Everything and Nothing

Everything and Nothing

In his youth, the boy had been a worshiper of rocks. His father had given him his collection, something like a cigar box the boy thought was a chessboard. The father told his son he'd had it for over 40 years, and every time he looked at it he remembered his youth, when he found fool's gold by the creek. He had wrapped it up in a rag and given it to his mother, as a gift. But those were just memories, and he had no use for memories anymore, and so the collection was given to his son, the boy. The boy learned how to know a rock by color and weight; to identify lime and sandstone; to wash and dust and care for rocks like treasure.
Everyday the boy dug into the soft dirt around his school, hoping for an emerald, a ruby, quartz, diamonds. By springtime, he had mined the length of the baseball field, caked dirt permanently under his fingers, which had swollen to the size of boys' hands three times his age, and found nothing. But he continued. One day, the boy was resting under a bush of honeysuckle, which grew around a chain link fence. Through the fence and leaves the boy could see the other children playing softball, hear the dull tunk of metal against leather, the softball slowly plummeting like a fat bird. Gretchen was there, with the red pig-tails and brown overalls, a German girl resented and feared for what passed as exoticism in elementary school. At this time, she walked over and sat with the boy.
To him, she wore a crown of light when she stood in the sun, and for her, this daily excavation was the scant human interaction for which she starved. They never talked; Gretchen would hold up a rock and the boy would squint at it for a few minutes. Inevitably, he would shake his head and the rock would be discarded, being not a gem, not a ruby, not a treasure of any sort. The boy and Gretchen eventually moved past the ball field, across the ditch, past the grass so short it never grew back, past the dead blackberry bush, and all the way to the street paved with cars, and back again. This entire endeavor lasted all summer, and was rooted in silence the entire time.
It was an autumn evening when they at last returned to the honeysuckle bush and the chain-link fence. The bush was alight with an orange glow. Gretchen ran ahead of the boy towards the bush, and she disappeared for a moment. The boy looked around the field, at the other children, and they all looked back. Gretchen returned with a firefly in her hands, held together as if in prayer. As she held her hands up to show the boy she felt the firefly in her hands getting larger, heavier. All around them, the light blushed from an orange glow to green. The boy felt as if he were sliding, as if he were stretching out, like ice. The children were there on the field, and Gretchen's foster parents were there, waiting in their car, and Gretchen's real parents were there, spying from the shadows of the dead blackberry bush, and the boy's father was there, asleep in the ditch, and I was there too. I was there watching, with everyone. We were becoming part of their imagination.