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November 11, 2005

“What happens when we die?” asked the little girl in the big coat. She let her fingers drag through the sunrise and admired the way orange bled seamlessly into orange once she removed her hand from the lake. Pink was separated from orange by a thin, grey cloud, she noticed. And a pale blue grew bluer the further it stretched above.

The man with the red hat smiled but only slightly. “Don’t worry, Aurelia,” he said. “Mr. Fluffers went to a better place.”

The girl frowned. “Is the ground a better place? There are worms there,” she said, looking distrustfully down at the mud drying on her shoes. They dug into pebbles and clam shells now, but the walk over had been soggy and windswept. Her mother had discouraged their morning outing as though fearful Aurelia would be carried away like a loose kite. Her father had shaken his head but only slightly. “It’s Aurelia’s birthday,” he had said, “Let her have fun.” That put an end to the disagreement.

“You weren’t always so afraid of worms,” he said to his daughter, pulling his red hat further down on his forehead as the wind sought to blow it away. “You used to flood the front yard with a bucket and then play ‘rescue.’”

Aurelia shook her head. “I’m not afraid.” She gripped the sleeves of her coat tightly in each small fist.

“I must admit, I don’t know what happens when hamsters die. I like to imagine that they have their own hamster heaven with wheels to run on and other hamster friends to play with and lots of snacks.” Aurelia smiled, satisfied with his answer, but her father continued speaking.

“I have thought a lot about the final destination for people, though,” he said. “When I was a young man, I’d imagine that we are teetering on the edge of a great abyss--maybe that’s cliche, to use the term abyss--but that in the abyss there is falling that never ends and we don’t get spit out into another dimension; nothing ever happens. Just a grand landscape of nothingness. And it is so dark we can’t hold hands or speak, and there isn’t wind as we fall. Just the feeling like when your stomach drops before you sleep. And maybe that’s why we call it falling asleep. Except in this dream, we never wake up. And maybe it would be boring if we weren’t so scared. And even though we are scared, we do not know why, because we are no one anymore, we have no names or faces, just fear. But when I had my reckoning, I realized that life is--almost--eternal, if we think about it differently. There is a parade of souls across the earth--a whisper of names and dust and stars becoming stars again when the sun swallows us. And now, all I know is that there is ground beneath my feet or at least I call it ground, and there are pebbles meeting the lake shore. And maybe the lake reminds me of the way I used to think about death, a great abyss of nothingness. But then, I realized that the lake is not nothingness, it is the unknown. And we face the unknown every day. Death is nothing new. So mostly I think about life, and the way the pebbles are mixed with shells of things that once lived. And when I die, I want to be a person who once was and who is now a whisper in the parade of souls, not a person who is no longer standing on the ground here watching the ripples of the lake.”

Aurelia’s brow furrowed, her blond eyebrows drawing so close together they nearly touched. The rest of her face was pale and placid like a lake before the skipping stone disrupts its surface.

Her father stood up and took her small hand in his large one. “Let me teach you how to skip stones.” Aurelia grinned big and lifted an impressively-sizedrock. It was speckled black and white and orange. She hurled it into the lake. It fell only a couple feet from her shoes, but the sound was tremendous, and the spray flew into her coat and gathered on its baby-pink, fluffy material, dripping down and onto her baby-blue jeans.

“Wow! You have a powerful throw!” said her father. “Now, let me teach you something. I promise it won’t take long.” He picked up a thin, grey stone about half the size of his hand and skipped it. Aurelia would forever remember the five splashes that followed. The first one was the highest but each left ripples in the water’s surface in the same way her fingers had dragged through the sunrise. They faded as quickly as they had come.

“How do I do that?” she asked, wide-eyed and mouth half-open with surprise.

Her father picked up another thin, grey stone. It was perfect, thought Aurelia. Circular and smooth and slightly smaller than her father's had been. He positioned her feet, the right one slightly ahead of the left. He curved her right arm and rotated her wrist. “Your thumb should be on top,” he said. “And your middle finger on the bottom. Then, take your index finger and wrap it around the edge of the stone, like this. Ready, set, go!”

Aurelia looked at the lake. She looked down at her hand. She moved her fingers slightly and the rock slipped between them and back onto the shore. Her laughter rang across the lake, a tiny, joyful song against a quiet morning.