two posts in one day !?

Actually, Muskrat Lovely made me want to write something about where I'm from. I set out to write about the Elvis impersonator who read at church with his pompadour and his white shoes. I wanted to write fiction. And I wrote this:

There is a place in Virginia where you can find cruciform crystals on the ground. Fairy Crosses, but who crucifies a fairy. I read about it in Rock & Gem. I wanted to go there more badly than any of the places where the rocks fluoresce or drip or float. Where I lived there was iron in the hills. Natural magnets but I never found one. Had to go to the rock and gem collection at Harvard to see one from my hometown. Our celebrity rock. We found slag instead, leftovers. It was something like obsidian, but more opaque. It cleaved like obsidian and there’d be this glassy bivalve shape, blue like a robin’s egg or that sea green color I was so wild about. It went into the box with the others, the conglomerate from the beach, the gneiss from the hike in the High Peaks. Even the fragment I picked up from the rubble pile when the movie theater collapsed. It was a piece of concrete with a shard of tile mortared to it. The tile was blue and translucent, not at all like pottery. There was something geologic about it, hence into the box. There was also a small square of marble, very dark with almost no veins, from when they were redoing the church. It must have been cut from a slab to make room for molding or a door frame. I must have removed it from a box of scraps, stealthily. That marble could have come from anywhere.