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on,” the man of the desert told her master.
    â€œUntil we meet again.”

The River
    Fleeting years and many lambs later, the youth had grown a beard and Eden had grown old. Whiter around the muzzle, and along her paws, her silvery fur all had turned to white.
    One day she watched Maryam carefully as the woman of the house packed many things in a traveling sack. Often Maryam would pack her son’s midday meal along with his carpenter tools, as he walked to nearby villages to repair a door or a bed. But on that day the woman packed no tools, only the supplies he’d need on the road: flint and tinder, water skin, bread and olives and cheese. And his rolled mat of woven reeds wrapped in his cloak which he carried over his shoulder.
    Eden felt the unspoken words of parting between mother and her master. Maryam would miss her son for every day hereon. From the shadow of the carpenter’s shop the dog saw Maryam’s husband Yosef pause at his workbench and stare silently at the open door. The men had said their good-byes in private and nothing was left to say.
    Maryam simply pressed her son’s hand to her forehead, then let his hand fall, neither bringing it to her lips nor kissing him farewell. “Come back when you can,” was all she said.
    But Eden had no intention of watching her master wander off. That day the dog and her young man walked farther into the green hills than Eden had ever been before. And they did not turn back as night fell, but slept upon the young man’s mat of reeds, curled up in their shared cloak till daybreak.
    All that next day they marched. The food in the young man’s sack vanished bit by bit. By nightfall they were tired and hungry. The man and the dog found shelter in a cluster of rocks by a running rivulet of water that gathered in a small pool no bigger than a few hands wide. Eden lapped gratefully at the stone bowl. And as the sun set Eden stood guard as her master found twisted sticks for a fire.
    At first Eden didn’t see or smell the stranger’s approach. Unannounced, one of the desert people had come out of the wilderness with hardly a sound and no wafting scent on the wind. Once more, the stranger smelled of nothing but sand and stone, his body so thin and gaunt, leaving only the barest essence of a holy man on his threadbare robes. Yet as he sat, she recognized him as the very same who had spoken at the temple, the very same who had spent the night talking in their house and told the story of the stones. The Outsider. The man of the Dead Sea.
    So it was not necessary for her master to say, it’s all right. He’s one of us .
    Instead he welcomed the man of the desert into their shelter of rocks and bade him sit.
    â€œIndeed, well met.”
    They lit a fire and shared the last handful of the food from the master’s sack. For a long time the three sat in silence, but at length the man of the desert spoke. “Have you been thinking since last we talked? How to discover what lives inside the stone without breaking it?”
    Eden looked up at her master, but he did not reply. Instead he loosened his purse strings and removed the two stones, the white and black given that night in their house those fleeting years ago. Her master’s fingers turned each over in the light of the fire. Over time each stone had rubbed against the other and in so doing had worn away its outer layer—the dark stone showing its white center and the white stone its dark one.
    â€œTime is the answer,” her master said. “Time and familiarity, like friendship. Time and close proximity, like family. Time and close affinity, like marriage. The stones sit in the purse, they rub each other’s sides, and over time their surface fades and the stones’ insides are revealed without breaking.”
    The Outsider looked in astonishment at his old friend. Then he laughed like a man with twice the belly—the sound rose from their rock shelter