How curious, a stack of stones
New fiction and watercolor art!
In 2025, I am playing with my creativity. I am expanding. I am letting my heart wander where it will. I am painting and I am writing short pieces, some are truer than others. Some of the short pieces I will be submitting to literary journals, but some of them I will be sharing here in this newsletter along with the painting that inspired the story.
Currently, I am not putting these pieces behind a paywall, but if you like my art and want to support what I’m doing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Think of me as a busker on a street corner adding delight to your day. By subscribing (for one month, for one year, forever), you’re throwing a few dollars into my hat and adding delight to my day too.
Thank you for being here. On to the art.
WAYPOST
by Valerie Geary
A woman walks the water’s edge, picking up round, flat stones, one for each of her lovers.
The first she loved before she even knew what love was or how it could break a person. He sent ripples through her life that, even to this day, have the power to drown her beneath crushing waves of memory.
The second she loved to get over the first, and when that didn’t work, she loved the third, but only for a moment. Both so brief, they barely made a splash.
The fourth was her longest love, the sturdiest love, a doorstop love. So heavy, there were days she could hardly breathe for the smothering. So familiar, there were days she forgot he was even there. Bedrock hidden beneath shifting pebbles. In the end, all it took to destroy what she believed would last forever, was the smallest of earthquakes. The ground shifted beneath their feet, and by the time the shaking stopped, they understood theirs was not a love sturdy enough to withstand the wreckage.
The fifth was a sharp pebble in her shoe, but eventually she walked long enough and fast enough and far enough to find her stride again.
The sixth was granite too hard to crack.
The seventh was sandstone, crumbling every time she held on too tightly.
The eighth, the last, was veined with gold. The intensity of her love, too, was golden, glittering in the autumn sun, so much more than the woman believed she would ever find again. This love had been there from the beginning, even if the woman didn’t see it until the end.
When she has enough stones, she stacks them gently where the sand meets the water, a flat spot, one on top of the other. It is easy to see how precarious the balance, how one could not be here without the other.
After the woman goes, the stones remain. She will return again and again, and the stones will sit unchanged, until one day she does not return, and the stones wait alone.
People who have nothing to do with the woman or the stones, will pass by and think to themselves, How curious, a stack of stones, and think to themselves, I wonder what it means. They will not recognize in the simplicity of its shape, the weighted act of stone upon remembered stone, stacked out of love and pointing the way to her heart.
First, the painting, which I really like. You’ve made the stones seem both settled there for the foreseeable future and able to be knocked over any minute. It’s interesting to imagine them meaning other things, too, like jobs, or places lived, or personal challenges overcome.
The story is compelling in its own way. I’ve been matching the stones up with various past loves of my own! Thanks for sharing!