WHERE DID HE GO? 245 words

Children often live in fantasy worlds, imagining characters and even making up voices for them. My five-year-old son Michael, like many children, is no different.

Last week he was busy exploring a planet where the air was so thick he had to wear an aluminum foil mask to breathe. He told me the trees were his friends and guards of the planet.

This evening my wife and I sat on our patio, sipping wine and relaxing in the shade of the umbrella.  The late sun cast long shadows across the yard, and Michael was hopping from flagstone to flagstone. He came up to me and said he had found a magic stone.

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “Can I see it?”

He held out his hand and showed me a piece of smooth black onyx the size of an egg. “I found it buried in the dirt by the big tree.”

The people who had lived here before us were from Prescott, Arizona, where onyx is mined. They probably dropped it in the yard where it got buried. 

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “Why is it magic?

“It can take me to the other world.”

My wife and I smiled at each other. He wiped the stone on his jeans to remove the last vestiges of dirt and cupped the stone to his chest in his small fingers.

Then he mumbled a few childish nonsense words and was gone.

I may be reached at goldmiel@gmail.com for comments