By Lesley Hart Gunn
First, don’t push the rock because they told you to, push it because you want to. Those golden-haired, fire yielding bureaucrats can’t make you hate the way you rise a little higher with each step. They can’t prevent the electricity you feel every time your hands touch the compacted aggregate that molts with each turn. They can’t stop the exhilaration of release, the kiss of the wind, as you run down the hill after it, the burn of your efforts its own reward, while they get drunker and fatter on nectars and elixirs, meant to fill their otherwise fruitless and inconsequential days.
Second, don’t worry about dying. You’ve plugged that hole a time or two, haven’t you? And they’ll have a boulder waiting for you on the other side as well, so you won’t have to worry about missing the things you cradled and molded and suffered, the things you love.
Third, why does the boulder have to have meaning? The rising sun, a clean house, the rhythmic tides, or cycle of life, it doesn’t matter. You are just pushing a rock up the hill to see it roll down, like a childhood game meant to fill the days with the hope and disappointment that indicates the passage of time.
Fourth. Consider how the rock feels, torn from a mountain like a heart from a chest. The once jagged edges grazed to smoothness that no longer chaps or digs your skin, beautiful, but defenseless, made to cradle the hands of man, while the unfillable maw of the mountain screams.
Fifth, consider what your punishers have missed, that they’ve created a god flattening monster, with muscles that writhe like knotted snakes along your back and shoulders, your weapon of choice poised at the top of the mountain, waiting for one of them to forget, to walk beneath you, just in time…
Finally, push harder and stronger, and higher and longer, push upwards and onwards, push faster and farther, then step to the side.
Let go and watch it roll. Watch them run.
Lesley Hart Gunn is the winner of the Fall 2022 F(r)iction Poetry Contest and has upcoming or previous publications in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Uncanny, Flash Fiction Magazine, PseudoPod, Abyss and Apex, Carve Magazine, Great Salt Lake Anthology, and Phantom Drift Journal. She is originally from the lakes and lighthouses of Atlantic Canada but currently lives in the mountains and desert of the American west with her partner, three children and two curious cats.
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