Faithful Pebble
Part Seventy-Four
"I forget when this happened," Pebble sighed softly. She stepped over a small log crossing their winding unmarked trail. "I've lost much time since I've fallen, but then again, that had always been the case for me." Once more she gazed up into the wood's canopy, at its web of netted branches. "Even as a little girl, it has always been endless."
"What exactly?" the wanderer asked.
He knew the answer. The wanderer knew her answer intimately, related to it almost to the point of anger, although he would never tell. He would never say it to anyone apart from common, short, cold, callous, conventional, polite, civil answers.
"What exactly?"
"How do you mean?"
"Oh really?"
Like what he just muttered.
"What exactly?"
"How do you mean?"
"Oh really?"
At this, he was well practiced, the wanderer. This casual lying, this he was used to.
"Please explain?" the wanderer repeated.
"Time," she said. "It never stays, just slowly and quietly slips away, like the changing of the stars or the turning of the seasons, or the tick, tick, ticking of a clock, but I never feel it, never see it. Do you know how long I was down there—
"No, please don't tell me," she said. She whispered. She trailed off.
"There," the wanderer thought. There, he spied it, the slight ring of longing in her voice. Was it for the woods? For her childhood? The wanderer did not answer, instead he listened.
Pebble continued on as if she hadn't spoken, hadn't side-tracked her narrative with a simple glimpse of her own.
- Calla