It was wet, still slick with algae and other indeterminate residue, and in a brief terrifying second he found himself losing his balance as it slipped in his hands and he shifted to regain his grip.  Always be careful you don’t take on something you can’t follow through with, came the words of his grandmother, as if whispered gently into his ear.  He steadied himself, and gripped the rock tighter.  

He stared at it.  It was like many of the rocks he and his cousin stepped on, or over, in their daily explorations of the shoreline that was a mere thirty feet from the screened-in porch of the house: stained with marine life that was determined to stand fast as it was battered by waves and slammed against other rocks by indifferent tidal flows, worn partly smooth from the more gradual, gentler natural forces that brought slow, barely measurable change.  He did not consider, in that moment, when his body shook with anger, when he had yet to acquire what adults called “wisdom”, that the entirety of his frame of reference was represented in that rock: violent change, painfully slow change, the impulse to cling doggedly to that which was familiar out of primal, non-thinking instinct.  He did not consider, seething with a rage born of a mere thirteen years of solopaistic existence, the terror that comes with the realization that the forces that operated on his own ecosystem, that buffeted him at times violently, were fundamentally no less indifferent to those that sent waves onto shorelines, that could in an instant change from soothing and reassuring to brutal and destructive.