Waiting for the stone

Based on a true story
I’m twelve years old. I get up before anyone else that morning and I leave the cabin and go down to the lake. It’s a very small, round lake, more of a pond, at the bottom of a steep-sided bowl of spruce and pine-covered hills. The sun’s just coming up and there’s a swathe of fog on the water, which is as still as glass.

I look down at my feet and here is a stone. Pale grey. Flat, disk-like. Perfect for skipping.
I pick up the stone. The lure of that calm mirror of water is too great. I cock back my arm, take a breath, then flick my wrist and the stone flies true. Plip plip plip … three bounces and then the white missile vanishes in the fog. I don’t hear a final splash and I don’t get to see if it bounced more than three times.
This is disappointing, and I keep staring into the fog, as if there might be something more to see. And then I hear it.
Plip, plip, plip … the stone reappears, skipping toward me, a tiny flying saucer, dropping with a plop into the water just in front of me.
I stand dazed for a moment. The far shore of the lake is still invisible. I don’t know who threw back the stone, if anyone did. Maybe the lake returned it. Or the fog. Or in this moment the world has become like the lake’s surface, a mirror, and if the fog cleared I would see myself standing on the far shore, having just thrown the stone.
If it is my stone. I reach down and fish the stone out of the shallows. Yes, it is the same flat gray disk, or it seems to be, but somehow it’s different. This is the one stone that came back when all the others didn’t. This perfect Paleolithic button. Now it’s more than a stone. It’s a sign. A word. A message. A beginning.
And then my twelve-year-old self is back in this grown-up body and I’m sitting at my desk, looking down at my writing notebook. I’m not holding the stone anymore, I’m holding a pen.
I hold the pen over the page for a moment, and then it descends and I start to write.
I write, waiting for the stone to come skipping back over the water.