Every morning, Grandpa Kii strikes a black stone against an iron rod to spark our fire. Lately, I can’t stop noticing how the black part of it keeps wearing away — and it bothers me more than I can explain.
We call it a sora-ishi, a sky-stone. It fell into our field one morning, long before Grandpa was even a boy. The story goes the air still smelled scorched when it landed. It’s black, small enough to fit in a palm, and as far as I can tell, our family has always used it to spark the morning fire. The stone never complains, so everyone just keeps striking it, on and on. Only the spot where the iron hits it has worn thin — black skin rubbed away to show gray underneath.
We studied stones like it in school. According to my teacher, sora-ishi travel an unbelievably long way before they ever reach us — so far I couldn’t even picture the distance. And strangely, that black skin isn’t something the stone picks up along the journey. It happens only in the last instant, as it tears through the sky and burns black on the way down. “So what happens during the long trip, then?” I asked. My teacher, looking half-asleep, said, “Nothing at all. There’s nothing out there to rub against it.” Funny thing is, whenever the talk turns to stars, Grandpa always looks like he couldn’t care less.
So after a journey that unimaginably long, the only proof of it — the only mark left behind — is that last flash of black char. And Grandpa wears it down a little more every single morning. That thought hit me hard. If this kept up, wouldn’t every trace of the stone’s journey just disappear?
First, I picked up a different stone and quietly set it down beside the sora-ishi. “Grandpa, can’t you use this one to start the fire?” “This one won’t spark,” he said, not even glancing at it. So next, I got some charcoal and carefully painted the gray patches black again, filling in the journey’s mark myself. The next morning, when Grandpa struck it, a puff of black dust flew up and coated his mustache. “Nobu — was that you?” Caught. But for some reason, Grandpa was smiling.
“You really love that black that much, huh?” He flipped the stone over and showed me the other side. Almost no black remained there at all, just smooth gray, with a small dent worn into the middle. “Put your thumb right there.” I did, and it fit perfectly, like it was made for me. “My grandpa, and his grandpa before him — everyone rested their thumb right there when they struck it. That’s how the dent got there.”
A stone that had traveled through nothing, gathering no marks at all along the way, had ended up with the shape of a thumb pressed into it, right in front of our hearth. All that distance, and it left no trace anywhere out there — but our ordinary, everyday fire-starting had been quietly carving into it all along.
“Today, you strike it.” Grandpa set the stone in my palm. My thumb slid right into the dent. I swung down hard against the iron rod. Sparks jumped, and the straw in the hearth caught fire. The black patch shrank by another sliver, no wider than a fingernail. And the dent — just a little, just my thumb’s worth — grew a bit deeper.