Disclaimer: This post is some kind of failed allegory for something but I’m not sure what.
Little does the little pebble have going for it. It is, by definition, an unsubstantial fragment of something that was once substantial but that is now just pebbles. Pebbles—if I may be so coarse as to discuss for a moment all pebbles at once as though the whole lot shared a lineage or an ancestor—are a geological diaspora with no hope of the nostos that drives diasporas. There will be no reunion with volcanic relatives in the mantle or whatever crusty oven whence they were baked.
A pebble is certainly no boulder, rock, or stone. It is not even a shard or nugget. It ought not deserve a place in the lithic family.
Now, the stupid pebble’s raison d’etre is to give the surf an audience and the stone skimmer a hobby as it makes little prayers for surface tension. I don’t know what it prays for. An abrasive life on the beach destined for even smaller pebblehood or a very similar life amid currents and crustaceans where pebblehood is rock bottom. Either way, pebblehood ends with sandhood after much wailing and gnashing of pebbles.
I don’t know if the pebble is endowed with a soul. Maybe some are. The good ones. Or, more likely, the bad ones. Because why would a good pebble have a soul? An evil pebble needs a soul because a soul can be punished. And pebblehood is, if you accept the forecoming conclusions, certainly enough punishment for any soul. Thus all pebbles are, quite likely, evil by nature. Well that’s surprising.
All is right and just in a world where evil meets with its punishment at no cost to the taxpayer.
