Village lore has it there was once a stoneless world. Indoors was not a command, but a choice. People walked about outside unfettered, like squirrels or mice. They hopped on things called trains to cover immense distances unimpeded, with no boulders barring their way. A small number landed on the moon, itself a giant rock.
The books on our shelves seem to confirm this, conjuring a world in which stone was certainly present, but impassive. It remained underfoot, and wherever it did move, it was into mountain ranges. None ever appeared on doorsteps, much less with malicious intent. It was building block, not barrier.
As far as we know, no train has ever run through Z, neither local route nor on any larger itinerary from coast to coast. We do, however, have a bicycle rusting away in old Ned Hackney’s yard, which far from being a mere rumor has been seen by more than one: proof plenty that even in Z, once upon a time, life took place outdoors. There is also the Gladstone family chronicle, which mentions a visit by a distant relative, back in the two-thousands, who, quoth, arrived in a shiny automobile twenty feet long, revealed after much prodding as a Cadillac Eldorado in paled turquoise. Such an uproar did it create that no less than twelve pages of the chronicle are devoted to it, missing only a photo.
And then, of course, there is our very own Olrich Darlington, the only writer Z ever had, whose book is a treasure trove of anecdotes both of a pre-stone Z and its transition into what it is today.
You would think that with all the time we have on our hands and not being able to spend it outside, we would have a ton of writers, but the fact is that we don’t. There simply was never a point. This, my own attempt, might be the first in a long, long time, and if I’m lucky it will join Olrich’s now-classic Easy Baking Recipes on the shelves of our children and grandchildren.
Harry Huckabee and his wife, whose house and stone lie at the northernmost tip of town, were the first to see the fog roll in.
“Something coming!” they yelled. Past our own stone, we could see the pair of them, halfway out the window and hanging on for dear life.
“What is it?” my wife Mona yelled back.
“Can’t say,” yelled Harry. “Wall o’ white!”
We have a saying in Z that good things never announce themselves after 5 in the afternoon. It was past that now, that time when the stones are not just dipped but bathed in shadows, when their color changes from a still brightish, milky grey to something more depressing, and when it’s no longer possible for us to see them as sentinels, here for our protection, but as prison guards locking cells up for another long night.
For an hour or so, wall o’ white was all we had to go on.
“It ain’t moving!” yelled Harry, only to have his wife contradict him. “Yes, it is,” she cried, “Yes, it is.”
Ten minutes of strained silence, after which Harry was back.
“Ok, it’s moving, it’s moving,” he yelled. “But slowly!”
Very slowly, indeed. Two hours we gave it, then we turned in. Harry and his wife were now certain it was fog, and no fog in the world would have made us stay up past bedtime.
When we woke in the morning, the fog was no more than a mile away and we knew it was somehow in cahoots with the stones. They seemed to anticipate its arrival like a dog its master, quivering, if a stone can be said to quiver. It was nothing physical; the stones weren’t moving, they never had, never did. It was something felt, a movement more implied than real. As if the fog was sending out curious waves of a sort we couldn’t detect, but which sent the stones all a-jitter.
Could it be that more stones were on the way, we asked ourselves? Was it the nearness of kin they felt? No new stones had appeared in Z for more than a hundred years, but at the same time they were not original to the soil. Z hadn’t been built around them; it had been stoneless for millennia. The stones were an infestation. Quoth Olrich, from page 17 of Easy Baking Recipes:
Unlike me, the town of Z had seen its share of the stones, but it had been several years already since the last had appeared. The arrival now of this new stone was rapidly causing a big stir. The street filled up quickly and my bakery also filled up with all the people who were in the street and who decided to come in from the cold and to have a piece of pie or a muffin when it looked like they were all going to be there for a good while.
Easy Baking Recipes is five hundred and forty-seven pages long. Of those, a mere nineteen are devoted to an account of the stones. An additional three pages are filled with Olrich’s own thoughts on the matter, philosophical musings, if you will. The bulk of the book is what it portends to be: Olrich’s favorite recipes for anything from blueberry muffins to cherry pies and assorted cakes. It’s as if he really wanted to write a whole book about the stones, but found his heart too heavy, only able to persist after surrounding himself with the familiar aromas of the bakery. Or perhaps he had posterity in mind, the souls now alive in Z, and it was to spare us undue grief that he fed us the story in morsels.
Thus, the narrative is broken up innumerable times, the nineteen pages spread out over the whole of the book. The horror of seeing his neighbor imprisoned by the stone is quickly followed by a recipe for a birthday cake, while the strained conference of the scientists, debating what to do, is sprinkled with advice on caramel, brownies, and cheesecake. The destruction of Z, shortly after, at the hands of the scientists, is introduced by gluten-free fruitcake and segues seamlessly into chocolate lebkuchen. Narrating the scope of the disaster, and the rebuilding, he finds comfort in star cookies and Grandma’s Rhubarb Sour Cream Coffee Cake. The story of the stones, so to speak, is no more than the icing on the cake.
A hundred and forty years later and Olrich’s words never fail to move us, here in Z. Knowing what was still to come and with our own deplorable situation being what it is, the tragedy of an early account is hair-raising. The stones were there, yes, but it was still more like an individual sickness, afflicting a small percentage of village folk. Olrich was born free, stoneless.
Earlier in the book, on page 5, we read:
The sight stopped me in my tracks. It was the early morning and no one else had woken. The town was without sound. And yet the stone was already there.
Olrich had noticed the stone in front of his neighbor’s door around five in the morning, which is when he used to crank up the old oven. Had there been a fog that night in Z? The same fog whose spooky action we were now watching from a steadily dwindling distance, but unnoticed because no Harry Huckabee had been there to sound the alarm? Did the fog deposit the stones in Z? In Olrich’s account, the stones appeared “out of the blue”, but perhaps that was a mistake. Perhaps they had appeared out of the fog.
Tensions were high. We could only wait and see. The children were as excited as on Christmas morning, while the old folk were wary, guarded in manner perhaps, yet hiding an inner turbulence they just barely managed to keep a lid on. Not wanting to seem like worryworts, we nevertheless ordered Anna and Danny, who were five and seven years old, off the windowsills where they had been perched like cats all morning, watching the fog come in at a glacial pace. With false cheer we served pancakes (Olrich’s recipe) for breakfast, and carrot cake (Mona’s own) for lunch. When the fog was still a mile away at four in the afternoon, we made feta muffins and coconut chai traybake. From all over Z, aromas wafted over, our trained noses detecting hazelnut brownies, chocolate marble cake and summer fruit drizzle cake. To keep the children’s minds off the likelihood of imminent catastrophe, we made a game of it: guess what the neighbors are baking! After everyone had written their guesses down, we called over and had them either confirmed or shot down.
“Danny says coconut carrot slice!” I called over to the Brummels, and cheerfully Mrs. Brummel chirruped back, “Yes, yes!”
“Rose water sponge cake?” Mona wanted to know of Mr. Outerbridge, whose apron gave him away as baker-in-charge.
“Almost!” he yelled back, with just a hint of panic. “Neapolitan cupcakes!”
“Excellent choice!” Mona congratulated him and quickly closed the window again, for the fog was now very near. So caught up had we been in our little game that we hardly noticed its advance. Whereas before trees had swayed lightly in the breeze, there was nothing now but white, and Harry Huckabee and his wife, who had been reporting on the fog’s progress as if yelling the scores from a baseball game, had fallen ominously silent. A quick glance out the window confirmed that they were way into the thick of it: half their house was gone, the other half protruding out of the fog like a leg from a gator’s mouth.
“Now who can guess this one?” I asked with a trembling voice, and just as we were wavering between cinnamon apple pecan pudding and cinnamon cashew flapjacks, the fog knocked at our door, and in less time than it takes to say treacle icing we swept the children up in our arms and rushed them down to the basement.
Neither Mona nor I knew what to expect. If more stones were in the offing, would they herald their arrival noisily or swoop in on bats’ wings? Would they crash into the lawn, leaving a crater, or make a bed on the grass using the gentlest of pressures? If anything, it seemed like the latter, for we heard no sound. No wind, no shouting, not even a door creaking on its hinges. Perhaps it was even worse that way – even the children, so buoyant before, were stricken by the severity of what was going on and fell mute. After a while, Anna started sobbing.
“Alright, now,” Mona said, shooting me an urgent look. “Who remembers the recipe for peach melba pop pies?”
Clever Mona, she knew the mere mention of peach melba pop pies would get the children’s mouths watering.
“Even I know that!” I offered. “Mix the corn flour and egg, and pour it all over the honey!”
Anna jumped up, blinking away tears.
“No, you nit!” she called. “You first set six raspberries aside, and throw the rest of them into a bowl.” She looked for reassurance to Mona, who gave it to her.
“Add peaches and toss together,” Anna went on. “Only then do you take the corn flour and mix it with the honey, not with the egg! You make a paste of the corn flour and the honey, and pour it over the fruit. The egg is only for brushing!”
“Silly me,” I said, bowing my head.
An hour or so went by like that. After peach melba pop pies, we waxed sentimental about giant cookies, Bakewell tarts, lemon and buttermilk pound cake. Everyone seemed more at ease. Distracted, anyway, and I judged it high time to go upstairs, alone, to get a reading on things. Turning the door knob, I held my breath.
The stone was already there, and Mr. Ellison was standing before it, utterly transfixed. They looked like a still life painting, the stone and Mr. Ellison, as though locked in some silent battle that was taking place in a different world than this.
Thus Olrich describes his first encounter with his neighbor’s stone, and the words, so familiar to everyone in Z, came back to me now as I stood in our soundless living room. At that moment, I might have been young Olrich, preparing to go outside and have my world changed forever, in that sweet spot between knowing und not knowing, when knowledge hasn’t yet arrived and when it would still be false to claim total ignorance.
It was with young Olrich’s eyes that I took everything in: the unchanged room, the feeling of unreality pressing in from all sides, the fog outside, visible through the windows.
If I still say fog, it’s a bit misleading. I knew by then that it wasn’t any normal fog out there, and yet there are barriers beyond which our language fails us, is found wanting. Then we fall back on the words we’ve used all along, and we understand each other, in a way, even if it isn’t reality we are describing.
With a heavy heart, because it was the only right thing to do, I opened the door to the fog. It did not rush in, and, at the same time, did not suck me out of the house. It was content to stay out there, and happy to leave me where I was, feeling weightless somehow. I couldn’t see a thing. For the first time in my life, I could not see the stone in front of our house. Even at night, after all, it is always there, always visible, and I was sure it was still there now, but that in a gesture of boundless communion the fog had thrown a veil over it, affording me, if only for a single moment, the luxury of stoneless vision.
Tremendous, pent-up joy took hold of me, and I wanted to run downstairs and grab Mona, grab the children, share this overwhelming moment with them. More than that, I clearly felt that it was my duty, as husband, as father, to offer them this rarest of glimpses, this gift of unfettered sight, which might not ever return.
I remained standing. Something in the fog, in the wall of white, caught my eye. A swirl of things, of images. I saw what looked like a giant rhubarb pie, floating by. Followed by a whole plate of peanut butter brownies, slices of poppy seed loaf, white chocolate chip skillet cookies. I saw myself, wearing a pirate’s hat and riding by on a giant gingerbread trifle. The children were there, too. Anna up to her neck in a bowl of toffee pudding, Danny in a glass of chocolate and nut tiramisu. Mona, finally, on a unicycle, juggling blueberry oat cookies and funfetti shortbread. All laughing, all having a great time. It was a circus. I saw Z, our town, destroyed by a sandstorm, by giant waves, by a meteor. I watched it get picked apart by pickpockets, sold off at auction, dragged into the sea by a giant anchor. Looking up, I saw our neighbor, Harry Huckabee, out in the open, balancing his ten-foot stone on the tip of his index finger. I watched him throw it high up in the air, twenty feet, thirty feet. I watched him kick it down the street like a football while his wife cheered him on.
Harry later explained it like this:
“I saw many worlds in the fog,” he said. “One on top of the other. Superimposed, like they were all one, and yet many at the same time. They all had the stone in it. All except one. In that one world, the stone was gone. In its place was a giant loaf of bread, standing upright. I rushed outside to see for myself.”
“Are you really a loaf of bread?” I asked the stone.
“Come and find out,” it talked back.
And I did. I rushed outside, and to my horror found the stone light as a feather. I leaned against it and next thing I knew we were tumbling down the lawn, the stone and I, as if wrestling for kicks. Feeling reckless, I took a large bite out of it and happily munched away, for it was indeed bread that I tasted, a kind of bread I knew very well. It was Henrietta’s own recipe for a simple white fluffy loaf. She’s been making it every week for the past fifty years, and that’s the God-honest truth.”
Harry was standing at our open window when telling his story. Henrietta stood by his side, pensive. They both looked strange to our eyes, in the open like that, framed neither by window nor door. Not fenced in by anything. Like animals of the wild. It seemed they, too, were aware of how awkward they looked. Walking over from their house, it looked like they were trying out different ways of walking, not able to decide on any and switching back and forth in mid-stride. Their voices, too, had changed. Honestly, they seemed like different people altogether, and we weren’t sure we liked what we saw.
All day, we watched the Huckabees make the rounds, chatting first at this window, then another. They were offered marzipan ribbon cake by the Allisons and pretzels by the Everleighs, accepted a steaming plate of pesto pinwheels from the Heywards before stuffing their faces with winter stollen and Stromboli at the Grimaldis’ window. As if that were not enough, the Starlings handed them a whole toffee apple crumble layer cake and all but threw a bag of ginger and cashew nut energy balls at them as they left.
“Surely they can’t still be hungry,” I grumbled, and we watched with disgust as their hands eagerly grabbed at a bucket of three-sugar fudge and coconut clusters.
“I wish them nothing,” said Mona, “but curd tart and dump cake for the rest of their lives.”
And she would have said worse, had I not quickly put a finger to her lips.
“Not in front of the children,” I hushed her.
As the day dragged on, the Huckabees were soon out of our sight.
“Robbing the Mintons, no doubt,” Mona scoffed. “Or poor Mrs. Cholmondeley. That fine black forest gateau of hers!”
I thought differently. I did not see those two laying into any gateau, but hauling it out of town as fast as they could, Olrich’s recipes in tow.
In my opinion, they were long gone.
“Gone where?” asked Mona.
I didn’t have to think very long, or hard.
“Gone west,” I said. “California!”
It was that time of day again. Our stone put on its robe of shadows, turned dark, and our lives disappeared down a chute. Mona went to tuck in the children, and their voices drifted over, Anna and Danny bartering about the number of recipes they would get to hear before nighty-night.
Not knowing what to do with myself on the eve of this momentous day, I went to open the door, stood blinking at the stone, and spoke at it:
“Are you really a loaf of bread?” I asked, wincing at the sound of my voice: tiny, hollow, inconsequential.
The stone said nothing, did nothing, stayed stone.
At that very moment, as if to save myself from further debasement, the Huckabees reemerged. They walked hand in hand, like the survivors of some unimaginable catastrophe. Timidly, they crossed the square, saw me, but didn’t come over. Harry raised a hand, waved shyly. Hesitatingly, I waved back.
I watched the Huckabees wobble round the statue once, twice, then they walked away. A minute later they were back, rounded it again and finally plopped down at Olrich’s finely chiseled feet. For a long time, they sat there, not talking. After a while, Mona joined me, both of us wordlessly watching the Huckabees and their silent torment.
They stood up and turned to face young Olrich, looking up at his serene face as if for advice. If he gave it, it was of a surprising sort. Still holding hands, Harry and Henrietta Huckabee walked towards their house and, without looking back, stepped inside.
Overnight, unseen, the stone moved back into position and resumed its eternal vigil – suspended only for a minute – at the foot of their door.
Olrich writes:
The stories we tell, about ourselves and the stones, they all matter. We must believe that they matter. All the countless times we think about the stones, touch them with our hands, lay a cheek on their smooth surface, all serve to establish them more firmly in the here and now. A stone weighs a thousand tons. It weighs fourteen grams. Both are true, and both are false. Too many poor people have looked at too many cruel stones for anything to happen overnight, it’s true. But change is coming. It’s coming slow and steady. I foresee this fated world, and our sons and daughters living easier, untrammeled lives. That world is already in the making. The ingredients are laid out. All it takes is one able baker putting his hands on the dough and kneading it. But it will take different stories than these. Stories of limitless freedom, of redrawing the lines of our faculty. In our children, we must foster a sense of wonder and possibility, and realize that everything one wishes for must first be imagined. Not once, but again and again, until the Maker at long last grants His sanction. Let us get to work, then, and start imagining. Many a blueberry muffin will need get baked before we can hope to transform this world of ours – this wonderful, terrible world of stone.
Mika Seifert is a writer, concert violinist and broker of rare violin bows. His short stories and essays have been published or are forthcoming in the Antioch Review, the Cambridge Literary Review, Chicago Review, Image Journal, The Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review, Salt Hill, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.