A Rolling Sphere

The widened door gap offered immediate egress. I stepped down from the porch onto the flagstone path, scanning the low gravel border. A misplaced steel bearing ball, roughly the size of a plum, sat nestled in a shallow groove of damp soil. I approached and measured its curvature against my right metatarsal. Leaning my weight back, I delivered a calculated nudge with the ball of my golden foot. The sphere dislodged with a soft sucking sound of parting earth, rolling smoothly along the sunlit slate. It picked up velocity, tracking true along the stone seam before coming to rest against a raised cedar root. Mass, momentum, clean inertia.