Bluewood Mountain

[Gum do Mugu]

Lapping waters splashed the cold pebbles and cobbles of the mountain lake shore. No two stones were alike; each was stout and flattish, but shaped and painted, uniquely, by nature’s timeless patience. According to Bluewood’s ancient people, the rocks were ageless bulwarks for lives that had been lived and lost.

Inca Roe—a carefree reader, weakened by tales of romantic lands—looked over the bleak beach, and she shivered for its wintry sorrow. The hopes and dreams of the dead crept into her heart like the chill crept into her toes. Surely, she thought, this place was as somber a repository for human sentiment as any of her people’s cemeteries.

She looked up from the misty water. Something was creeping in the blackness between the conifer trunks. Inca strained her eyes across the distance of the lake shore. “It’s them,” she mouthed to herself, clutching her bundle of books like an anchor latching onto sunken rocks.

As she wandered and wobbled across the stony shore, she wondered, would her excitement be sealed in stone one day. If so, she hoped her soul would become an agate. Maybe a little girl or boy would find her lingering foothold in the material world, and carry it home, cherished, in a jacket pocket.

She imagined, as she continued to navigate the edge of the lake towards her friends down the way, that maybe her eternal agate would be sat… in a little box of memories. What an honour, she thought, to be held precious alongside hopeless love letters and postcards from the world’s disparate corners.

“Gosh!” she exclaimed, as she twisted her ankle on an irregular cobble. “Am I really in such a hurry to die?”