If you’ve been here a while you might recognize elements of this story. It was one of my first experiments with dark fiction last year. It got a ton of great feedback and nudged me down the dark forest path of writing horror.
Since then, I’ve grown as a writer and as a human. I created EJ Trask to channel my dark side and I’ve learned to stop apologizing for what comes out of the channel. Sometimes, I have to get out of the way and let EJ cook. So if you read The Gem the first time around, read it again. I hope this version will surprise you.
This story includes salty language, bodily harm (by self and others), and wildly unhealthy relationships. It’s also a bit gross, but you must have expected that.
Since neither of us are going anywhere, I’m telling my story. You can kill me if you want me to shut up.
I was twelve, Nathan. Twelve years old.
You know that saying about the frog in the pot of boiling water? Being a twelve-year-old girl is like being the frog in the fucking pot. The people around you are turning up the flame and you’re the last one to know.
You’re running around, belly flopping and climbing trees, and then one day your mom tells you cover up, sit down, be quiet. The boys can tumble around in the dirt forever but suddenly you’re on the sidelines. You aren’t a kid anymore. You need to act appropriate.
Teachers, coaches, the dad of the kids you babysit, they knew it was coming before you did. Now they look at you too long, or not at all. Every moment crawls with something sordid.
You realize that you’re held responsible for how adults feel around you. Every weird moment, every new danger, they’re your fault for having a body that dared to grow up. The shame will boil you alive.
Me? I tried to jump out of the pot. I held on to silly little kid games as long as I could. I was loud, wild, childish. The more they disapproved, the worse I acted. But there’s no getting out of it I guess. I jumped straight into the fire.
I was doing cartwheels down the hallway in my house, being dragged out of childhood literally kicking and screaming, when I fell. Hurling myself too wildly for my new center of gravity, I bashed my toes into the wall. The arm under me collapsed. My elbow drove hard into the floor.
In a nicer place, I might have landed on something plush. But in our shitty little house it was raw wood, worn down from shoes bumping it for ten lifetimes. It was carpet tacks, poking their heads up like broken corn stalks, and cheap wall-to-wall, stiff with stain-resisting chemicals.
The carpet and the wood grabbed my skin and held on, the friction burning away some minuscule pieces of me. The tacks dragged a broken calligraphy through my arm. Rug burn bristling with carpet fibers, baseboard leaving a bloody, splintery mess.
Scrapes and scabs are a badge of childhood, entirely unfit for a teenage girl. And this one was especially gross—thick and bumpy, wet and glistening. My mother was disgusted so of course I wanted to keep it forever. I wanted anyone accusing me of having an adult’s body to see my little kid scab and move along. I was growing a protective shell. It took weeks to heal and all the time I was messing with it, picking at it, being gross. Entirely unfit.
Once, my fingernail found a sharp edge and I pried it up. A glittery bit of scab stuck to my finger. It caught the light like a sequin or a tiny red gemstone. I didn’t think a scab could be pretty, but mine was. And as I looked more closely at it I realized it was more than pretty. It was a jewel.
And that was that, Nathan. I wasn’t growing a shell to protect myself. Some alchemy inside of me was turning platelets into precious stones.
My parents couldn’t believe it. But they had to, because it was happening right there in our flat little house on our boring suburban street. As my scab healed, it crusted over with tiny rubies, garnets, tourmaline and tigers eye. Crystals formed not in veins of magma but in the roiling geology of my pre-teen body. Next came orange, pink and black sapphire, and eventually, brown and black diamonds. I was magic.
My parents scraped off the gems, collecting them in a glass jar they kept on the bookcase. They looked up the names of the stones online and each one sounded like a poem to me. My dad would wear his reading glasses and my mom would hold a flashlight steady in the dim light of the living room. I would bend and flex my elbow and we would watch the shining flakes rain down into the jar. Sometimes they would catch each other’s eyes, but I couldn’t read their grown up expressions.
After a while, as the wound shed its most valuable gems, the skin underneath began to emerge fresh and pink and wholly unremarkable. Girl skin, nothing special.
The jar sat on the shelf. I loved it, a glittering trophy for something cool that only I had ever done.
But I came home one day and the jar was gone. All my gems hawked on the internet for a wad of cold, hard cash. I was told the money would be saved for my college fund. I bought the story, but you know better.
I had believed I had done something very special, a sparkling moment in the everydayness of my family’s life. But the sale was the start of something dark. My skin had worth. Not in the abstract way that all people have worth. In a real way.
My parents got that wad of cash and whoosh, their hopes and dreams came in and breathed up all the air in our house, leaving barely enough to survive on. We used to joke but now they just stared at me. Or they looked at the floor, lips pursed, something nervous happening between us.
They didn’t want to hurt their daughter, they wanted me to do it for them. Cover up, be quiet, be a good girl.
At first it wasn’t so easy to make new scabs. I set up little accidents for myself because I didn’t have the guts. I skateboarded and rode my bike off homemade ramps. I touched strange dogs right on the face. I signed up for shop class until they kicked me out for breaking all the rules.
I learned through some horrifying trial and error that slices and punctures could not produce the gems. This was unfortunate, because cutting yourself with a sharp knife is a lot less gross than making wide, shallow scrapes. But it is probably a blessing that my gushing blood can’t make anyone rich.
Are you listening Nathan? You want scabs, not stitches.
My body, scraped raw and always hidden under long sleeves and bandages, did so much work for us. If I walked to school in new shoes, my bloodied heels would pay for them and then some. I zeroed in on scratchy things like a treasure hunter. Asphalt, cheese grater, sandpaper. A little friction and I was a sorcerer.
Mom and dad— always needing car repairs, groceries, a weekend away— told my teachers I was clumsy, told themselves I was fine.
I got braver as I got older and things hurt less. I needed money to get out of the house so I would sit in my room with a microplane grater— you know those things chefs are always using?—and shave away at my shins and knees. Messy business, but so is working at McDonald’s.
Making your own money, do you know what that feels like Nathan? Literally making money. You do not. It’s such a fucking rush. It was never enough to have me rolling in cash, but it was enough to buy cigarettes and black nail polish, enough to have some power. And what else does a 14-year-old need? I paid a little tax to my parents and they pretty much left me alone. As long as I was bleeding, we were good.
I came back to rug burn, my first friend, and realized it could pay me twice. First, in the rush that came with getting attention for something normal. Boys or girls, I didn’t care, as long as we were on the carpet. They could help me out of my body while they helped me out of my jeans. In a few days the gems would show up, blunting the pain when no one ever called back.
The raw skin sting was my boyfriend, my pimp. A song in my ear, the smell of money. I was a witch.
Eventually, my body bought me a used car. And when I immediately wrecked that car— who’s to say I saw the light turn yellow?— the wounds where my skin was licked away by the airbag paid first and last on a rundown apartment. Even with the broken teeth and collapsed lung I came out in the black. And I’ll be honest, being in the hospital was nice. Those people spend their whole day trying to heal you.
Once I was out of the house for good I actually tried to slow down. I got a regular job, paid my bills the regular way, for a while. But I could always upgrade with a little nick and the temptation was huge. I didn’t have to live paycheck to paycheck, I was a renewable resource! And I didn’t know how to feel if some part of me wasn’t shredded. At least I could be in charge of the things that hurt.
Never again for dear old mom and dad of course. Their mine was permanently closed. At holidays I saved up just like a stupid normal girl and I bought them cheap tacky presents, never the beautiful things they wanted from me.
And then, dear Nathan, I met you. My prince fucking charming. Kept my secret from you for a year! Yeah, think back to that time Nathan, before you knew what I was worth. My scars faded to spiderweb lines and I was so careful. I even bought lotions and creams, deciding to be smooth and soft and whole for the first time in my life.
I fell for you like an idiot and you aren’t even that great. Sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t insult you right now but I don’t want to die and have you thinking you were a great catch. I’m not a whole person— literally Nathan, there are chunks missing all over me— so it didn’t take much.
Peeling potatoes the night before Thanksgiving, it was just so perfect. I wanted you to know me, and I wanted to be special. So, I oops! Peeled a strip off the back of my knuckle. It felt so good.
You were a little queasy, as I recall. But by Black Friday we had quartz. You called me a gem, do you remember? Your smile looked so real.
On Monday, I had a crop of tiny chocolate diamonds. I rolled them off my finger and pawned them on my way to your place. Used the cash on an expensive bottle of champagne, strolled in, and then you hatched your piece of shit plan.
So you’ve got me bleeding in your guest room. Watching your sweaty face as you try to decide what to do next. Sorry for not begging for my life. Blood doesn’t really scare me.
You look kinda sick, Nathan. Did you start something you can’t finish?
Listen. I have a technique for this if you’ll just let me do it. If gouging random holes into myself worked, I would have bought myself a much better life.
If you cut me too deep, you’ll only find a human in there. Nothing of any worth.
Puberty horror wasn't on my bingo card today. Jokes aside, this is the most painful take on the Coming of Age trope I've ever read. And, in the weirdest way, I loved how the themes of self-mutilation and gratification were used. This is a hidden gem of a story and I hope the algorithm shows it off to more people!
This was so absolutely horribly fucking wretched and brilliant it made me so sad for all young pubescent girls as they suffer their way through growing up while their Mothers watch in horror or cluelessly