The Rose Rock
	H	e took the wrong road into town. Slamming his palms on the steering wheel and cursing the entire known and unknown universe, he tried to find the destination by that special sense of intuition he often alluded to. Should not intuition work in a place one has never been? "This is a small town?" screamed his overheated cranium, smoldering through strings of successive red lights that might have been just about anywhere else in America of the late 1980s.

K-mart. Wendy's. Westside Motel. Grand Hotel. Waterbed Headquarters. Big- Tee.Sunrise Motel. Sunset Realty. Sundown Motors. Sunup Eats. Casa Taco?

Still yet another wrong turn took him across the tracks. Literally and figuratively. He pounded the dash board again in anger, just to the left of the place he dented it while disoriented in the backroads of an Alabaman swamp.

In pure silence, the long abandoned grain elevators observed. How were these sentinals, when they were erected- full of bright hope, rosy economic vision, reeking of freshly sawed lumber and sparkling in new coats of white paint? Once as wide-eyed as newborn child, adulthood sees only rejection, despair, futility, vagrancy, scorn, disgust.

Did he really have time for this melodramatic bullshit?

With a squeal of tires, he was off toward what might loosely be termed "downtown", when he almost passed it. Cross Street. He had an address, a street number, but no mental image of the house. It was certainly not a stately Antebellum manor, just another homey brick suburban split-level.

Why was he here? Ghosts do not exist, so why was he chasing them?

And so, thus, he found himself standing on the porch, softly pressing the bell. And he found the screen door opening slowly, groaning on its ancient hinges. And he found the door opening to her face, those deep silver grey eyes, the eyes he had fallen into and swam among years ago, but never could claim for his own.

The hug was superficial and barely related to the passions of the last goodbyes. They spoke some words but had always conversed best non- verbally. And the why which never was asked, need not be asked; he swore he was honestly here as a friend. Maybe he just enjoyed torturing himself.

She showed him a special family possession, one he would surely appreciate. The rose rock had been found by a grandmother in Oklahoma, the only place in the world except for Africa (and who ever goes there?) where it can be found. It was large enough to fit snugly in the palm of his hand, a stone of radiating soft pink scales that formed an exact replica of a rose flower. The family watched in great expectation, because after all, he was studying Geology, and knew of all such wonders. He marvelled at the way in which the former sand grains were softly welded together, silently ashamed that he could not adequately explain how something of such beauty could come to be. Oh, he could have babbled about the mineralizing effects of saturated ground water, or perhaps drawn the correct phase diagram for the hydrous sulfates and expounded upon the free energy equations. But how to explain the perfection of its shape? So in the end, he settled for an enlightened smile and a exclamation of "Remarkable."

A scientific explanation might have sounded convincing but it would not wash in the face of a family who saw this object as a divine creation. It just simply was.

And then the rose rock was put back inside its home, a locked glass cabinet. He found himself wanting to hold it, to keep it, to caress it, to draw upon its magic, to call it his own. It sang to him, beckoned, perhaps even teased him. Later it would invade the peace of his dreams, mocking him with whispered love chants.

He sat in the chapel only half-listening to the ceremony, Every mention of Jesus, Our Lord jarred him- why? Not formally an atheist, just a skepitcal disbeliever, he was incredibally isolated. And internally deriding all of the white bread American wedding trappings was little comfort.

Walking out of the church, solitary in a mass, he felt the urge to kick back on a pillar and light a cigarette. He did not smoke, never had a desire to, but at that moment in this universe, it felt like the most appropriate action.

He wanted to slip away, to dissappear like morning mist. So putting on the glad- face, he made the customary salutations. For the final goodbye, he took one more dive into those deep beckoning eyes, and for an eternal second, swam again in the silvery waters.

He wondered about things that happened in other time-event dimensions. Those things beautiful and mysterious which defy logical-rational-scientific- absolute explanation, but have an obvious place in the real world. But not for him. Some things were meant to be had, others were not; some things were to be explained and others best left as grey unknown. He knew but one time and place, and it was constantly unfolding before him.

The road out of town was awfully easy to find. It led somewhere.