Trigger Warning

Diamonds and Pearls

Once upon the olden times, when the trees walked and the stars danced, there was a girl whose mother died, and a new mother came and married her father, bringing her own daughter with her. Soon enough the father followed his first wife to the grave, leaving his daughter behind him.

The new mother did not like the girl and treated her badly, always favouring her own daughter, who was indolent and rude. One day, her stepmother gave the girl, who was only eighteen, twenty dollars to buy her drugs. ‘Don’t stop on the way,’ she said.

So the girl took the twenty-dollar bill, and put an apple into her purse, for the way was long, and she walked out of the house and down to the end of the street, where the wrong side of town began.

She saw a dog tied to a lamppost, panting and uncomfortable in the heat, and the girl said, ‘Poor thing.’ She gave it water.

The elevator was out of service. The elevator there was always out of service. Halfway up the stairs she saw a hooker, with a swollen face, who stared up at her with yellow eyes. ‘Here,’ said the girl. She gave the hooker the apple.

She went up to the dealer’s floor and she knocked on the door three times. The dealer opened the door and stared at her and said nothing. She showed him the twenty-dollar bill.

Then she said, ‘Look at the state of this place,’ and she bustled in. ‘Don’t you ever clean up in here? Where are your cleaning supplies?’

The dealer shrugged. Then he pointed to a closet. The girl opened it and found a broom and a rag. She filled the bathroom sink with water and she began to clean the place.

When the rooms were cleaner, the girl said, ‘Give me the stuff for my mother.’

He went into the bedroom, came back with a plastic bag. The girl pocketed the bag and walked down the stairs.

‘Lady,’ said the hooker. ‘The apple was good. But I’m hurting real bad. You got anything?’

The girl said, ‘It’s for my mother.’

‘Please?’

‘You poor thing.’

The girl hesitated, then she gave her the packet. ‘I’m sure my stepmother will understand,’ she said.

She left the building. As she passed, the dog said, ‘You shine like a diamond, girl.’

She got home. Her mother was waiting in the front room. ‘Where is it?’ she demanded.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the girl. Diamonds dropped from her lips, rattled across the floor.

Her stepmother hit her.

‘Ow!’ said the girl, a ruby red cry of pain, and a ruby fell from her mouth.

Her stepmother fell to her knees, picked up the jewels. ‘Pretty,’ she said. ‘Did you steal them?’

The girl shook her head, scared to speak.

‘Do you have any more in there?’

The girl shook her head, mouth tightly closed.

The stepmother took the girl’s tender arm between her finger and her thumb and pinched as hard as she could, squeezed until the tears glistened in the girl’s eyes, but she said nothing. So her stepmother locked the girl in her windowless bedroom, so she could not get away.

The woman took the diamonds and the ruby to Al’s Pawn and Gun, on the corner, where Al gave her five hundred dollars no questions asked.

Then she sent her other daughter off to buy drugs for her.

The girl was selfish. She saw the dog panting in the sun, and, once she was certain that it was chained up and could not follow, she kicked at it. She pushed past the hooker on the stair. She reached the dealer’s apartment and knocked on the door. He looked at her, and she handed him the twenty without speaking. On her way back down, the hooker on the stair said, ‘Please . . .?’ but the girl did not even slow.

‘Bitch!’ called the hooker.

‘Snake,’ said the dog, when she passed it on the sidewalk.

Back home, the girl took out the drugs, then opened her mouth to say, ‘Here,’ to her mother. A small frog, brightly coloured, slipped from her lips. It leapt from her arm to the wall, where it hung and stared at them unblinking.

‘Oh my god,’ said the girl. ‘That’s just disgusting.’ Five more coloured tree frogs, and one small red, black and yellow–banded snake.

‘Black against red,’ said the girl. ‘Is that poisonous?’ (Three more tree frogs, a cane toad, a small, blind white snake, and a baby iguana.) She backed away from them.

Her mother, who was not afraid of snakes or of anything, kicked at the banded snake, which bit her leg. The woman screamed and flailed, and her daughter also began to scream, a long loud scream which fell from her lips as a healthy adult python.

The girl, the first girl, whose name was Amanda, heard the screams and then the silence but she could do nothing to find out what was happening.

She knocked on the door. No one opened it. No one said anything. The only sounds she could hear were rustlings, as if of something huge and legless slipping across the carpet.

When Amanda got hungry, too hungry for words, she began to speak.

‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,’ she began. ‘Thou foster child of Silence and slow Time . . .’

She spoke, although the words were choking her.

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know . . .’ A final sapphire clicked across the wooden floor of Amanda’s closet room.

The silence was absolute.