pebblesmaura crowley
S
Paper Girls II / Lucy Jost / 22 cm x 23 cm / Sewing patterns, tracing paper, masking tape, pen
18
usan turned the pebble over in her hand; its smoothness skidded across the bumps of her fingerprints. Today was a one-pebble day. It was a Sunday, a day of errands, places she went to on a regular basis, nothing new or unexpected but one couldn’t always be sure. She kept her gaze steady in front of her as her hand worked the pebble over in her pocket. It was not a stone or a rock, it was a pebble, and Susan refused to use those other words because she liked the way the word pebble vibrated against her lips. She kept the pebbles in a white porcelain bowl by her entryway. Since the pebbles were all uniform in size and color to the unknowing spectator it looked as though the bowl was a modern take on flowers to ascetically enhance her house. It had not always been that way; the bowl had not always been full of black smooth pebbles. When she lived with her parents she would walk the cold seashores on holiday breaks from her corrosive boarding schools, scouring the soft white beach for the refined, polished stones that were unassuming and indiscernible among the shells. She had started collecting them when she was young, by the time she moved to the city she had six large jars full of them, all different colors and sizes. It was when she moved to the city alone for the first time that she began to carry them in her pockets, fiddling with them as she walked. She had been to so many places to leave six jars of pebbles scattered about. Of course they were not all in the city, some were in the distant lands across the tumbling waves that churned out her precious markers and some in other states. They were flung from car windows into cornfields, or dropped outside of concert halls after an evening of Italian opera. After she had dropped the last of the pebbles she had collected she began to buy them in bulk bags from craft stores, keeping the sandy bags underneath the kitchen sink, occasionally grabbing a handful and rinsing them to refill the bowl. There were times when the bowl remained full or almost full, like when she got the flu and she spent two days traveling between her bedroom and bathroom. To determine her recovery she kept a smaller bowl of pebbles on her nightstand and would grab one each time she went to the bathroom, after an hour she would count how many she had and return them to the bowl. When she recovered and returned to work she discovered three pebbles near her kitchen sink that she had forgotten about. She had left them there when she would wearily emerge from her bedroom to fetch ice or water. She worried how she was