Dan and I share a best friend named Ben, and he moved to West Virginia. We were devastated; it was far from us, and all the mountains there contain bituminous coal, shale and are entirely Appalachian. From the Pittsburgh airport, where we have flown in for a visit from Kansas, we have to travel by car another eighty-five minutes, and I sit in the back of Ben's station wagon, nauseously watching the mountains pass by. Before leaving Pennsylvania, I spot a colorful Ikea sign etched into the side of a large mountain; aside from this spectacle, the landscape is a full-blown and barren shade of grey. Occasionally, I spot some chalky crosses nailed to the rocks, but these, too, turn a shaley grey. As we pass by the rocks, Ben says he's happier than he's ever been. He says he forgot to clean his shower, but that's fine. We nod. It is good to see Ben.

            His shower and bathroom ceiling are crawling with black mold, a porous substance that is consciously eating through his paper walls and nesting in the seams of the tiles. The black is almost green and this almost pushes us immediately back to the Pittsburgh airport, past all the rotting limestone on the sides of the cliffs, hanging there. Instead, we apply Clorox to everything except the ceiling and notice the stash of drugs Ben's hiding in a drawer in an oak table next to his futon that functions as his bed.

Reverberations

"Rocks vibrate," Ben says to us upon entering his apartment; he's been down the street, sleeping with his girlfriend. "Did you know that?" he asks us. "You mean, when we explode a rock face?" I ask. He looks at me, disparagingly. "No, I mean all the time."

            Rocks' vibrations are reverberations to me; echoes of heat and light when it's too hot and humid in a swelling augusted heat. Heat spills off of rocks when it rises in summer; heat turns tar to mush and our driveways and our roads look waxy and malleable, as if we could ball them like foil. Rocks have minds of their own, these beating magenta or grey hearts of ore and lava. Inside a volcano, everything shakes, and the eruption quakes everything we consider to be solid. Rocks move and change and etch new beginnings, trail down mountains as pebbles, new starts. To Ben, everything beats constantly, echoing a livable, movable space, slightly tremouring in complete stillness. His hands shake as he says this. “Too much coffee,” he says.

Beans

A week after Christmas, when I was a freshman in college, my dad stayed home from work, nursing a hangover, and asked me if I wanted to grab a coffee with him. I said sure. We went to the town coffee roasters, a new cafe that was near his barber. Sitting there, he ordered Blue Mountain coffee and asked the owner where he got it. "Jamaica," he told him, tending to other customers. My father, relentless, asked who his supplier was. Instead of taking a simple answer, my father hauled me back into the car, my Kenyan dark roast poured into a to-go cup between my hands in the car. He took me all the way to the supplier, called ahead to see if we could get a tour.

            The coffee roasters in the back were fat silos of beans, all types of levels of caffeine labeled on their sides. As we moved through the back rooms, we came across a yellow bucket full of shiny, round stones. I peered in. "Oh," the woman who gave the tour said, noticing my disinterest with her speech, "Those are the rocks that sift through the grinding process. Once we roast the beans, these rocks come out; they get kind of shiny." I wanted to put my hand in and touch them; some were pink and some were perfect, gaudy quartz. They were a bucket of misplacement. My father and I stumbled through the tour, and afterwards, he tasted a fresh sample of Blue Mountain roast. "You want to take some home?" the woman suggested. I nodded. My dad stared at her, "Thanks anyway," and we were on our way, coasting back over the empty asphalt roads, clear of any traffic.

Amber

In the Detroit airport: a water fountain, with spurts of water like fish jumping, independent of each other, people running, flat moving escalators, newspaper stands. We are making a connecting flight from Pittsburgh to Kansas; it's the middle of winter. I am holding onto Dan's arm, walking quickly to our gate, when I look down: the amber stone is gone from my ring, the prongs scarily empty. I gasp, point. We turn on our heels and retrace our steps. All these people's feet kick at the air, as if the stone is not underfoot. It's nowhere. We walk all the way back to the bathrooms. I enter, go to the toilet I was sitting at a few minutes earlier, though it's occupied. I drop to my knees, look under the stall, the neighboring stalls, but nothing. I move to the sink: on top of the grate, the stone gleams in a puddle of soapy water. I pluck it from the white foam, rub it off on my sleeve. I race to find Dan, holding the stone up to the artificial airport light. "I got it!" He's amazed.

On the landing, there are no mountains, and the earth is as green as it is brown. The landing is rough, I hold Dan's arm. I can hear the landing gear emerge from underneath, the mechanics preoccupying most of us. Out the window, closer to the earth: rocks, in large bulk, next to a river, asphalt landing strips, sedimentary pieces of rock that have changed and been eaten at and eroded from snow, run-off, wind. Today, it's a bit windy, raining intermittently, snow tomorrow, the pilot says. The wind skims off the rocks as we land; we hit the earth with reverberating glory: the asphalt and rocks vibrate and shift.

            
             

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