A Stone Only Rolls Downhill

A short story written for the Media Prompt.

Darren Hillson wasn’t remarkable. Not in the way people put in newspapers or in viral clips with triumphant soundtracks. He was thirty two, an office assistant in a cramped cubicle on the twelfth floor of a building with too many coffee stains and not enough windows. He paid his taxes, called his mom on Sundays, and watered the neighbor’s plants when she visited her sister in Phoenix.

He didn’t wake up that Tuesday thinking he’d die.

It happened in the way these things do: quickly, senselessly, in the middle of a routine. Darren had stepped out for lunch, his mind fixed on whether he’d get the tuna melt or the chicken wrap. He was halfway across Main and Fifth when he saw her Amanda Martin, ten years old, a blur of pigtails and pink hoodie, chasing a paper airplane fluttering ahead of her like a taunt.

The traffic light blinked red for her. But she didn’t see it.

The car was speeding. Darren ran.

The impact was deafening, like the snapping of reality. Metal screamed. His body hit the windshield and then the pavement, hard. Time stuttered.

Then came the music.

“A Stone Only Rolls Downhill” by OK Go played not from the world, but through it, as if it had been hiding beneath the skin of the moment, waiting for something to break.

Darren felt weightless.

He blinked and suddenly he was everywhere at once. His life unspooled before him like old film through a noisy projector:

His father teaching him how to ride a bike.

The first time he got his heart broken.

Laughing in a thunderstorm with his little brother.

The time he helped a stray dog find its way back home.

A thousand small kindnesses, unnoticed by the world.

And then: Amanda, safe on the curb, sobbing in her mother's arms.

The music echoed in a chamberless place, as if the universe itself hummed it. Then came a voice not booming, not distant, but as close as breath:

"If you were given another chance, would you still save her?"

Darren didn’t hesitate.

"Yes," he said, clear and unwavering. "Every time."

The voice was silent for a beat. Then:

“So be it.”

He awoke to sirens and tears and the coppery taste of blood in his mouth. But he was breathing.

Broken, but alive.

A miracle, the doctors would say. The kind that made headlines.

Amanda visited him a week later in the hospital. She brought a drawing: two stick figures holding hands, under a giant sun. One had a cape.

Darren smiled, tears in his eyes.

Some stones might only roll downhill, but every now and then, one stops. Turns. And chooses to rise.


Word Count: 448

Written for: "Note: 48-HOUR CHALLENGE : Media Prompt Deadl..."