Stone Collection

Sally's love of collecting stones led to collecting fossils. 300-word flash

Stone Collection

Sally loved to collect stones, had since she was young. These days, she was more particular about the ones she kept. Her mother had tossed them all when she went to college.
“I knew I should have taken them, but in the flurry to pack and leave I forgot.”

Although she was studying Geology, she quickly became more fascinated by Paleontology. She made the switch in second year. To her surprise, her professor chose to take her on a dig.
“You’ll be our fossil expert,” he said when he let her know by email.
The dig was in the Blue Ridge Mountains. What was even more surprising, was how few fossils she found! She picked up pieces of clay pots and other things as she secretly mourned what seemed to be a lack of fossils.
Then she hit paydirt! Most were common rock of the area, but one was truly unique. When she rinsed it off, she was dumbfounded. It was a blue crystalline stone ; unique in itself, but deep inside it, some species of fly was trapped.
Carrying it to show her professor, she was elbowed. The stone slipped from her fingers and smashed at her feet. The fly, suddenly alive, flew past her eyes. An entomology student, whom she liked, caught it in his hands.

“Where did this guy come from?”
“Out of the blue crystal I found that someone just knocked out of my hand,” Sally told him, flushing.
He managed to look at it without letting it escape. “Better show this to the powers that be. Something in your rock kept it alive for millions of years, that is the real discovery.” He popped it into a specimen bottle with holes in it.
Sally managed to collect fragments of the crystal for another specimen.