How to Skip a Rock Across the Pacific by Matt Leibel
- Sep 7
- 3 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Imagine the platonic ideal of the perfect skip. It’s a dream I had the first time I ever stepped foot on a Southern California beach as a kid: a stone I could skim off the sunglossed surface, that would continue to bounce in bunny-hops all the way across the ocean, passing over pufferfish, whizzing by walruses, dancing past dolphins, and finally landing in the sand in, let’s say, Ishinomaki, Japan. From which location another kid, every bit as stone-besotted as I was, would simply hurl it back, and the next time I stepped foot on the same beach, maybe that same summer, maybe the next one or the one after that, I would find it again, aerodynamically thin and round, a rock God had carved specifically for this purpose. And in this dream, the same stone could tour through all the oceans of the world, never stopping once to sink, never beaning the blubber of a breaching whale, never pinging the hull of a cargo ship, never purloined by the talons of an albatross. My imagined perpetual skipping stone would be an able stand-in for the concept of infinity itself—a notion that first cohered for me in conjunction with an early consciousness of death (“We die forever? Forever ever? And ever, and ever, and ever?”) The finite nature of life and the infinity afterwards was a concept I couldn’t wrap my head around, and still can’t. The near-infinity of sand comes close: though the world’s supply could theoretically be contained in a moon-sized sandbox, it’s impossible to countenance the notion of counting all the individual grains, let alone the finite grains that would clump inside my swim trunks, and get trailed into the house after a beach day, to my mom’s consternation. Rocks—sand’s older brother, geologically—held something of the ineffable and infinite for me in their permanence, a sense of connecting me with the ancient peoples who first laid eyes on this beach, the ones who’d crossed here via the land bridge through Alaska, and had seen the same rocks, and likely, tried to skip them. Anyway: for maximum effect, you’ll want to sidearm the fucker. Expect the results, the first several times you try, to disappoint. Expect your stone to plummet to the bottom, but your mood to shoot to the top, because there is nothing on Earth, or of earth, that’s more fun than this. People in glass houses—like the ones overlooking the ocean up in Malibu—don’t throw stones. They’re too cool for that, have an image to maintain. I’m not too cool, nor, I imagine, is that kid from Japan, who, if he’s still around, has probably gone through some things, like upheavals, heartbreaks, earthquakes, tsunamis. In a world this incomprehensibly vast and volatile, it can be useful to imagine none of us are more than a stone’s throw away from each other—even if the throw required would need to be once-in-a-lifetime perfect.
Author's Note:
For me self-care often involves walking, sometimes all the way to the beach; if I can still get the skinny rocks to skim off the wave-froth at least a few times, I can store up hope and wirelessly recharge my inner battery, at least to like 73% or so. En route, I’ll usually listen to podcasts about literature or architecture or tennis, or more lately Icelandic hip-hop. I’m also finding it calming this summer to watch bears hunt for salmon on this Alaskan Bear Cam.
Matt Leibel lives, and sometimes writes, in San Francisco. His short fiction has been featured in Post Road, Electric Literature, DIAGRAM, matchbook, and The Florida Review Online. His work has also been anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2024, Best Microfiction 2025, and National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2025.
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