A Consequence of Stardust
Short Story
The rock had begun its life like everything else on Earth: of stardust compressing and compacting until the planet emerged from the void, raw and unformed.
Even before the concept of Time became fixed in the imaginations of primitive people — even before the ancestors of these primitive people emerged from the water, the rock hunkered down beneath the surface of this strange landscape.
Volcanoes erupted and spewed lava, fighting with deliveries of ice and water from impacting comets. The world heated and cooled, heated and cooled and the rock weathered the storm in silence and complicity.
It remained there, trapped in a larger mass, as the atmosphere encapsulated the Earth, trapping in the liquids and gasses that would one day spark the foundations of life.
The rock remained ensconced. Over time, it would move, slowly and imperceptibly. Shifting as the plates jostled for space and the continents formed. The single cells that multiplied and grew, lived, reproduced and died did their own jostling. An entire world of this constant scramble to survive just that second longer. Above the rock, evolution in its multiplicities and mercilessness bloomed. Even after wayward comet strikes struck down the dinosaurs, smaller beings remained, and lived.
The rock found itself nestled in a landmass that would one day become Australia — after a pocket of early humanity made their way across land bridges that would eventually succumb to rising seas. This pocket grew and spread across the great continent, a world unto itself, surviving blistering deserts and freezing southern lands. Then the winds brought ships of colonialism and convicts, cholera and smallpox. The rock bedded down as genocide raged above; it wasn’t as primordial as what it had experienced in its infancy, so long ago, but it was just as animalistic, just as bloody.
It was only when the fighting died down that the building began. It started small — townships made of the timber from once gargantuan trees in ancient forests. After they suffered their decapitations without complaint, their networks of roots hardened and shrivelled around the rock.
The railway lines came and with them the vibrations that rattled the rock, still below in its cocoon of dirt and rubble and dead roots. But these vibrations were nothing like the ones the earth-moving machines brought with them, as they left scars in their wake, carving the tracks of a new road.
Just like that, the rock was thrust into sunshine. Burst into dazzling light, it was moved and deposited on a man-made hill, upon which a footbridge would be built. To be thrown over the new six-lane highway, a passage for walkers, joggers or cyclists above the frenzy of vehicles below.
Significant turmoil for the rock, which had spent most of its life sedentary, buried and hidden away. But this was not the end of the turmoil: there was more to come.
A light-polluted night sky stared down the rock, and the hand that plucked it from its resting place. The hand belonged to a young boy, bordering manhood, and it was flush full of adrenaline. He carried the rock to the overpass, he and his friends sailing on the same mischievous current that shocked the boring suburban night full of electricity. The egging-on, the small hesitation before the throw. And belief, or hope tossed to the wind, that this act he was about to commit, though juvenile and stupid, would not actually result in anything bad happening. That the rock would not actually hit a car — instead, the rock would impact the asphalt and explode, causing no harm but a slight shudder to the first vehicle that ran over it at a hundred kilometres an hour.
When asked later, face awash in flashing blue and red lights, among the flurry of other questions, of “Why?”, the boy couldn’t quite conjure up the words to describe what he’d been feeling in the moment. How it hadn’t felt like tempting fate — that he’d been sure that there was no way the consequences could have been this severe. That the rock, despite its weight and velocity, could never have smashed directly through the windshield of a car driven by a mother with her three children in the back. That the smooth, lulling glide along the highway could so violently be disturbed, that the rock could knock the mother unconscious with a blow to the head, and all the children could see would be the rapidly approaching pylon of the bridge. No time to scream, not time for the eldest to attempt leaping into the front to take the steering wheel, no time to do anything but perhaps register that this was the end.
The bodies would be buried, the boy would be sentenced to a long enough jail term that he would emerge from prison an old man, and the car and the rock would be ground down by a compactor and left to decompose under the elements. After years of dormancy blighted by a speck of violence, the crumbled rock would resume its unmoving observance of the march of time.
The stars went on twinkling above, as if they sagely knew that all of it — the rock, the hand, the young boy, the bridge, the car, the mother and her children — were a consequence of stardust.
