We were just killing time behind the old fairgrounds—me, my nephew Malachai, and his little brother Maceo. The boys were skipping rocks, splashing each other, their laughter bouncing off the water, echoing louder with every splash.
Malachai wandered off a little ways upstream and shouted that he’d found “the perfect sitting rock.” When I turned to look, there he was—barefoot, balanced right in the middle of the creek, like he was meant to be there.
The strange part? I’ve known that creek my whole life. Walked it since I was a kid. I could draw you a map of every curve, every sunken tire and busted beer bottle. That rock? It wasn’t there before. I’d bet on it.
I shouted for him to get off it—the water runs deeper in some spots than you’d think—but he just grinned and said, “It’s humming. Feels warm underneath.”
I stepped closer, squinting at the shadowy shape beneath him. The water around it shimmered, like heat rising off blacktop on a summer afternoon.
Then, right before my eyes, the creek went still. Not frozen, not ice—just… paused. The surface stilled completely, even where it should’ve been running over rocks. No flow. No ripple.
Maceo gasped and dropped the muddy rock he’d been holding. “Uncle Theo! What happened to the water?”
I had no idea what to tell him. My mouth opened, but nothing came out. My brain scrambled for an explanation—earthquake? sinkhole?—anything that made sense.
“Malachai,” I called gently, “you feel anything weird? Tingling? Pressure in your ears?”
He looked up at me slowly, blinking like he’d just come out of a dream. “I feel… calm. Like I’ve been here before. Like the rock knew me.”
That hit something deep in me. Malachai’s no liar. He’s got a big imagination, sure, but he’s never been one to make stuff up for attention. And yet there he was, looking perfectly peaceful, sitting on a rock I swear had never existed—while the creek around him stood still, like time had stopped.
“I think I’m supposed to stay here a little longer,” he said, eyes drifting downstream like he could see something I couldn’t.
“No,” I said, more firmly than I meant to. “Get off that thing. Slowly.”
He hesitated, then stood up. The moment his feet left the rock, the creek came back to life. The current resumed its gentle gurgle, and the birds overhead picked up where they’d left off—like someone had hit play on the world again.
I helped him back to the bank, my heart pounding. I tried to laugh it off, said maybe we’d just spaced out and imagined it all. But Maceo’s wide-eyed stare told me he’d seen it too.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept replaying the shimmer, the silence, the way Malachai had looked—so calm, so certain—as if something in that rock remembered him.