The Girl and the Tiny Meteor

I kicked a decently sized pebble down the road as I walked home from school. It was gray, round, and heavy enough that it more or less went in the right direction when I hit it. These things are so easy to lose, but they aren't too difficult to find either. The trick is being able to find one when you're looking for it. I always keep a backup rock in my backpack just in case I can't find one on the pavement.

I walked on the sidewalk down the usual route, the sort of road that you'd taken hundreds and hundreds of times before and you know every stray cat and weirdly persistent graffiti artist. I lived just close enough to school that it didn't make any sense for me to drive or take the bus, but just far enough that it was a real pain in the butt walking there and back every day.

Everything was more or less normal. Cars were zooming past me, way faster than the speed limit. It looked like it was going to rain soon. I had an umbrella in my backpack, so I wasn't worried.

Everything was normal. Except for the girl lying in the middle of the sidewalk.

I didn't notice her at first, so I accidentally kicked my rock into her. She didn't move an inch. She had a blank, vacant expression on her face like she was off in some other universe.

"Sorry about that, I can be a little clumsy sometimes," She didn't respond.

Normally I would just ignore this sort of person and walk on home, but she was wearing a blue pleated skirt and white blouse, the school uniform of Saint Mary Middle School - the same one I was wearing. I had never seen her before.

"Is everything alright? You seem a little out of it," I was beginning to suspect that she was mentally handicapped.

She didn't speak, but I finally managed to get a response out of her. She slowly raised her arm and gently, ever so gently, pointed at a fence. It wasn't a very interesting fence. I hadn't even felt the need to comment on its existence before now. It was wooden, brown, and old, like it would crumble to pieces if you put too much weight on it. It was separating the sidewalk from the park on the other side.

I cocked my head to the side, "The fence? Is that what you're looking at?"

This girl was weird, really weird. She finally opened her mouth to sigh, "Is that all you see? A fence?"
"Well, yeah. It's a fence. There's a bit of mold growing on it, I guess."

She shook her head, "It's a work of art. As priceless as the Mona Lisa. You should treat it with more respect."

"This old thing? Are you serious?'

I snorted, she shut her eyes. I wasn't getting anywhere, but I wasn't convinced that she would be okay by herself either. I sat down. I tried my best to clear my patch of sidewalk of pebbles and dirt and met with zero success.

Her peace already broken, she breached the silence, "If I told you that Leonardo DeVinci built this fence would you consider it art?"

"No. It would be a fence. A fence is a fence, no matter who makes it. There's nothing beautiful about it."

"Nothing beautiful? What about the delicate cracks in the wood, the peacock-esque splay of fibers and splinters, the robust shape of the planks, and the interplay of the shadow created by the fence and the grass behind it? What about the fence as a meta-commentary on industrial society? It could be taken as indicative of our tendency to create and build the next new thing over and over again without any regard for what's already been built."

I thought over her explanation and came to my conclusion, "Or, it could just be an old fence. There doesn't have to be a deeper meaning to everything."

She sighed again, but by now she was full of energy, her earlier stupor abandoned, "'If a man should have a feeling and deeper insight with respect to the things that are produced in the universe, there is hardly one of those by-products that will not fail to give pleasure,' an old Roman emperor wrote that. Would you ignore the wisdom of our ancestors as well as your peers?"

"You're spending an awful lot of effort trying to convince a stranger to have the same viewpoint on art as you. Do you do this with everyone you meet?"

"If you didn't want to hear it, then why did you sit down and ask?"

She wasn't quite on the money, but I didn't care to correct her.

"Well, I suppose you might have a point," I wasn't convinced in the slightest, I just wanted to leave.

"Good. Now leave me be. I'm trying to appreciate the art."

I got up to leave. I picked up my pebble and put it in my backpack. I started walking, glanced at the girl, glanced at the fence, and turned my head forward.

I realized when I was shutting the fence in front of my home that I had forgotten to ask the girl's name. I sat on the steps before the door and felt a sudden urge to take the pebble back out of my backpack.

It was grey, round, and a bit heavy, but there was more to it than that. It was a deep gray, darker than the concrete, but lighter than the roads, with little freckles of white stone dotting it. It was marked with little scuffs and scratches from the frequent scrapes with the sidewalk, each one smoothing the stone's natural porousness and making the shape more uniformly round. The streaks almost resembled a ball of string wrapping around the rock.

It looked... pretty. Like a little meteor cupped in my palm. I wanted to keep looking at it, to examine every little crease and crack in the stone, to understand every facet of it. I wanted to-

I wanted to know the girl's name. I decided to find out tomorrow.