Green Stone

Undecided, for the time being, on whether and how to die, he chose a walk, and with a stick in hand for a third leg, headed for the river bank. It was that time of year that he also chose a coat and hat from among those that had stayed for months in a closet; geese could be heard passing overhead, talking quietly among themselves, and some of the older neighbors had begun to rake leaves.
      At the river, he turned right. To the left, the trail bored straight through a tunnel, still, of green, and he would have none of that. Blackberries, hazels, and stripling firs wore there an air of youth and industry, running riot, reclaiming the land jouyously from inattentive farmers. His direction, left, led to a faint trail losing itself among maples already golden in the low light of the shortened afternoons; here he might find a tree leaning far over the water, perhaps thinking, as he did, that it might be easier simply to tumble in. Some of the mighty trees had done just that, and though there was no longer life in them, they held to a place in the scheme of things, lying in wait, so to speak, for the unwary canoeist or kayaker to be swept into, and held under by, their mindless but still mighty arms. That this should be so, he found somehow mildly reassuring.
      He had seen himself in the morning's mirror, and taken inventory: beard growing out at all angles, even in tufts from his ears, a tooth missing, new age spots on his cheek and at the corner of a newly sagging mouth. Yet he did not really mind age; perhaps it was that he had not yet become profoundly uncomfortable in his body, or perhaps it was that there were still others who depended on him for his work, his income, his contribution to the day's sum of humanity. But a tiredness was on him that he had not known before, and the ambition had grown on him, for several weeks now, to see some sort of closure to his story. He leaned out to look at his reflection in the water, upside down with the maples, and decide if he might not be ready to join that reflection, and look briefly on a world from beneath its notice.
      A gleam of jade-green and delicate black tracery caught his eye. He reached with the walking-stick to guage the depth to the new object of his interest, and found the river here shallow enough for an investigation. Dragging with the stick, he brought a stone to the angle of repose along the river's bank, and, shucking off his coat and rolling up his sleeve, braved the shock of mountain snowmelt water to fish out his new-found treasure.
      "Hm," he said, and setting the stone on a stump, rolled down his sleeve onto his numbed arm and pulled on the coat again, savoring its familiar woolen warmth as he did so. Turning now his full attention to the wet stone on its rough-sawn pedestal, he stooped over it to admire the play of shades of green over its surface, and the filigree of black curling lines upon the green, which, he felt sure, would be found to descend to the stone's heart, if one could bring oneself to the sacrilege of experiment. "Hm. Serpentine, or something. A pretty."
      He lifted the stone, dried it on his sleeve, noted absently that, unlike so many stones, it did not lose interest on being dried, and, slipping it into his pocket, lifted himself into his walking posture, and headed home.