Why not? How about about a quick Micro-Fiction Wednesday?

Shale

I grasp for the locket but my hands are turning to shale. Flaky gray stone rises from my wrinkles, robbing my fingers of any movement. I doesn’t hurt, but it’s agony.

The tall man looks at my locket. The picture of Emma – drooling and fat-cheeked. He meets my eyes and we share a moment of mourning.

I cough and it tastes of sediment. The man uses his staff to draw a circle around the totem, which lies inert on the ground.

“What’s happening?” I ask in a voice I half-recognize.

More villagers arrive. They wear cargo shorts and dusty sports jerseys for teams I don’t know. Each wears a mask made of shale. Jagged and imprecise. The crowns rising up in irregular polygons, like flames turned to stone. The same laminated rock now creeping over my arm.

Not over my arm. It is my arm. Was my arm. Fragments fall into the dirt, discarded remnants of a metamorphosis. Of a curse.

Emma.

I had her too late in my life to be a fixture in hers. I sought no desecration or disrespect. Only to sample a power. To have more time of my own, not steal any from others.

The man raises his staff. Thrusts it once, twice. In unison, every villager reaches to their mask and chips of a stone shard. They toss the pieces at my feet. One by one, satisfied by this ritual that they never seemed interested in, they leave.

“Please,” I say, my breath encased in an unbending chest. “It promised eternal youth.”

The tall man shakes his head and puffs his nose. “Fool,” he says. “Yokutta nacra rava.”

My vision is covered by staccato extensions of stone. Only one, open ear can hear his last words.

“It means ‘you will never grow older.’”