On Saturday I drove the kids to the lake. They were grumbling because I made them leave their phones at home. 

Mom would’ve let us, and all that.

But I’d decided that all their various devices were robbing them of their imagination. 

Then, in a flash of inspiration, I made each of them go to the lake shore and select a rock.

I held each one of their specimens in my outstretched hand and made the same proclamation for each one. 

‘This is not a rock!’ I bellowed. I made a big ceremony of it.

‘What is it, then?’ they muttered, petulant. 

‘Whatever you want it to be. Use your imaginations, for fuck’s sake.’

Ariana took her rock back and launched it at my face. I swerved just in time.

‘This is not a rock,’ I repeated, unscathed, scrambling up to recover the projectile. ‘This is a weapon.’

‘Cool,’ said Ariana. ‘What’s yours?’ she asked Finn.

‘A princess,’ he said, unapologetically. He was painting a smile on it with a stick of lipstick he’d been hiding in his pocket.

Did his mother know about this? I wondered. Did she encourage it?

‘You have to say the whole thing,’ Ariana said, finally getting into the spirit. ‘This is not a rock, it’s a…’

‘This is not a rock, it’s a princess,’ Finn murmured dutifully, adorning it now with a wig made from the wet remains of a plastic bag he’d dug out from beneath a pile of pebbles. 

‘What’s yours, Clive?’ Ariana asked. Clive was hiding among the branches of a fallen beech.

I watched as he tried to shield himself from her approach, hunching his bony shoulders, his quivering lip jutting out.

‘Come on, it’s easy.’ Ariana was jumping on the tree, as if to shake her brother out of his driftwood fortress. ‘This is not a rock, it’s a… You just say whatever it is you want it to be.’

‘I don’t want it to be anything but what it is,’ he said, his voice pleading, his eyes blinking back tears.

‘Don’t be absurd, Clive,’ I chastised him. ‘It’s just a game.’

Solemnly my youngest child extracted himself from the beech branches and walked to the exact spot from which his rock had been extracted. It took him forever to get it balanced in what he must have decided was its original position.

The weakness of his imagination unnerved me to the point of rage. 

‘You do realise,’ I seethed, ‘that the rock wasn’t always a rock? Once it might have been a mountain. And one day it will be dust, scattered across the earth.’

‘It’s not a rock now,’ said Clive. ‘It doesn’t want to be a rock. It wants to be what it is.’

But what is it? I wanted to scream, but refrained, faced with the silencing force of my own lack of imagination, stretched out before me, threatening, an abyss.

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Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 71 of Structured Visions.