Lian Rameson

The rocks I found on our rain hike were mostly round and gray, and I cannot recall the impulse that made me stuff them, one after the other, into my wet, sand-lined pockets. My mother saw how my sweatpants sagged under the weight and told me to dump them as we approached a small stream. I did, grudgingly. When she reached for my hand to help me across, I shook my head and would not budge. Finally, curling my fingers back, I revealed my last, unrenounced treasure: a moss-colored sliver of faceted rock with yellow veins.  

An arrowhead! she said, made of chert by people who lived a long time before us. She turned it over in her hands, eyes wide, then placed it in her own pocket. I would have liked to play with it, to feel the sharp edges dig into my palms again, but once we got home she put it behind glass on a high shelf. I didn’t mind the way she absconded with my find. She guarded it like a dragon hoards stolen treasure, marking its significance, and by extension mine. I was now a discoverer of lost things, finder of magical objects.

My mother said I could have the arrowhead back once I was grown up, and she returned it to me twenty-five years later. Dusting the mantle in my grown-up home, I bumped the arrowhead. It fell and broke in two.

I haven’t had the heart to tell my mother.