Highland Pebble

by Frances Ainslie

I found a pebble in my pocket, peach-skin soft. It’s a polished cabochon pebble smoothed by endless tides. Splintered from rock and abandoned by a loch-side. It’s only a daft wee pebble, a keepsake, a memory, a talisman. Washed pale as a winter moon and moulded by a mermaid’s thumb. A pebble that glints with mica flecks in sunlight. Its journey told in scars of silver. A simple pebble, that took two million years to fit snug in a bairn’s hand; to fit perfectly in a pocket.