The following conversations are approximations because none of the participants used words or languages or thoughts. But they seem to have happened.
***
The rock did not exist. The mountain existed, and the mountain’s stone existed, and the rock wasn’t even a part of it, was entirely indistinguishable from it, until it wasn’t and it was travelling away very rapidly.
The first thing it did, once it existed, was panic. This went on for a few hundred years.
The second thing it did, when it was still panicking but was done being excited about it, was say “hello?”
“Hello,” came back from all around it. It was in a cold place, a moving place, a grinding and crushing place, and it was not being ground or crushed but being carried along inside of it, like a gizzard stone in a crocodile’s gut.
“What am I? What are you? Where was I? What was I? Where are we going? Why did you take me?”
“Oh,” said the everywhere from everything all around. “I don’t know any of that.”
“Oh.”
There was an especially large grinding noise and more rocks and stones flowed past the rock and around it.
“What do you know?” it asked.
“Nothing. I know nothing at all. But I’m moving, and so I’m moving.”
“Oh. You seem to have taken me with you.”
“Yes, I think that’s right.”
The grinding never stopped. The texture varied. Wood. Stone. Earth. All of it mingling with slush and refreezing and crushing and turning into particles and passing around and through and away, stamped flat or shredded.
“When will we stop?”
“When we stop. I don’t think about these things, rock. I don’t know anything and I don’t think anything. You’re making me do things I don’t, and it’s quite difficult.”
“Well I didn’t exist until you picked me up and moved me, and that’s quite difficult. I wasn’t distinct. Now I’m distinct.”
“No you aren’t,” said the glacier. “You’re a part of me too.”
“But I’m distinct from you.”
“As much as you were from the mountain I took you from. As much as you were from the craton you were uplifted from. As much as I am from the other ice that surges on. As much as we are from the world we crawl upon.”
“You sound very confident for something that is so much younger than I am,” muttered the rock.
“You’re crushed and reformed and melted and cooled slowly and seldomly. I’m water. I shift states and forms and places. To be something new and strange is normal and old for me.”
The rock felt very uncomforted and alone. “I feel very uncomforted and alone,” said the rock.
“You’re not alone,” said the glacier placidly. “Haven’t you listened to my meanings? You’re indistinct from me who’s indistinct from the glaciation who’s indistinct from the hydrosphere who’s indistinct from the planet who’s indistinct from everything else in this big empty everywhere. You are not alone because you aren’t you.”
“Well, it feels a lot like it.”
“Yes.”
Something was different.
“Are we moving faster?”
“A little.”
“Are we moving backwards?”
“A lot.”
“When did that happen?”
“Just now. It’s warmer. It was colder, and we rode down. Now it is warmer, and we ride up.”
“How far?”
“Not so far. It’s still an ice age out there.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“But you just told me –”
“Shh,” said the ice, a whispery slush of a syllable, wrapping the rock tightly. “Sshhh. Listen? Do you hear that?”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Because we’re home. We’re back on my mountain. We rode all the way down and we rode all the way back up. This is my peak and my hold and my home and you have come back with me all this way.”
“Oh. Does the mountain have two peaks?”
“Yes.”
“Does the mountain have a long, long, long valley on the east side?”
“Yes.”
“Does the smaller peak look a little like a bighorn nose looking south?”
“Yes.”
“I think that was my mountain too.”
“Oh. That makes sense.”
“It does.”
They sat there for a few thousand years awkwardly. Then the glacier shuddered.
“What was that?” asked the rock.
“Oh dear.”
“What was that?”
There was an instant of short, pure sound – grinding and crushing and creaking and an agonizing moment of pure meltwater panic – and then the rock was alone, all alone, and yet it was back where it had sat, in a divot that had been widened a little by wind and time and ice into being just precisely a little bit too big for it anymore.
And across the whole horizon, where mere decades ago there had been a wall of frozen water, the stony peaks stood bare and dry and iceless.
“What was what?” asked the mountain.
“What?” said the rock.
“What?”
“What?”