I walk through knee-high grass wet against my jeans. Headstones tilt on the precipice of ruin. Others have succumbed, fallen facedown above the bones. Broken granite blocks impress forgotten names and dates into the soft earth. Perhaps the dead read their own epitaphs through the dark soil. 

My feet step into a rectangle of sheared grass. Three pebbles atop the headstone. One I recognize, quartzite with a vein of rose. The other two are interlopers. They do not belong.

I curl my second finger against my thumb, muscles tensed. A siege engine. Flick. Fingernail impacting stone. One pebble disappears. Flick. The second intruder zings away. The pain is now. Tomorrow, a moon-shaped bruise beneath the nail.

My fingers place another pebble beside the first. Rough agate from the beach you loved. We loved. And both pebbles mine, as you are mine.

Marco Etheridge is a writer of prose, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His work has been featured in more than seventy reviews and journals across Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA. “Power Tools” is Marco’s latest collection of short fiction. When he isn’t crafting stories, Marco is a contributing editor and layout grunt for a new ‘Zine called Hotch Potch.