Trinity part 13

He just sits there, all day long, in his little store by the highway. "ROCKS" hand-painted red on black press-wood at the end of his driveway. His store is a clutter of stones and crystals. Hematite. Agate. Onyx. Chrysoberyl. Cymophane. Peridot. Topazes of every colour. Spinel. Amethyst. Opal. Hydropicus. Selenite. Ana touches them, tracing the curves and smoothing the rough edges with her finger tip. Feeling their power. Millennial. Subterranean. Luminescent. Permanent. Later, in the car, Ana belittles her entrancement. "I liked his store. He had some nice rocks there." "I used to work the ploughs back in '75 when this place became a national monument." He slips through a bead curtain into the back room. Ana picks up an aspilate and clenches it in her fist. He returns from the back with a jar in his hands. "This is what we were burying. They told us the stuff was dangerous, but it seemed so pretty, and I figured I was touching some history here." Time kissed his hands. Yellowed and cracked like the desert sand. Left pinkie shortened by one phalange, the result of some mechanical accident, no doubt. Later, in the car, Ana tells me, "He looked like a victim." He places the jar on the counter. Inside, little luminous blue-green pebbles the shape of windshield shards. Trinitite. He unscrews the lid and hands me one. Blue like swaying oceans and green like a forest. "The whole world's in there," he could have told me and I would have believed him. I stare at it, flipping it up and down like a water-filled winter scene, expecting something to move, to take place. I drop the trinitite into my coat pocket with the spoon.ls from my cup onto USd floods the Danil Boone National Forest, Kentucky