One day, before the cancer resurfaced, before the papery pale skin that transformed her into a childhood memory, she told the young girl that stones with a complete circle were special. She taught her how to search for them along the rocky shore, barnacles and seaweed camouflage carpeting like a mold.
They’d stroll along the Sound, down a woodsy steeped path, down from the musty cabin, faces groundward, searching for the wishing stones. Sometimes a clear white ring signaled upward, demarcated from the the concrete grey base of an oblong rock.
Decades later she teaches her own daughter: look for the one with the ring, the sign of infinity round and round. Hold it in your hand, warm it, keep it. Or return it to the ocean; give it a new life among the rolling waters.
They like to collect the different stones, squat and oblong, granular and smooth. Such varied colors from the surface of the earth. They turn them over in their hands, so different. One small and delicate with a child’s tensile skin; the other spotted, weathered from decades of existence. They each make a wish, the girl tossing into the sea, the woman holding on, relegating her hopes to her pocket.