Beautiful. Cold. And Singular.

The stone, beautiful and cold as it is, created such a feeling of home that he couldn't imagine losing it. It was a simple stone - elongated and a polished white color, smooth and skinny when compared to how long it is. Still, small enough to grasp within his hand.

He palms the stone, closes his eyes, and falls back into the cold sensation that emits from the smooth surface.

His eyes are closed, and he becomes lost. More lost than he can remember being lost, at least since the last time that he was lost which he has no recollection or understanding of when it was. It could have been hours. It could have been years. In this moment, he doesn't even know his own age.

He finds himself on the riverbank. The sun is bright in the sky, there are clouds strewn about, but mostly it is a bright and blue sky. He peers across to the other side of the river as though he is searching for something lost to time forever ago, and forgotten nearly as far back in history. Of course, nothing is there. There is no lost relic. There is no memory that will float to the surface of his thoughts, yet lost he remains.

Perhaps, he thinks to himself, if I can peer hard enough across this river I will be able to see the future.

The thought gets lost to time, and it is as though he had never even begun to think the words. He picks up a stone from the ground. It isn't particularly flat, or round - more of a cube with jagged walls - and tries to skip it across the river's rushing water. The rock sinks to the bottom without even so much as a single hop.

He picks up another stone and tries again. These stones, however, are no match for the rushing rapids of the river before him. His eyes have yet to even notice whether or not the stones skip. He just glances at them when he picks them up, stares back across the river and flings the rocks. One by one, disappearing into the white caps of rushing rapids.

He finally picks up one with a strange sensation filling his hand. A white, flat rock that seems unnaturally cold.

Here it is, he thinks to himself once more. The future.

He opens his eyes and peers at the rock in his hand. He notices with immediacy that the rock is now covered in a liquid, cold as can be, and clearly water.

"Where am I?" He looks around the room that disorients him as he says this aloud. The room, with a bit of sunlight peering through the dark green curtains illuminates the room well enough to make clear the burgundy couch that could easily pass as being from the 1970s, as well as the beige shag carpet that could equally be as old. The smell of musty old fills the room. Nothing looks like a new, and in fact, it looks decades old and worn to hell and back.

The stench overwhelms all his other senses. It isn't just musty, it is filled with the death of millions of hopes and dreams decaying before him. A predisposition, or a propensity, to sensing such things has never led to anything this overwhelming to him, and as a means to alleviate his overwhelmed sense he begins to frantically search the room.

Patting the couch cushion leads to a fluttering of what could only be described as pounds of dust flittering through the air as it slowly disperses and flickers in the beams of lights from outside. Nothing to be found from this search pattern, he feels, but he begins lifting the cushions from their places never the less. The smell of dead, and dying, hopes and dreams begin to subside from his senses as he sees the springs beneath the cushions expose themselves through a tattered bit of fabric that lost its sense of duty decades prior.

More dust takes flight in the poorly illuminated air as he opens a nightstand drawer. No one has inhabited this room in quite some time, but he finds a fountain pen and an ink pot that has only been lightly utilized within the contents of the drawer. The ink, mostly dried up and unusable, still has some liquidity to it if he mixes it well enough. A tattered piece of paper resides on a coffee table, though it looks as though it could turn to the same dust filling the air if looked at in the wrong way. He takes the pen and dips it into the half dried ink well. A drip slowly drops from the tip as he holds it over the pot of ink, so slow that he can count the seconds between when the drop begins to form and when it finally drips.

He begins to remember how to write the cursive words, forming into a sentence. "Where can I find my stone?"

He opens his eyes and feels the cold, solid, beautiful stone within his hand. It is no longer white, but covered in a thick layer of silty dust that, as he looks at it, shakes off into his hand.

I still have yet to find what I am looking for, he thinks to himself as he looks around his bedroom. I will try again tomorrow.

He drops the stone back into the drawer of his nightstand next to his bed after removing the dust, revealing the white, cold, and beautiful rock.

A world within a world. What a life we live. Insanity, reality, and the summation of humanity contained on a single stone. Whatever will man think of next?

-Dustin S. Stover