text: You can’t skip stones on the sea. You can sometimes skip stones on a river, if it’s a deep, calm one in which the currents run deep. Lakes and ponds are the ideal skipping surfaces: mostly calm, like mirrors on a windless day. The sea never stops churning. Any stone you try to toss at it is immediately lapped into its depths. Perhaps anything else would upset the natural order. Every stone was shaped by the sea and for it to assert dominance over its maker, even for a few skips, would be an anomaly. Perhaps it would cause a ripple effect of a grander scale and physicists everywhere would have a field day as our cosmos- every so slightly- shifted itself. Whoever skips the first stone shapes the universe. She threw a stone at the sea. It sunk, as was to be expected- so had every rock before it. And yet, she thought, just because no-one has done it before doesn’t mean it cannot be done. Would the shape of the universe-shattering stone matter? In which direction would the world adjust itself if, let’s say, a more rectangular one skimmed the surface? When this stone tears at the fabric of reality, our current world will be turned into one where she has found purpose. She threw the stone, and it sunk. A few solemn steps later she found a round, pink-and-grey pebble. It would free her of the ever-bearing weight of her own mortality and understanding that while life was short, it would be the longest thing she would surely ever experience. The black rock next to it would give her the courage to see that her bruised heart was, once again, timidly perched on a cliffside. Both stones sank. They were too heavy, she knew. The waves rolled in a cycle of lower, higher, and lower again- yet they were unpredictable. Sometimes the lower waves of one round would be higher than the higher waves of the next. A song that never changes in rhythm and never repeats in melody. This stone would skip across every beating heart and remind them of empathy. The next would make a young tree bear fruit for the first time. The next would make a butterfly on the other side of the globe flap its wings, which in turn would cause a hurricane. She was glad to see the last one fall. How would she know she was the first one to skip a stone, if she did? Just because she had never seen a stone skip on the sea didn’t mean it had never been done before. Perhaps her own attempts were being sabotaged by someone, somewhere, throwing rocks at waves and wishing for a world without mosquitoes. Perhaps they had already shaped this universe, years or seconds ago. She threw one last stone, not knowing what it would do. It skimmed the surface daintily, skipping from the head of a wave onto another before it disappeared for good. The universe shifted. She never found out how.