This is a round stone, about the size of my head.
I saw the stone sitting as a doorstop outside my local post office. Though I don’t usually do this sort of thing, I asked if I could take it with me. The answer was yes, if I could supply a stone of equivalent weight to be their new doorstop. I walked down to the riverbank, wrenched out a piece of limestone, and brought it back. The limestone passed muster and I brought the round one home, where it lives in my writing studio.
It looks alive, like a human head, or an overlarge cannonball. It seems to have force inside it, and also the opposite, an almost willful inertness. It’s probably the oldest thing in the house, by many thousands of years. I like it. It doesn’t like me back, but its presence makes my mortality easier for me to bear.