I sleep like a stone next to her. In the morning she will mutter into my static-filled ears her dreams of California, and the sky, and caged animals. But for now I am a stone. I sink deeper into the murk of the lake, twitching to the music of ghostly currents as I slip further down. Bubbles rise past me, spinning my smooth shape with their effortless friction. They are messages from the black sludge below. It is calling to me. It wants to smother me again, and there is no reason to resist. I let myself fall. I think back to when I was loosed from the grip of a child, when my medium was the air. I skipped like an ancient discus across the water’s surface. One, two, three. The tempo increased, each jump closer to the next, until I was only a vibration in the liquid. Then I sank. And now I am sinking still. My memories are fading. I forget the rocky beach from which I was chosen, I forget my time as a source of wind and laughter, I forget how the sun felt on my round form, I forget the pleasure of spirit that I found in spasmodic dance atop the water, I forget how the droplets leapt around me. I forget, I forget, and I am still sinking. I am afraid of how comforting the darkness has become. I wonder if it was better to have flown once, or if it would have been better to sink since the beginning of time. But the choice was not mine, it seems. The child chose me for my smoothness, my roundness, my flatness. I was made smooth and round and flat by the tides. The tides were driven up and down by the moon’s cycle. The moon twisted in the sky by its own fearless momentum. Curses erupt from my design, aimed both outside and in, and the mud consumes me, and the need to be whole vanishes like a strand of steam, and time is a pinpoint, and I am a stone.