riverstone

flat stones come from wet gravel, by hand. skip one across still water and it goes — damped bounces, a plink per touch, the whole small physics of a good afternoon. or stack up to seven into a cairn: a traveler's grammar for forks and fords that only a thunderstorm topples, stones scattered, nothing lost. mobs cannot knock one over; the weather has to earn it. seven stones have seven shapes of their own, so a cairn is read at a glance from across the ford — how far it got, and whether anyone has been back.

the players of the game are already in: a dog fetches its own person's fresh throws — never pocket spills, never a stranger's — a crow within twelve blocks steals one skip in sixteen and will swoop a skipping stone mid-flight, and the cairn top is perchable, which is all a crow ever asked of a monument.

planned: the current bending a skip's run — a bounce shorter upstream, a bounce longer down — and the almanac's line for the first seven-skip throw.