ROCK COLLECTION — SABRINA HICKS
/The first rock struck me in the head after a neighbor boy told me to go to hell. I can’t remember why, only that he had blond hair and a vicious smile, smelled like the boys at recess with their peanut butter fingers pulling at the training bras worn by girls like me, impatient to become someone they could imagine. I pocketed the rock to feel the weight of hell. It stayed in my backpack for years, whittled down by the edges of childhood.
The second was in high school, kissing a boy on a soft patch of grass under an olive tree. A rock pinched under the weight of us pressed together. I dislodged it from my backside, cursing before slipping it into my pocket, shifting my body onto a bed of stones, sinking into the hard points. The boy followed me. Better? he asked, his face unsure in the moonlight before he swallowed what I knew to be true: A lone nail will impale you, but a bed can be laid upon. The kissing boy was my first taste of gravity.
The third rock presented like an anchor, a gift from a college boy who had slipped in and out of my room, my classes, my mind. He had nice teeth, the kind that saw a dentist every six months and remembered to floss. He was as beautiful as the sea, placid and vast. And so, I had a rock in each pocket and a rock I would twist on my finger and leave in a bowl at the end of the day so I could remember what it was to be weightless.
A flood of rocks came after, turning my limbs to stones, my feet to concrete. My hips widened to make room. My hands grew, too. I became a monument, worshipped, public, exposed until I blended into mountains and no one saw me at all, a woman with her pockets full of rocks. No one had to tell me that if I walked into the ocean I would sink. I just knew this to be true. And so, I became a woman on the shore, staring into a stitch of blue.
From my seaside window, I see people pointing at the tall mounds of stones I have emptied from my pockets over the years, calcifications I’ve shed to walk upon this earth. The cairns on my front yard, a nest of angles, reach up and up and up. Women stop and stare, nudging their husbands and lovers, their sons and brothers. See there! they say, their eyes climbing each rock until all they see is someone they could imagine, a woman no longer on the shore.
Sabrina Hicks lives in Arizona. Her work has appeared in Wigleaf Top 50, Split Lip Magazine, Lost Balloon, Bending Genres, Barren, Matchbook, Ellipsis Zine, and other publications. More of her work can be found at sabrinahicks.com.
