Throwback Thursday: ‘Stones’ by Genni Gunn

Although a clear and sunny day, no people gathered on the rich green grass, no children’s pockets filled with pebbles. No men shifted from foot to foot, no women gossiped. There was no pyramid of stones, no big black box. 

The man sat cross-legged on a patch of earth, on the russet bank of what appeared to be a lake but was a moat two hundreds metres wide. He was in his mid-thirties and wore a faded crimson shirt, sleeves rolled up, and blue jeans. His feet were bare. Pond herons wafted in the air in long smooth glides to the surface of still water. Behind the man, a boy splashed waist-deep, collecting pink and purple water lilies. Across the gravel road, an array of vendor stands shimmered in the heat, kaleidoscopic with silk scarves and purses in reds, oranges, and purples, stone amulets to ward off evil, postcards and guide books, and rows and rows of watercolour Brahmas who stared out with stony eyes. The man could have been a tourist, a bas-relief against Angkor Wat’s quincunx pediments, which rose into a sunlit sky; a tourist resting, perhaps, in the shade of a banyan tree after a day’s trekking through temples, but for the large black plastic bag which lay beside him open and overflowing with empty water bottles.

Sheila saw him first, as she and Vivian rounded a corner, fanning themselves with cultural travel guides, their hair semi-plastered to their heads, their feet sluggish in sports sandals, as they searched for the rental car and driver who had dropped them off at dawn. They were both in their late twenties, childhood friends who had survived the divides of university and different career paths. Sheila became a junior geologist at a brokerage firm, and Vivian a receptionist for a revolving door of employers. They had been in Cambodia for four days, exploring the recently proclaimed Eighth Wonder of the World, Angkor Wat, the seat of the Khmer Empire when Cambodia was at its height; Angkor Wat, the world’s largest religious structure, and the only religious monument to appear on a national flag. Birds circled above them, landed in the banyans and kapots whose tubular, aerial roots fell and spread like white hair.

Poised in a wide semicircle around the man were four teenage boys in jeans and T-shirts. One wore a light windbreaker. They could have been playing a game, so cheerful they were, as each stooped, picked up a stone and hurled it at the man whose arms rose up, whose hands tried to protect his face. The rocks hammered the man’s head, his chest, his arms, and legs.

“Stop that!” Sheila said, surging toward them. “What do you think you’re doing?”