There was once a pebble dreaming day and night of becoming a golden nugget. The pebble had seen gold before, in passing in the underground stream beside which he lived. He’d never seen anything so brilliant. Always the gold nuggets were bobbing along in the current on their way to somewhere special, somewhere he’d question them about doggedly but which they kept closed mouthed about. It was infuriating. 

‘And completely unfair’ he thought, sitting alone in the green glow of the mineral deposit where he lived. Not so alone then. But the minerals he lived beside, though brilliant in their own way, lacked the arresting beauty of those golden nuggets. 

‘Don’t worry about it’ they said, ‘those haughty pieces of garbage aren’t worth their weight in the turds that pass us daily’.

The pebble couldn’t take the minerals seriously. He was sure they meant what they said, intending to encourage and affirm, but ultimately they had their own lustre while the pebble was just plain and bumpy, blending almost perfectly into the shadowy dark and his own bed of soil. Blink and you’d miss him. Also, he secretly thought their contempt of the golden nuggets was fed by some of their own jealousy, because surely even they could see how marvellous the golden nuggets were. And so free, their gleam catching in the foam that carried them to something bigger and better than this dank pocket. Surely. 

‘If only I could get to the water’s edge’ he’d say, ‘then I could go with them’.

‘You’re too heavy’ the minerals told him, ‘gold is lighter, more malleable. It’d take you years to close the distance. You’re a stone!’

As it happened it didn’t take him years. One day there was a great calamity. The earth itself rumbled and split, the waters foamed and raged. Around him the minerals were dislodged from their ancient bowers and crushed into glittering frags, emerald sprays that showered him like confetti as he rolled down down down into the river with a heavy splash. He didn’t even get to say goodbye!

He felt sad about this. The minerals had been his only company for as long as he could remember. Though they’d had their differences in world views he’d come to think of them as his family. And now they were broken into a million pieces, buried in the collapsed pocket that was once his home, as he sped away in the current with his new golden mates, the ones he’d feverishly coveted for such a very long time. 

‘Hello’ he said. He couldn’t believe this was happening. Here he was in the stream, being jostled by the jittery current and bumping up against pure gold. As he felt their bodies against his he saw what the minerals meant. They were almost plastic! As his own sturdy bulk knocked against their shimmering skeins, it left little chinks there.

‘Ow’ they said as he was shuttled between them like a ping pong ball, ‘this chunky fucker is hurting me!’

‘I’m so sorry’ the pebble was saying. His initial joy was being sullied somewhat by a deeper realisation. The difference between himself and the gold, purely visual up until now, ran so deep. It was in their mass, their respective molecular structures, and the articulated energy fields holding those molecules together. It was the will of the universe that the pebble be what he was and the golden nuggets be what they were. 

‘Yo, fuck off!’

‘Stop fucking bumping into me!’

‘Who the fuck is this guy?’

‘Dunno. A petrified turd maybe’

The pebble’s joy had been so short lived. How stupid he’d been thinking he could just enter the stream and be welcome among gods. He was a foreign contaminant. 

‘Why is he so hard?’

‘Why is he so colourless?’

‘Don’t let him touch me!’

‘Where are you going?’ the pebble tried asking them. But he was embarrassed and suddenly shy, preferring to be invisible at this exact moment, and his voice came out tinny and limp.

‘He shouldn’t be here’ someone was saying, ‘he shouldn’t be allowed to go where we’re going’

‘But where are you going?’ the pebble asked again. He was gaining confidence, the initial discomfiture at finding himself so grossly inferior subsiding. What remained was a stoic calm, an increased situational awareness which might’ve benefited the golden nuggets had their bauble minds not been so preoccupied with their own grandeur. 

’Somewhere you can’t’ 

This came from a naturally tumbled nugget of gold. While most nuggets retained the edges of the natural states from which they’d become separated, this particular nugget was blessed with profound symmetries. Regardless of whether the arrangement of his molecules was tantamount to divinity, or merely a cosmetic fluke, this nugget certainly spoke with the pomp you’d expect from someone born of spoon and crown. 

‘Why can’t I?’ asked the pebble.

‘Because you cannot survive the purification process. It is not meant for you’

Spoken as if this wasn’t conjecture, because honestly who could say what lay beyond the river’s end, the destination fabled for nuggets and, by a happy accident, the pebble too.

‘Well it’s a bit late for that isn’t it. I’m coming now whether we like it or not. Even if I didn’t want to come, there’s no fighting the current’

‘You’ve transgressed against sacred powers pebble’

No longer embarrassed or awed in the presence of superior beings, angry now.

‘Suck it’ said the pebble, wishing he was more articulate. But that kind of shame was systemic, he suspected. It was probably the kind of elitist thinking these damned nuggets (his respect for whom was diminishing by the second) promoted, fanning whispers here and there, conflating their own worth and endorsing their own propaganda cycles. They were just rocks after all, shiny ones but what did that have to do with the price of Tia Maria?

The pebble, having lost his only home and having then been quickly disillusioned, felt his stomach cinch and then bloat with bilious flutters. He’d never felt this before, but his body resourcefully took a rapid overview, and he realised that he was in total free fall. While the gold nuggets bickered amongst themselves about purity and the evils of contamination, the pebble rolled himself sideways and away from their golden cluster, letting the murk of the river’s edge envelop him for privacy, for contemplation. He needed a lifeline whip-snap. 

Much time went by. The current alternated between furious and lazy. Daylight came and went, the moon and stars appeared on the wheel’s turn with intermittent enthusiasm through cloud and haze, daubed and marbled through the water’s broken skein. 

The gold nuggets had been silent so long. They murmured horizontally but always intentionally out of ear shot.

The pebble didn’t mind. They were the worst.

Being submerged in the water for so long, his vision and thought impaired, everything filtering through to his senses all glassy and unsure, he could feel that he had changed. He didn’t know if it was possible for water, as an element, to change stone. But then he remembered through this foggy state of submersion a barely retained geography lesson from when was sixteen. Something called fluvial process, or the ability of rainfall to cut shapes in mountain terrain over an extended allotment of time. To this he connected his memory of sitting at the river’s edge in his innocence, absently counting strangely smooth lines in the hard ground. He realised now that these rivulets had been the gradual impressions of the water, a document of aeons similar to the rings inside a tree. 

He’d been under so long. How much had been shawn off him? If he stayed in the water much longer, would he eventually diminish into nothing? He’d realised this place the golden nuggets thought they were moving towards was some kind of collective delusion, despite their unswerving faith in it. The current was oblivion, a slow death. They were fools, and he shared in their fool’s errand. How he’d prayed for it! 

He missed his mineral friends and their pale glow. They’d been complaisant and stubbornly committed to staying in one place, but at least they’d accepted him. And from where he floated, a captive bauble of jetsam going nowhere fast, their rootedness seemed a blessing he rued to have forfeit. 

‘We are here!’

‘Hail the Pan!’

‘Yes, oh Hail the Pan!’

The pebble had slipped into a revery of milky half light, a kind of fugue state his little pebble body had concocted to help his mind cope with unbearable conditions. So when the current had slowed and brought them to shallows where they washed up and he felt, unbelievably, the coolness of air, it took him some time to realise what was happening. 

‘What on earth is happening to me?’ he thought in the dank echo chamber of his mind. 

As his pebble sense adjusted to the crisp forms of actual daylight, this is what he saw;

They’d washed up in the shallows of a river running through a glade, full of undulating willow trees and green grass and the brightest, warmest light he’d ever known. What was that? The light source, he realised, was the biggest nugget of gold he’d ever seen in his life! It was quite far away, he could tell, but from where it hovered in the sky, it shed a brilliance that blasted the rot from his mind, and his whole being greedily gulped the impossible wondrous-ness of it all. If he’d had eyes, the pebble probably would’ve cried. 

But while he swayed to the beauty of the place, thinking all along the golden nuggets had correctly prophesied the current’s destination, it wasn’t this the nuggets were getting excited about. Up and down the shallows, strange upright creatures were dipping into the water and retrieving the nuggets with big earthen pans. As he watched, he saw they’d scrape out great clumps of riverbed but only keep the gold, casting the refuse back into the water.

They were doing this busily, with toothy grins on their big white faces. The pebble was afraid.

Hours went by and one by one, the golden nuggets were all scooped up and pocketed by the monsters. They all seemed giddily alright with it, which he couldn’t understand. The few times he’d been accidentally scooped up and tossed back, his pebble heart had hammered and he’d almost pissed his little pebble pants. 

It wasn’t until that great piece of gold in the sky dimmed and the sky turned purple that the monsters gathered with their spoils, and left the glade cackling and guffawing with animal delight. 

And then all was calm. The stream cooed as it flowed more gently now, the wind in the trees sighed and trilled pleasantly. He thought he’d drift off to sleep, so peaceful it was, until he thought he heard someone laughing. Someone right beside him in fact. 

When he focused on the source of laughter he saw that it was another pebble, similar to him in shape and colour but maybe twice as big. 

‘What’s so funny?’ he said.

The other pebble honed his pebble sense on him and said

‘Those gold nuggets! Thinking they’re going some place better. You know what’s going to happen to them?’

‘No’ he said. He left out the part where his burning curiosity to know exactly what happens to gold nuggets at the river’s end was what brought him here in the first place. 

‘Well I’ll tell you’ said the bigger pebble, barely swallowing the great big laughs trying to escape his little pebble mouth. 

‘When those damned creatures get back to their shanties, they’ll divvy up the gold and smelt it. You know what that is mate?’

‘No’ he said. He was impatient to learn though.

‘It means they’re all going to be melted down in a big fire. Then those creatures’ll make a bunch of useless trinkets out of them, wear them, trade them, whatever. And they’ll get stuffed in gammy purses and shoved in locked drawers and vaults and mostly never see another scrap of sun or even fresh air for the rest of their long, long, bitterly long lives’

At this the larger pebble recommenced his uncontrollable laughter which crescendoed sharply and crazily, darting up and down and filling out the glade in rambunctious echoes. 

‘Oh’ was all the pebble said.

The purple of the sky was deepening, tuning navy and black until it finally darkened completely, and the night unveiled all it’s glowing adornments in highest resolution, cutting the little pebble’s eyes like diamonds, because up until then he’d only seen them through the veil of dirty river water. And it was soul-crushingly beautiful. 

And when it got darker still, he could see there were little glowing things in the trees and in the muddy reeds of the riverbank, and all of a sudden all around him these things raised their voices in a layered chorus, an orgy of polyphonic cacophony, of invitation and response. After ages of floating in semi dark with no one to talk to, this explosive conversation was overwhelming. And not just that, but he realised in that outpouring were the voices of other pebbles! Hundreds of them. Thousands even!

‘Not alone then’ he thought as he pondered what his own contribution to this luxurious twilight symphony might be.  

‘That’s nice!’