A Cut Rock Does Not Bleed, It Shines

(Originally published in Another Name for Darkness.)

I uncover the first gem by peeling my right palm open, tripping over one of my mother’s decorative stepping stones.

The ground rushes to meet me with more enthusiasm than my parents ever have and I put my hands out to catch my fall.

At first, there’s no pain and, despite the gouges I’ve made in the path, it seems I’ve escaped injury. The raw red ache comes only when I turn my hands over and see the damage—deep scarlet gore and torn white skin.

And something strange.

Dug into the meat of my palm, surrounded by black dots of gravel and welling blood is a pea-sized, gleaming blue stone.

I pinch and pull at it—the pain lancing, deep and stubborn, like popping a cystic zit. The skin around the rock turns white, there’s more buried in my palm; what I see is just the tip of the iceberg.

The gem is inside me. Unveiled, not implanted by my fall.

It hurts, but I’m relieved. My skin’s always felt wrong, my limbs disjointed—a busted animatronic in the wrong flesh suit. But I’d never had a reason to believe that this wasn’t just in my head, until now.

Sobs burst out, an unstoppable flow like the blood from my wound; salt and water, confusion and relief.

The door behind me opens.

‘Tallia, no!’ my mother pulls me inside before the neighbours see me. Our house is the last wartime bungalow on a block bulldozed to make way for modern mini-mansions. The neighbours want to get rid of our “eyesore”—mother’s mosaic-covered paving stones be damned—to increase their property values. They send us bylaw officers monthly for various violations; Dad calls it death by a thousand fines. My mother insists I behave like a “nice young lady” and not draw their attention. So, no moody outbursts, no boyfriends with modified mufflers (preferably, no boyfriends at all), and always modestly dressed (in my mother’s hand-me-downs).

‘I’m fine,’ I insist.

Regardless, she hauls me into the bathroom and pulls out the first aid kit.

‘Let me see.’ Her tone is no more soothing than the prickles of alcohol she pours on the abrasions.

Nurse Mother has taken over.

Her trained grip and keen eyes mean I’ve lost my chance to evade discovery. The stone gleams as rubbing alcohol stings the cut.

She gasps as the red curtain parts.

‘Where did you find this?’

‘It was on the ground. I didn’t steal it, I swear!’

Her face falls, perhaps sensing my lie, but Nurse Mother takes over again. She flicks open the special bright lights she uses to count her wrinkles and pulls open the kit.

The blue in my palm glitters, sparkles.

‘This will hurt.’

She grabs the gem with tweezers and pulls. It doesn’t come out. I groan but try to keep the crying to a minimum.

She sets down the tweezers and I know from past splinters that the next tool is the scalpel. My mother doesn’t like it when I whine but I can’t help myself when she puts in a fresh blade. I cradle my hand to my chest and a red smear marks my school uniform. I’ll need to clean it later.

‘Give,’ she commands simply. I look away as she gently cuts the raw tissue in my palm, the pain worse than the alcohol. Tears blur my vision. The stone, as it emerges, is rough, deep blue. She places the gem in the alcohol lid before turning back to me, face drawn.

‘Don’t tell y–’

‘What’s going on?’ Dad stands in the doorway, framed like a hero. Always good at sensing what is out of place, he spots the blue gem in the cap of alcohol. ‘What is this?’

Grinning, he picks up the little cap and tips it out onto his palm, holding the gem up to the light. Cleaned of blood, the uncut gem matches the blue of his widening eyes, as if he holds a copy of his iris between his fingers. Our irises—I’ve got his eyes.

‘It’s huge!’

‘I’ll get it appraised tomorrow,’ my mother tells him, hand extended. He places it reverently, reluctantly in her palm.

‘I always knew you’d be special too, kid,’ he says to me, shadowboxing my chin like when I was younger. It feels awkward but also kind of nice. Loving.

I haven’t seen him smile this big in years.

‘I’ll order us a pizza,’ he says as he walks away.

My mother is silent. She seems mad, but she bandages the gaping wound with more care than she usually reserves for my scrapes and bruises.

•••

‘I got you a treat,’ my mother says, giving me cookies that come packaged with icing for dipping. As a kid, I used to beg for these snacks but she always said no, saying they were expensive and unhealthy.

The rock fetched a good price; this is my reward.

She rubs my back while we watch TV, something she hasn’t done in years. She goes slowly, meticulously. I melt into it until I realise she is assessing whether the raised spots on my skin are acne or shallowly buried gems.

But the acne never grows enough to warrant closer investigation and the cookies are eaten and not replenished.

Back rubs evolve into a kind of pat down and then fade away completely.

The small scar on my palm heals into a thin white line. There’s no dent, no evidence of the treasure that was under my skin, that I incubated.

No evidence of the part of me that was taken away.

I shouldn’t miss it. It’s not like I needed it.

It’s better this way.

For all of us.

•••

She looks at my report card as if it is a tarot spread. The future looks B for Bleak.

I scratch a painful lump an inch below my elbow.

‘Are you even trying?’

I nod. Of course I am. I always finish my homework, read the textbooks, do the practice tests. But faced with the real thing—the first year this really matters—I froze, crushed under the weight of expectations. Crushed under pressure.

‘It’s hard out there, you need to take this seriously. You won’t get into medical school without getting into a good university. And you can’t get into a good university without good grades.’ My mother sighs. ‘We’ve been over this.’

We have. The path from good grades to a “bright” future is so well-worn that correlation has become causation in my mother’s mind.

I want to tell her to get a life of her own and stop living mine, but she’ll lash out and nothing will change. Instead, I scratch my arm harder, feeling the tip of my finger grow wet. I’ve burrowed through my epidermis. See, I know things. What kind of sixteen-year-old calls their skin epidermis? The kind that gets mercilessly teased at school.

The texture under my nails turns rough, hard.

Another one.

I thought it was just eczema.

I flinch and hide my arm behind my back; the motion alerts my mother. She grabs my arm, twisting it until the underside is exposed.

‘Another?’

I am pulled to the bathroom, ministered with the first aid kit.

‘Hold still.’

Skin parts like an overstuffed omelette as she drags the tip of the scalpel along. The kidney-bean-sized blue gem falls with a clank on the linoleum and I feel relief, a release of pressure, followed by grief at its loss. It’s even bigger than my first, more valuable. And it’s proof that the last one wasn’t a fluke, that I am a steady source of these beautiful gems.

I want to hold it—keep it, after all, there will be others for them to sell—but my dad practically leaps on it.

‘You’re really remarkable.’ He ruffles my hair, pocketing the gem before wandering off. He’s forgiven my report card failings; the gems are a much better promise for my future than grades ever could be. But my mother is still frowning.

She takes out the alcohol and the stack of Band-Aids, measuring them against the hole in my arm until she finds one big enough. It’s a problem she knows she can solve. She’s so focused, and seems to be enjoying this.

That’s the thing with nursing, it walks the fine line between healing and causing pain.

‘We just want you to have a good, stable job. Dad and I won’t be able to support you forever.’ Are the gems not enough? What more do I need to do to make her happy? Can she even feel happiness? She looked happy in pictures of us when I was a newborn, still covered in blood and juices. Was that woman different from the one who stands in front of me today?

I pull my arm from her grasp and stomp to my bedroom, slamming the door behind me.

I know what I want to do, even if I promised myself I would never do it again. The vent in the corner of my room eyes me like a painting, begging me to retrieve what I’ve hidden inside.

•••

I sit on my bed making a pros and cons list until midnight, when I hear my father’s snores through the wall—they’ll cover any noise I might make.

My actions are compulsion rather than choice, like a starving person eating until they vomit. I remove the vent cover, carefully pulling out my little plastic bag and old spoon. I haven’t seen it in a while but, like an old friend, I recognise the dents from the times it scraped rock and the crooked bend of its head.

I feel the hot tangle of shame in my belly—I am weak, I am dirt—as I place the hot dented metal in my mouth. The comforting weight of the spoon, the familiarity of it, balances out the shame. For now.

I creep downstairs and into our yard, kneeling in the dirt.

I fill the spoon, placing it in my mouth, the dirt turning to mud and coating the moist surfaces wherein. I’d forgotten the slight chocolate taste and the fizzing feeling. I chew to moisten what I’ve packed in my mouth, falling back on my haunches in delight. Palming at the soil with my hands, I shove more of the loam into my mouth.

The motion-activated light in the neighbour’s backyard turns on and their dog starts barking. I nearly throw the spoon, like a criminal disposing of a murder weapon.

This is bad.

This is bad.

My mother is a light sleeper and, sure enough, I see the glow of her window projected onto the lawn. There is no way she won’t go look outside. I panic at the threat of discovery—my face is covered in dirt and shame. She’d know I’ve been at it again.

I press myself into the darkest corner of the yard and wait a couple minutes after her light goes out for her to go back to sleep before creeping back indoors, shaking from the close call but also pleasantly full.

I suck on my fingers until even the nails are clean and white.

I sleep like a baby.

•••

The next gem appears two weeks later, pressing on the stress knot near my right shoulder during a gym test.

‘I’ve always said you’d do great things,’ my father says, holding my hand and telling me to squeeze when it hurts as my mother cuts into my skin. I cry, and it’s not just because of the pain.

That night, the main character in the movie we’re watching wears a giant blue sapphire necklace and I feel a fresh pang for every gem I’ve lost. Was it hers, one that she got to keep?

It’s beautiful, large, and a deep blue.

What kind of pain grew a gem like that?

•••

The next one comes six days later when they announce the ladies’ choice winter prom and Josh, who sits next to me in class and does group projects with me, insists that I ask him.

‘It’s my choice,’ I tell him.

‘I know, that’s what makes it more meaningful.’

My mother listens to my story with a gleam of pride while cutting out a gem four inches down from my collarbone. I hope it’s because I stood up for myself, choosing to focus on my studies and avoid romance until after med school, the one rule we do agree on. But instead, she says, ‘We’ll have to find you a dress with a neckline that covers the wound.’

She wastes no time, telling Dad we’ll be out doing “girly things” and nearly breaks the speed limit to get us to the mall. Once there, she takes me to the places we usually can’t afford, pointing out dresses she would have worn if she were my age. I’m in a daze until she holds up a rather awful pink number against my body and I realise the gems will be paying for it. This is the last way I’d want to spend the money.

‘Why don’t you just go instead?’ I yell, taking refuge in the changing rooms.

The rings of the curtain give a protesting squeak as I draw them shut between us, but they don’t pack the punch of slamming a door.

The pain of the new gem crystalizing above my knee lances as I wind back to kick the wall. Full of grace, I fall backwards into a mass of glitter and taffeta.

‘Hey, can I come in?’ My mother’s voice is softer than usual, like she’s soothing a distressed patient.

‘Sign says one person per room.’

‘I won’t tell them if you don’t.’

I chuckle despite myself and she takes it as permission to enter. I stop rubbing my knee but not fast enough and her eyes catch the movement. At least there’s no first aid kit here; I’ll have a reprieve. With any luck, she’ll forget by the time we get home.

She sits down beside me on the ground, staring at my knee silently.

‘Why do you want me to go to the dance so badly?’ I ask when the silence becomes too much.

‘Don’t you want to go?’

‘No.’

‘You should! You’ll have fun. I regret not doing this stuff as a kid. I was way too focused on school.’ I want to point out the irony to her. ‘You only get one childhood, appreciate it. Live a little. Life gets hard when you’re older.’

‘And why don’t you live a little, Mom?’

‘I tried—it nearly killed me.’ I open my mouth to ask questions but she shakes her head. ‘You’re much stronger and smarter than I ever was—you get it from your dad. You’ll just have to live for the both of us.’

That is a lot of responsibility, a lot of pressure. To live out her dreams. And mine too, I guess. If I ever get a chance to figure out what they might look like.

I take her offered hand as she stands.

‘Don’t tell Dad about this conversation and I won’t tell him about this.’ She points to the bulge on top of my knee. ‘I know you want to keep them.’

I nearly cry but instead I nod.

•••

In trying to kick the habit again, I lick the spoon’s sharp edges, hoping there might be some molecule of dirt in its crevices. All I can taste is coppery blood as the silver cuts my tongue.

It would help to fill my stomach again, replenish the dark rich core of me. But once I feel satiated, the shame always follows. This taste of blood is as good as it’s going to get.

The painful lump above my knee has become a second kneecap and the skin around it is red and inflamed. I am not sure if leaving it alone is the right thing to do, but I wanted this; it’s the first thing I’ve really wanted for myself. If I pull it out, then maybe I don’t know myself at all. Maybe it means I’m better off letting my parents decide my future for me.

The light in the hall flashes, snapping me out of my pity party.

The bathroom door squeaks.

I roll over in bed, thinking someone is just peeing. But the rock in my leg twinges and I know I need to be alert. I hear the all too familiar sound of the first aid kit’s zip and creep over to the door. Opening it a sliver, I press my eye to the opening.

My mother straddles the toilet, facing away, pyjama top lifted over her shoulders while my father stands behind her.

‘Did you disinfect it?’ she asks.

‘Jesus, Nan. This isn’t my first rodeo.’

My father shifts and I see his pocket knife—the same one he uses to cut apples on picnics and open stubborn packages. The one he sharpens in the garage on the first weekend of every month. It slices through my mother’s shoulder blade like a knife in butter. My mother doesn’t even flinch as he parts the skin with his thumb and index and pulls out a gem.

Hers are so much paler than mine. For a delirious moment, I want to shout a victorious “ha!” and humiliate my mother.

But then I realise what this means—I am not alone.

And that my mother has lied to me.

I look back up at her. Our eyes meet over her shoulder and she smiles sadly.

‘It’s good that you can still make these in case we need a backup,’ my father says, patting her on her other shoulder. I notice a scar there too. And all over her back.

•••

‘You’re limping,’ my father tells me as I broom on Sunday chore day.

It is growing harder to ignore the painful lump. When I touched it this morning, I felt a smaller cluster of gems around it.

‘I hit it in gym class. It’s just a bruise.’

‘Have your mom look at it.’

His delivery is automatic, as if he doesn’t understand the implications and I think I might be saved until my mother enters the room, summoned by my liar’s karma, hands full of flyers to sort.

‘What is it?’

‘Your daughter is hurt.’

‘She’s fine.’

This is a mistake—he knows she always jumps at the opportunity to nurse me, keep her “skills” sharp. I’ve never had a bump or a bruise she hasn’t peered deeply at, never been prescribed a drug she didn’t scrutinise.

‘But you didn’t even look at it,’ my father insists.

‘She looked at it yesterday,’ I say.

‘It was fine. Just a cut.’ She rips out a coupon.

‘A cut? Natallia said it was a bruise.’

‘It’s a cut and a bruise.’ I try. It’s no use. The damage is done. My dad is no idiot. When he turns to me, his face is splotchy with rage.

‘Are you growing an uncultured gem? Do you have any idea how dangerous that is? I thought you’d be smart enough to figure that out without me needing to spell it out for you. And you…’ He turns to my mother. I am acutely aware of the outline of the knife in his back pocket as his tone rises and hands shake. A flash of last night’s dream—him stabbing my mother in the back repeatedly, the knife sparking as it hit the stones hidden just under the surface—hits me like déja vu. ‘You knew about this and encouraged it? What happened when you hid your gems from me, huh? They spread like cancer—you nearly died. You couldn’t work, I had to support the both of us on my measly salary. And I never once complained because I love you. I even gave you a kid, against my better judgement, because you said you needed purpose when you couldn’t work anymore. And this is how you repay me? Endangering our child?’

He reaches into his back pocket and I try to hold back his arm but only brush his sleeve.

He hands my mother his knife.

‘Take care of your mess.’

•••

My skin itches under the Band-Aid. I’m healing fine, although the sight of the black thread and the inch-long incision gave me the creeps when my mother changed the dressing this morning.

I flip absentmindedly through the biology textbook and land on the page about evolution and the fossil record. Long-dead animals trapped under mounds of dirt, their bones slowly turning into rock as calcium is replaced by other minerals.

At least they got to turn into stone only after they died. They didn’t have parts of themselves scattered to the four winds to pay the bills.

I wander at lunch and my feet take me to the library. I delay the inevitable, and stand pondering in the fiction section for a couple minutes before going to my true destination, the geology section: 550.

There are three types of rock: sedimentary (like fossils), igneous (from volcanoes) and metamorphic. This last type is created by great pressures under the crust of the earth.

Geological forces can turn a stone into a precious gem. And gems can be subjected to stronger geological forces and become something else.

Something else entirely.

The motion-activated light in my neighbour’s yard doesn’t turn on as I step outside—I clipped the cable after school.

•••

I head to the back corner of our yard, the muddy mess my dad always plans to resod but never does.

It’s perfect.

I kneel in the mud and scrape my hands in the dirt. It’s tempting to satisfy my cravings but I focus on the task at hand. Soon I’ll have as much to eat as I could ever want. So, I dig and dig, arms shaking. I should have worked harder in gym class.

Rocks and debris cut at my fingers, pull at my nails, but still I dig. Even if I start to bleed.

The moon rises over the fence line and lights the scene in silver.

I sit back and see my fingers gleaming in the moonlight.

The tips of my fingers have worn away, revealing an opalescent swirl of colours where bones should be. I peel back skin like wrapping paper; it hurts until it’s completely removed, then I just feel the cool soft night on my glimmering bones.

They’re even more beautiful than the gems.

Wonder turns to dread—if my parents learn about this, I’m worried they’ll pull my bones out of me to sell. I doubt I can grow back a bone the way the gem polyps regrow.

A hand closes over my mouth.

‘It’s me,’ my mother whispers before I can protest.

I look back and notice she’s holding the de-icing shovel.

‘It took me a while to find this,’ she says, handing it to me.

She glances at my hands but says nothing, grabbing a trowel and digging.

‘You’re okay with this?’ I ask.

‘Once you’ve made up your mind, I can’t change it. Like your dad.’ I’ve always thought of her as the stubborn one. ‘It’s not what I would have chosen.’

No, I’ve seen what she chose and I do not want it. I grab the shovel and kick it into the dirt, heaving out the heavy dark brown soil. My mother works hard next to me, making up for tool size with gusto. She’d been strong once, enough to lift patients, and she still has ropy muscle.

The moon lazily travels across the sky as we sweat and work.

The sky is lightening by the time the hole is a couple feet deep and long enough for me to curl up into. It isn’t as deep as I wanted but it will do the trick. I can burrow deeper later.

There isn’t much time left.

I look over at Mom, at her smiling muddy face. Sweat has cleaned a line around her forehead. I’ve never seen her look this exhilarated.

‘Come with me.’ I don’t let myself think about the implications of this before I say it. About the complicated way I both desperately want her to say yes, but hope she says no.

Mom shakes her head and takes my hands in hers, cleaning the mineral tips now covered in dirt.

‘I can’t. Someone has to take care of your dad.’

‘You’re staying for him? Really?’

‘He took care of me, gave me support and hid my secret from those who would have wanted to take me apart and study me. He let me quit my job when the stress of it was too much. Even though it meant we’d never have it easy, couldn’t afford fancy vacations or have a comfortable retirement. And he gave me you.’

‘He takes the gems away. He hurts you—us.’

‘Nothing is ever perfect.’

I want to yell at her, not just for being an idiot but also for everything she has done, how she used me, how selfish she’s been. How she’s staying in a situation so unhappy she has to live out her life through others. But I don’t want those parting words echoing in her memory.

She presents me with Dad’s knife. I wonder how many times it’s cut her.

I plunge it into my belly button, opening myself up. The metal sparks as it scrapes my mineral core. It hurts. It hurts so much more than any cut Mom ever gave me, hurts so bad I stop.

But her hands join mine, pulling when mine falter. We stop at my chin as I bite back a scream.

Together, we peel back my skin, slough off my former epidermis. As it disconnects from my true core, I no longer feel any pain at all, only the soothing kiss of silver moonlight along my gleaming bones and pumping organs. I look down at the hollow flesh sac, the gory mess of skin, blood, fat and hair abandoned on the ground. It doesn’t feel like mine, it never has.

Maybe I’ll grow something new eventually; already I can see the gem polyps forming around my bones.

Mom weeps, reaching out to trace a finger along my opalescent ribs. Is this what she looks like on the inside too?

‘You’re beautiful, you know?’

She is too, in spite of everything.

‘I love you,’ she says, and holds my hands, helping me descend into the ground. I finally move freely, as if my skin had been rubber bands holding me in a state of tension. I could jump into the sky, but instead I curl up in my cradle of mud.

Her tears fall and dampen the dirt she shovels over me. I keep my gem-blue eyes fixed on her until they are covered.

The dirt presses down on me, her final hug. I feel her pat the ground when she’s done, saying goodbye.

Soon, I’ll burrow deeper. But I will give myself a day to say goodbye before my new life begins.

A day to see if she’ll follow.