’m young again, my form thrashing into existence from lightning and thunder, cold and hot fronts. I blinked into immortality at the sound of the universe howling, a proclamation of my indomitable nature. Silence fell upon the earth, but not before it could scream: Tomultus.

God of natural chaos, ruler of the sword and skies.

-

HI. My name is ISABELLA! I am nine and a half years old. This summer, I’m going to do lots of things like: swim at the pool, eat ice cream, and have sleepovers with my friend Ellie from dance.

She lives by all the big houses. I used to live over there with my mom and my dad. Now it takes almost the entire Kelly Clarkson album to drive to. Ellie has a sister. I have no sisters. When Ellie can’t play, Mom tells me to knock on our new neighbor’s door. They are twins, and they are one year younger than me. I don’t know them that well, but they have a Slip N Slide. They don’t look similar because Aidan is a boy and Julia is a girl. I like Julia better. Aidan is mean sometimes.

I wish I had a brother or a sister because it’s more fun to play with someone. I would even let it share a room with me. And we could make forts and whisper after Mom tucks me in and turns off the lights, like Ellie and her sister when I sleep over. It’s so quiet in my room at night, and it’s so dark.

Mom says that because she and Dad aren’t together anymore, she’s not gonna have another baby. I asked her how she knows that, and she says she just does.

So now I want a puppy. I want a puppy because I think it would be cute and nice to me, and it would be happy when I pick it up. I asked my mom, and she said no, and that I should wait until I am old. But I am already old because she lets me have sleepovers, and she didn't last summer.

-

I used to be merciful and good. I felt pity and found valor in protection.

But centuries drew on. Another conflict, another disaster, another year, another scribble on my tired limestone walls, my spirit invoked more frequently for worse causes.

Flood flatlands to ruin harvests.

Smite this opposing tribe’s leader.

Break the earth, turn conspicuous city walls to dust.

Burn the village of the oppressor.

I was feared and beloved, dancing on the stage of a power imbalance. If there was any differentiation between senseless and sensible violence, I was its thinning thread of a line, until it finally snapped. I blame myself for what came next, the great cold that came and covered everything.

For the first time, there was no wind. Just time, frozen; lives lost. I had no purpose. There was no one, neither rich man nor poor, to beg for their life or request to ruin another’s. There was not one person left to impress.

And for the first time in a long time, I felt peace. I fled, finding a quiet bank of sky to languish away. All that time gives one plenty of opportunity to reflect.

I mull this over, tucking the spent ages and eons neatly away into a pocket of my essence.

I’ve kept watch over the people, the societies that stretch and grow on top of each other. From here, it is one big mass, creatures within that are so insistent on being categorized separately from one another.

Alas, even in the corner of the universe where I rested for so long, there is no such thing as a vacuum.

Now, no one knows my name. No one summons me. But I am here, on the doorstep of catastrophe, finally ready to fight. This time, on the ground, in full form. I take my last breath in my current form, thanking the sky for its refuge. Then I’m screeching down to Earth, ready to mark my return.

-

I GOT A PUPPY!!!! MOMMY GOT ME A PUPPY!!!

-

There has been a grave mistake.

-

My puppy’s name is Pebble. Mom helped me come up with it. He is mostly gray with some brown and black and white spots. Pebble is very nervous. He doesn’t wag his tail very much, and Mom says it’s because he’s still getting used to the house. She says he was rescued from a storm and probably misses his mom, which I understand.

I begged for Pebble because when I go over to Dad’s, I get really worried, and itchy, but in my mind. I miss my mom, but like, extra. What if she doesn’t come to pick me up? What if I never see her again? What if she’s dead? Dad doesn’t get it, and I think it makes him feel bad. I don’t know why, but I just feel better when she’s around. Mom says now I have a Pebble in my pocket to help me feel brave.

I hope Pebble knows that he is safe in his new home and that he is brave, too. To help move things along, I have been carrying him around the house. I showed him my room first, which is where he's going to sleep. I also showed him:

The basement

The kitchen

The downstairs bathroom

The freezer

The shed

My bookshelf

He is very little and long, so he can’t see very well. So I showed him things he might be curious about. I hope he likes it so far, even if he is afraid.

-

Despite my notorious nature (notorious, at least, about fifteen millennia ago), I see myself as a peaceful creature. Between the storms, on a rare day no one wrung my spirit like a rag, I’d go somewhere quiet.

I’d find sprawling pastures or waters that whispered breezes to gentle giants that didn’t mind my presence. Aurochs and elephants. Whales, if I didn’t mind getting a little wet.

It was so quiet. It was all so beautiful back then.

This can’t exist without me, I’d reason. There is no real peace without chaos. My existence is to provide contrast to this.

I’d also visit past haunts. In the ruins of villages, green would creep back in, sometimes lush canopies growing over cursed grounds, renewed. I’d go back to these places and find bees carrying pollen, flowers hanging sickly sweet in the air.

This couldn’t have happened without me.

A force larger than me didn’t care about cause and effect—the bitter cold came and it stayed. By the time the land started to thaw in bits and pieces, revealing rock carvings, rivers, and flourishing undergrowth, I decided there was enough beauty across the whole face of the earth to never need me again. It was a relief, I thought, to prove myself wrong.

And then I watched as a creature began to cross the globe, and it steadily fell apart.

-

He is still very nervous, I think. He does not want to be petted very much, so he lies next to me, and I tell him all the things I’m nervous about, too.

Like when I’m the last one after school, and the teacher has to stay late because of me.

And when my math test comes back, and there’s red pen all over the page.

And when the seat at lunch is taken, so I sit farther away from the girls in my class and have less people to talk to. I imagine what pebble might be nervous about. Like being scared of being stepped on. Or not knowing that when I leave to go to dance, I’m coming back later. Being lost again in a storm.

“It’s scary to be little,” I tell him. He looks at me with his big, round eyes and lays his head on his paws.

-

I do not like the kind she comes from. Their foolish, self-centered brigades are heartless, senseless, and stupid. After long enough, I couldn’t spectate anymore. If I were made to ruin lives and burn ground for new growth, then now is as good a time as any.

From my macro view, I've seen it all, what they’re capable of. For millennia, I’ve seen people enslave their neighbors. I've heard their whispers of othering, and sometimes, their screams. I’ve watched figures rise to power, stumble, fall, and rise again when they never deserved it in the first place. When someone leans down to touch me, all I can wonder is what this person has done. If not in this life, what about the last? Who is this person when no one else is looking? I am looking.

Today I burned through my rage, running laps around the yard. Over and over and over again. To remind myself how generating power feels. But all I pick up is mud.

Afterwards, she wraps me in a towel and carries me to the bath, sudsing me with bubblegum soap until she squeals with delight.

Her name is Isabella. When her mother turns out the light, she opens my cage and lifts me into her blankets. She talks to me until her eyes go soft and she lies motionless. Then I let myself sleep.

-

Kelly Clarkson plays in the car. It’s the song that talks about how someone finds her where no one else was looking. It’s my favorite. My least favorite is the one where she talks about the sidewalk. It makes me cry.

Pebble pants in the seat next to me. He’s drooling all over; I think the car makes him nauseous. I give him a piece of a treat that looks like bacon. “We’re almost there,” I whisper.

We pull into Dad’s gravelly driveway. Mom says she’ll call me to say good night. It’s just for the weekend, but I look over at Pebble, and suddenly I feel sick, too.

He crawls into my lap and drips his gross saliva on my pants, but it also makes me laugh.

-

I’ve seen his type. Proud. Stern. Resentful. He gets mad when she garnishes shredded cheese over my meal. He asks her how her mother is, and gets quiet halfway through dinner. He doesn't ask her how she is doing. Isabella keeps talking for a while, and eventually stops too.

I don’t leave her side, except to relieve myself.

They put on a movie and sit quietly until he proclaims it’s time for her to go to bed. She protests, and he says he doesn’t want to hear it.

She doesn’t speak as I curl up next to her. It isn’t until after she hugs her dad and calls her mom that the light turns off, and she finally exhales a deep, pent-up breath. I can feel her shudders before I hear them, muffled by her pillow.

I wiggle close to her, and she wipes her hot tears away on my neck. I let her pet me and stroke my belly. I believe she is one of the few gentle ones left.

Once she falls asleep, I slip out from her arms, off the bed, and through the sliver of light into the hallway. I feel power crackle behind my shoulder blades as I stalk down the steps for the first time since I’ve landed here. I don’t know what I’ll do, or what I’m capable of. I still don’t know why I’m this, but I know what I am underneath it all. Angry.

I slink through the house to the padded chair in which he feebly postures himself.

He’s there, just as I expected. Shoulders slumped, vulnerable.

He’s crying, too.

He looks up at me from his palm, pressed against his forehead as if to keep it all in. Utterly mournful. He’s neither pleased nor displeased to see me.

I get closer. I see Isabella in him, the corners of his mouth, his eyebrows. The storm inside me quiets. His lips form a straight line, and he pats his lap. He's like her; he wants company.

"Come on up."

Behind my anger, smaller, I find something I haven't felt in a long time.

A while later, after he dozes off, I go back up to her. She stirs when I return, pulling me into her small arms.

I want to tell her, “It’s scary to be big, too.”

-

Pebble lies next to me on a blanket in the backyard. The grass pokes at us under the cloth. I’ve been teaching him tricks. He knows how to sit, and lay down, and paw. He isn’t so good at stay. I repeat it over and over, taking slow steps back. But he just tumbles over himself to end up back at my feet. Mom says to be patient. He’ll learn; he needs time.

-

The grass tickles. I’m still not used to having such tactile appendages, let alone four of them, and a soft belly with organs underneath. The world is less vibrant through my new eyes. But still, as the clouds pass, and the trees rustle, I let myself relax.

I have never owned anything before. I sink my fangs into a fuzzy, silly thing. I don’t know what it is, but it’s mine. And they seem to like it when I exert my anger onto this, rather than a shoe, the pillows, or my favorite, toilet paper. Those things are not mine. This is mine. I look up at Isabella, who looks up at the clouds.

I have never been owned before, either. It’s trivial to think about. Who could own me, when in my ancient form, my footsteps could drop the leaves from trees in an instant?

Now, my short legs move swiftly and paradoxically without any speed. My body has no urgency. I have little strength. For the first time in all my years, I am fragile. For the first time, someone picks me up and holds me.