echo

The word starts with a vowel sound and ends with one, the only intermediary being a single consonant sound that has somehow occasioned the transition to the hollower sound of the "o." Like an actual echo, which is strangely haunting in its fading infinity, the word has a cache of mystique. It reminds me of high bridges in rural Jersey that I explored when I was a kid, chucking rocks in the water and listening to the splashes that stretched on and on under stone arches. The word is short and scarce like childhood.