15 April 2012
He knelt at the side of the pond. His hands gripping the slippery, slimy slates he lent forward peering into the inky darkness of the water; wondering what undiscovered treasures lay at the bottom. He pushed up and leant back on his heels looking around. Near a clump of tall reeds he saw exactly what he had been looking for. A big, smooth, oval pebble. He shuffled over to it and weighed it in his small hand, clutching it in his palm.
Returning to once again kneel at the side of the pool of water he held his hand high above the surface and let the pebble drop. It entered the water with an uninteresting, but somehow satisfying, "plop!". Eagerly he leant over the edge of the pool to see how deep the pond really was but soon had lost sight of the pebble floating down to find its place on the pond's floor. Being an inquisitive boy he didn't like to give up and wasn't prepared to accept the pebble had been totally engulfed by the murky waters. He squinted down into the depths, leaning further and further over the water until he could have almost have licked the surface of the pond. But he didn't stop leaning.
He kept on bending over until his nose touched the water and then, before he had time to panic, his hands slipped and he toppled helplessly into the cold water, gasping. He let out an involuntary wail of surprise as his lungs emptied of oxygen only to be replaced with putrid water as he tumbled down, following the path of his eagerly searched for pebble. He peered at the green water and blinked as he found his vision blurred with the same dirty water that was filling his young lungs. He frantically tried to kick upwards to break free of this watery nightmare he was trapped in but it was too late to fight. His lungs had already emptied and were screaming for air, his mind was going fuzzy and his head flopped back. His hair floated around his head in a eerie halo, glowing in the shifting green light which filtered through the water and his arms danced weightlessly beside his body. As the last air escaped his mouth in a globular bubble, his mouth remained open in a hopeless "o" and as he started to sink gracefully his young eyes glazed over and then softly shut.
As he hit the bottom of the pond debris floated up around him in a delicate mist and as his body settled peacefully on its back, eyes closed and head turned to one side, a smooth, round pebble bounced from the bed of the pond and silently settled into the boys softly opened hand. It sat perfectly in the curve of his cold, lifeless palm; anchoring him to the depths he had been so eager to discover.
The Pebble And The Pond • Opuss № I