The prisoner woke up in his cell on the edge of the sea early in the morning. He was to die this day, as planned. The sun was white as it rose over the water, and the sky was empty, and the horizon was a pale rind speckled with distant ships. Today there was a white stone on the sill of the barred window that had not been there before; an old beggar who’d been walking by, shouting nonsense about the end of the world, had put it there. The prisoner, a young man who did not want to die and believed he was justified in the murder he committed, did nothing with the stone and thought nothing of it until the early afternoon, when it grew hot in the cell and when he knew his hour of death was nigh. He was to be hanged with three other criminals who were way worse men than he. The guard dropped off a pot of delicious beef stew and a loaf of wheat bread, which he devoured, and then he began to pace the stone floor back and forth. “It can’t be,” he said, and screamed. “I am an innocent man! An innocent man!”
Right when the guard came back to take him to the gallows, the young prisoner leaned his head against the sill and wept, and a lock of his hair touched that beggar’s stone. At once, it was morning again. The prisoner woke up in his cell in the prison on the edge of the sea. He was to die this day, as planned. The sun was white as it rose over the water, and the sky was empty, and horizon was a pale rind, speckled with distant ships. The morning had repeated itself.
The prisoner leaped to his feet, crying, “What sorcery!” and touched the stone again to find himself just waking up once again at the break of day. “Aha!” he cried. “Aha, I’m saved!”
He waited all day to eat his last supper again, waited further until the guard came to knock, and then touched the stone to return once again to the early morning and its white rising sun.
The prisoner touched the magic stone for many, many days. Weeks and months passed. He never knew where the stone came from—God or demon, who knew? He soon grew tired of the delicious beef stew, of course, and longed for some other kind of food and drink, but he was still alive, and he would stay alive forever so long as he had the magic white stone. He kept the thing safe in a corner of the cell and cherished it with every bone in his wretched being.
Years passed. The young man felt old in time but was still the same age because he was no longer subject to the time, and the day was always the same, and he never saw the night sky with its crescent moon or spread of silver stars. He only saw the white sun and the empty blue sky and the ships on the thin-lipped horizon. Day after repeated day, the prisoner began to suffer from a different kind of dying.
“Oh God!” he would cry after touching the stone. “Oh God, is this thing a blessing or a curse? Methinks it could be the latter! For what good is it to exist in a circle with no change or season? What good, I ask, is it to be alone in this hell? Better to die a mortal man than persist in this everlasting death, no?”
Nonetheless, he couldn’t bring himself to cast the stone out of the window. He tried many times, but saw the deathly gallows in his mind’s eye, and his own corpse hanging there in the wind for the crows to pick. And yet he grew to hate the stone, in a way, just like he loved the stone for keeping him away from death. He took to clutching it greedily for all hours of the day, until finally, in a moment of despair, he laid it on the windowsill and leaned his head against the bars. He soon fell asleep. When he woke up hours later, the stone had fallen into the grass and tumbled all the way to the beach below. Only, the young man couldn’t see it. The prisoner searched the cell high and low for the stone and nearly tore his hair out in his agony. He even forgot to eat his beef stew for that day. And the day stretched on and on until the guard came to get him, marched him to the gallows with the three other men, and hanged him, just as planned. Before he died, though, he cursed the wretched stone and begged the Almighty for mercy, for a new life, even so. These men beside him, he argued, where not more wicked than he.
Later that evening, the old beggar man walked down the beach with his staff and picked up the magic stone from the stand, whispering to himself, “Odd! I had it with me just this morning! I must have set it down on some windowsill in the prison.”
By the time the fellow had shuffled away, those ships on the horizon had made it into the harbor, the stars had come out, and the dead man lay in the ground, covered with stones.
Image by Sabine Kroschel from Pixabay – A round, white stone against a cream background.
literally stories 