Amber imagined what it would be like to be a stone. She sat on the park bench, shivering in the cold, even though it was sunny. Recruiting her mental powers, she attempted to understand the ornamental gray stone that lay across the path. She wanted to empathize with it.

Where was it from? Was it cut away from a rock-face thousands of miles away? Or had it been dug up from a nearby construction site and had its sharp edges smoothed out? There were too many things that Amber didn’t know about the stone, and they were getting in the way of her really penetrating its frame of mind. She became frustrated, and stared at it harder.

Maybe if she curled up on her side and looked at it that way, she would do better. She tried the new position for a while, but still felt herself drawing a blank.

“Damn it!”

She sat up again. She stared some more. The stone stared back. It was being purposefully infuriating. It didn’t appreciate being empathized with. It saw itself as a tragically misunderstood stone.