there was a rock
One day a mole will appear on the back of your left hand, but this is not the day.
The car plunges into a tunnel. From the backseat, the shadows of other cars look like bears running up the walls.
There's a rock in your hand, warm and small. If you think hard enough, you can turn its color. It weighs more than you expect. When you get home you plan to throw the rock into the neighborhood pool, to see if it sinks like the others.
At this point, the other kids don't believe a thing that comes out of your mouth. Not the portal to the witch's house at the back of your mother's closet, not the fairies that leave their canoes in the puddles after it rains, not the one time you learned how to fly a foot and a half off the ground. Whenever they played house you wanted to be the dog. It was weird, so you played alone.
You knew that some of the stories you told were wishful thinking, but it was too early in life to care about truth. Who cared that if you pressed your ear to the back of the closet, you wouldn't hear a witch's cackle? If you listened hard enough, you would. A child’s mind holds special powers.
You learned to become invisible. Your breath slows, and one by one, you command each and every muscle in your body to cease. You find that eventually, your mind goes blank, your body melting into the bed you once laid upon. At the doorway of your room, you can hear your mother breathing. Unlike you, she hasn't been gifted with invisibility, no matter how little she speaks. Sometimes you feel bad for her.
You throw the rock in the pool. Despite its weight, it defies gravity and floats to the top. The way it bobs up and down, the rock seems to laugh at you. It's emerald, your favorite shade of green.
Watching it, you're hooked. The rock must've chosen you, sensed a loneliness in you.
So you begin to tell the rock all your secrets. As a child, you don't have many, so you make some up. How you hid candy underneath the couch as your secret stash, how you left torn anonymous messages on your friend's desk at school just so you can stir things up with your classmates.
Days pass, your fixation grows. In the quiet hours of the night, you whisper bigger secrets. Like how you caused a monsoon in the middle of summer in Uozumi, an ice van spinning out of control and hitting the telephone pole near your grandmother's. It was the first death you heard of in your hometown.
You heard about ghosts before you heard about death. At your grandmother's, your mother spoke of a man falling over and over again in the corner of her childhood bedroom, reappearing at the same time every year. You thought you kept seeing a flash of him in your periphery, mouth agape, eyes blank with panic. Back then, ghosts were as common as cockroaches.
One day the rock turned blue. The teachers at school asked you if it was a new art project, with patronizing curiosity. You knew better than to entertain adults.
You sit on a camping chair of the same blue, watching your little brother's soccer game. This is before you realized you needed glasses, so you have no idea which of the players is your brother. The referee blows his whistle, the over-involved dads are yelling on the sidelines. You're invisible again... Until you feel a droplet of rain land on the tip of your nose.
While everyone else rushes for cover under each other's umbrellas, you run towards the edge of the field, where it meets a forest. You find refuge underneath a familiar willow tree, the dangling leaves a curtain that envelops you. On your many walks back home from school, the tree became your friend. You affectionately named her Sadako, after a girl with long black dangling hair, from a Japanese horror movie you haven't seen yet.
There's a thickness in the air, and it's not the rain. From within the darkness of the forest, you hear slow, stumbling footsteps. You grip the rock tight in your sweating palm. As you dig your small back into Sadako, she whispers gently:
"My friend wants to see you."
Would you trust a friend of a friend? The footsteps move closer but you can't see through the leaves. You try to remember if your mother ever said ghosts can follow you to different places. Invisibility's a luxury until it's a curse. The rock in your hand begins to tremble with startling intensity. You've never held onto something so tightly before. To this day, you still remember that feeling – the rock digging into your skin.
As sudden as the first droplet on your nose, you hear a loud pop.
You run out and find your brother. It isn't until the next day that you realize you lost the rock.