This whole thing doesn’t being to make sense. But not in a bad way. Or, at the very least, not in a way that makes you roll your eyes and discount it from the start.

Never in that way.

Let me start from somewhere in the middle, that’s when it was making the most sense, so it’s probably the easiest place to begin.

I had just finished dinner. The television was muted without the captions on. The phone rang. It was Magdalene. There were only about three numbers in my caller ID rotation, and hers came up most often, so even before I looked at the the display I had a good idea it was her.

“You’ve got to check this out.” Her voice had about 4 cups of coffee in it.

“Good evening. Mark here. Great to hear from you. How’ve you been? Same here.”

“Quit joking around- you’ve got to check this out.”

“Check what out?”

“I was looking at a map around your house and there’s four huge, and I mean _huge_ stones arranged in a square nearby.”

“They have stones on a map?”

“It was a satellite image. Quit fucking around and get over here.”

Before I got a chance to answer there was a click on the line. I finished the program on the television, got my keys, and drove over. Magdalene lived in a fourplex about an hour away. Her living room was the sort of controlled chaos that most academics I had met inhabited. When she opened the door she was smoking a cigarette in a faded grey t-shirt and jeans that barely hugged her frame.

“What are you doing here?” was her greeting.

“I thought I was supposed to stop being difficult and come over. You more or less said it before you hung up. Now, what the hell is going on?”

“Oh!” She grabbed my arm and started pulling me towards the bedroom. I broke free and closed the apartment door before following her.

She pulled the image of the field up on the computer. It _was_ strange, these four rocks, viewable from space, in the middle of the field, aligned symmetrically.

“See, take a look at this.” She flipped parts of the image over each other. The rocks were perfectly aligned. But I tried to stay calm. Magdalene had a tendency to get excited that I didn’t want to encourage.

“Huh. Looks like some farmer was successful at getting free publicity by laying some rocks on the ground. Good for him.”

“But _why_ would he do that? There’s no sense to it.”

“I dunno. Why would you look up satellite images of it?”

She gave me a look. “Force of habit I guess.”

“Well, maybe it was force of habit for him too. Maybe he started with small stones a long time ago, and kept moving larger ones over there until finally they were visible even by satellite.”

“You’re impossible,” she ashed her cigarette on a floor standing ashtray next to the ratty old recliner in her bedroom.

I saw “Breakfast of Champions” on the floor. “You reading Vonnegut?”

“Just started. Not bad.”

“So we gonna check it out?”

She smiled. “Yes!”

We took separate cars. I kept looking in the rear view mirror to make sure she was following, though I knew she knew the way. It must have been close to 11pm when we parked our cars outside a fence post that didn’t look too well taken care of.

“Where is it?” I couldn’t spot a white stone anywhere.

“About a mile away.” She jumped the fence.

“How do you know it’s a mile?”

“It was about an inch on the map.”

The ground under our feet was soft and slightly wet, like a light dawn had come upon it. We walked the mile in near silence, eventually falling into a pace where our steps and breaths matched.

There was no moon out, we were lit by what seemed like thousands of stars. The soft light glistened off her hair and colored her in different shades of whitish grey. I said “Hey” once, but it was under my breath and not completely audible.

Finally we arrived. The rocks, that had looked so very white in the image, were dull as we approached them.

“Not what I was expecting,” she said, her voice low. But she kept walking, and I followed her to the other side of the rock. It was hard to believe it was the same rock I had seen from the other side.

It had been chipped at a million different angles, each unique, but the shape still generally the same. I stood there, examining the rock as best I could without moving. Magdalene was next to me. Then, I felt her hand on mine, then, I felt her move me into a dance pose. We walked sideways, and not a bit awkward. It must have been the center. It felt like they were four magnets, nudging us one way then the other, into a perfect waltz in place. I looked into her eyes and felt her lips touch mine.