Crystals and Stones

Money is silent in a house until it is not. It sits in a drawer, in an envelope tucked behind the tea, in a number on a lit screen that you check at eleven at night with the lamp turned low. It makes no sound at all, and then the month turns, and the sound...

The house is quiet in the way houses are only quiet at four in the morning. Rain moves against the glass in slow handfuls. The heating has not come on. Under the floorboards a pipe ticks, settles, ticks again. And in the hollow of your palm there is a stone. Small. Cold at first, then...

The kitchen has gone dark except for the one lamp above the table. A square of dark cloth lies smoothed flat, the fold-lines still standing in it like the ghosts of four straight roads. Beside it, in a chipped saucer, nine stones wait, cool from the drawer, dull until the lamplight finds their faces. You...

The house goes quiet in stages. First the street outside, then the pipes in the wall, then the last thin line of light beneath a door down the hall. What remains is the small country of the bed: a lamp turned low, a glass of water going warm on the table, a book laid face...

There is a rock that never finished becoming a rock. It began as lava — thick, slow, heavy with silica — and it should have taken the long road every stone takes. Atoms find their neighbours. Lattices form. A crystal grows, one patient layer at a time, over centuries nobody was there to count. Obsidian...

Set the stone on the windowsill at dusk and walk away from it for an hour. When you come back, the light inside it will have moved. Not much. A pale drift across the curve of it, like milk stirred once into cold water and then left alone to settle. Tilt your hand and the...

There is a table near the back of nearly every shop that sells stones. Shallow trays stand upon it, divided like a printer’s drawer, and in each division a hundred small polished things lie heaped together. Rose, smoke, frost, honey, ink. A paper label leans against each tray, curling a little in the warmth of...

There is a stone on the windowsill that does not shine. It is pink the way the inside of a shell is pink — clouded, uneven, more milk than jewel. Through the grey middle of an afternoon it looks like very little at all, a lump of frozen rose water somebody forgot to put away....

There is a stone on the windowsill that the winter light goes straight through. At first light it is grey and unremarkable, a chip of nothing. By mid-morning it has caught the low sun and laid a thin bar of white across the floorboards. By evening it holds the candle in its shoulder, one orange...

There is an hour in the evening when the lamps have not been lit and the room keeps only what the day left behind. Set an amethyst on the table in that hour and watch what it does. It does not shine. It darkens. The violet draws inward the way water draws down into a...

There is an hour past midnight when a house stops pretending to be still. A joist eases. A pipe knocks twice behind the plaster. The refrigerator shudders awake in a dark kitchen and settles again into its low, patient hum. You lie and listen, and the listening is the trouble. On the windowsill, where you...

The room is dark but for one candle, and the candle is doing to a bead of amber what candles have always done to amber. The light goes through. The bead lies on the cloth like a drop of held honey, lit from somewhere inside itself, and the glow that comes out the far side...

The stone has been in your pocket for eleven days. It has ridden there against coins and keys and the soft fold of a receipt. It went with you through one bad afternoon. It sat on the wet lip of the sink while you washed your hands, and it came back damp, and you did...

The bowl was left on the windowsill overnight, and by morning the water had gone milky. The stone lying at the bottom is not quite the stone you set there. Its long pale ribs have softened. The edge that caught the lamp last night catches nothing now. Draw a thumb across it and a fine...

There is a stone on the windowsill, and the last of the light has found it. It is small enough to be closed inside a hand. It has sat there so long that the paint beneath it has stayed a shade darker than the paint on either side, a pale ghost of the shape, waiting...