Rocks, Nicole Griffin

 

Little Jackie loved rocks. He had a cardboard box full of carefully curated minerals—graphite, quartz, pyrite, jasper, chalcedony, hematite—and a scope to examine their crystal structures, the microscopic peaks and valleys that made each one unique. His shelves collected specimens plucked from the banks of streams, purloined from the depths of quarries, and combed from waves at the shore. 

    His dream of being a geologist was impractical, guidance counselors said. Better to be a pharmacist. But pharmacy was not geology, and so Jack drifted away from college like silt washed out to sea. There he would spend his life bobbing without a rudder on an ocean of dreams, the solid, stony shore of success ever-elusive.

    Still, the secrets buried within the earth’s crust beckoned to his restless soul.         

    He journeyed in a camper van with his wife, cruising through the variegated stone towers of the American West and fancying himself a pioneer, the first explorer to see it all on horseback.

    He crouched by the roadside with his daughter, searching for trilobites amid freshly cracked shale.

    He collected books on mining and imagined himself a 49er, riches gleaming gold in his pan. 

    He drove his Jeep up the crags of the Rockies, facing steep drop-offs and dramatic vistas with bravado. 

    He dreamed of retreating to a mountain cabin, his only fellows the bighorn sheep who strolled across the alpine meadows and clung sure-footedly to the cliffsides.

    Instead, he spent his final years a hermit in the dank cave of his bedroom, cancer cracking his bones apart like geodes—his precious collection, the work of a lifetime, gathering dust on a shelf.

    Now Jack’s name is chiseled on the granite wall of a mausoleum. And his ashes gambol over the smooth, worn stones of a rushing river, where years ago Little Jackie cast a line.

 

 

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Nicole Griffin lives in Arlington, Virginia and works for the US government by day.

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