Charles River Gemstone
by Bec Bell-Gurwitz
Jordan Tierney, Great Blue Heron Reliquary, found tree root with natural stone inclusions, vintage flatware chest, rusty screw drivers, bicycle brake handle, mousetrap, broken orange reflectors, and hardware found in stream, soapstone pendant shaped by hand, collage, velvet, paint, 15 x 22 x 4 inches, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
CHARLES RIVER GEMSTONE
Bec Bell-GURWITZ | JULY 2023 | Issue 25
Excerpted from the novel Truth or Consequences
Lou and Susana stood on the banks of the river. Lou held a plastic bag full of something heavy and set it down on the ground so its contents were revealed. “Bring them to the water,” Lou commanded, gesturing at the plastic bag filled with the rocks and minerals she had been collecting unbeknownst to Susana, for the duration of their road trip. The bag was filled almost to the brim with stones, but on the ground where Lou set it, they lay in a pile while the plastic fanned out in a circle around them, less a vessel and more a protective wreath, now a part of the ritual itself.
Susana flashed back to the desert, a hard battery on her tongue leaking in little shocks, her body prone in the dirt. Thinking of this, Susana shivered in the humid air. She was done being compliant, “I thought you said no more games.”
Lou gestured at the bag again and said, “It’s the last, last time. I promise I won’t hurt you.”
Susana flicked a fried blond strand from her eyes and reached for the purple elastic band she kept on her wrist, snapping it around a thick bundle of her hair and twisting it twice so it held. As soon as Susana pulled her hair back, the offending blond strand slipped its way back into her eye and she swatted at it again as if a mosquito. Finally, she gave up and let part of her vision include the strand of hair, which was nearly translucent in the light and framed the river dotted with kayakers before her. Susana had the thought then that she was grateful for the bounds of her own hair. Those little strands helped to remind her that she was experiencing the world through her own eyes instead of her sister’s.
“What do you want me to do?” Susana asked, “Put rocks in my pockets and drown?”
“Susana,” Lou said. Her eyes took on a sheen, but Susana couldn’t be sure if that was a trick of the light. “Be reasonable.”
Susana ignored this and knelt in the grass. She looked at the collection of rocks where they lay in the white plastic bag. On first inspection, the rocks all appeared dull gray, but the closer Susana looked, the more she saw that they held many different colors and shapes. A kayaker slid by, moving through the water like air. “This place isn’t private enough. They’d cart us off to the looney bin in a second.”
Lou crossed her arms over her chest and shrugged up her shoulders.. “There won’t be any drownings today. Don’t be an ass.”
”Well Lou, this is a game of Truth or Consequences, isn’t it? How should I know whether or not you want me to end up like Dad?”
This was the first time either of them verbally acknowledged all of the pit stops, all of the digging, and the shallow burials. An unwritten rule of Truth or Consequences was that they only played in private, which was easy to do in the vastness of the southwest, but it became more and more difficult as they moved northeast, and especially difficult where they stood now in the city at the end with so many passerby, before Lou would stay to go to college and Susana would return to New Mexico, after everything.
“I’m sorry,” Lou said. She didn’t quite look at Susana and instead locked eyes with a kayaker who waved affably. Lou didn’t wave back and kept focused on an arbitrary point on the horizon, shielding her eyes from the brightness with one open hand. She took a harsh inhale. The humidity made Lou feel like she was swallowing water with each breath. “Anyways, that time was for me. This isn’t. Your dad just died too.” Lou breathed again and let her features go slack, hoping Susana would trust her this time.
Lou’s face was open and earnest. Susana could feel herself hardening in response. This goodbye would go terribly if both of them went soft. And besides, Susana didn’t want pity. Pity was a trap. She would go back so Lou could go forward. It was a sacrifice, sure, but it was also a position of power. Let one of us not be fucked up from all of this, Susana thought, but she wasn’t sure which one of them she was referring to, sacrificer or sacrificed.
“You never hurt me,” Susana said and hoisted up the plastic offering, the bag’s bottom drooping with weight. She felt solid in her body, solid as one of the stones. She kicked off her flip-flops. They landed askew on the grass about a foot in front of Lou. Then, she proceeded to the sandy banks of the river, relishing the soft, pulverized rock bodies between her toes. In the shadows of the willow tree, the grains of sand had been cool, but became bitingly hot as soon as Susana ventured into the sun, heat eating into the crown of her head and burning the soles of her feet. She gritted her teeth through it all, yearning for cold.
“I said you don’t have to get in!” Lou called from where she stood above on the hill.
The land sloped down into riverbank. “I want to!” Susana yelled back, her toes kissing the cool lip of the river as it met laden sand, which darkened as it lapped up the water, thirsty as anyone. Susana thought of her father again, how he would no longer be able to answer any of her questions about the earth and its bodies. Questions about why the land did what it did, why she did what she did, why sometimes the land with its infinitesimal shifts and transformations seemed to also predict how she would feel, who she would one day be.
Susana waded into the river in her frayed jeans and yellow T-shirt, the cold swallowing her toes, then ankles, and then her knees. When she was up to her hips, her shirt suctioned itself tightly to her stomach. A nearby kayaker called out to her, “I wouldn’t swim in that, song’s called dirty water for a reason!”
Susana shrugged. “Got a strong constitution,” she said in a sarcastic tone. She didn’t care if the kayaker heard.
Susana squeezed her eyes shut. The orange of the sun filtered through. Then she could see her own network of veins in flashes of light, like a photo negative or a map. When she opened her eyes, the light glittered again over water and the afterimage projected itself in purple and blue neon flashes across the rippling surface. Her veins drawn over the water. Lou was so far away already, just a tiny part of the backdrop. All of this was necessary. One above and one below. Susana shivered into a gust of wind. Far and up the hill Lou’s hair blew wildly. Since leaving Austin, Lou had stopped wearing it in braids and let it free to be moved by wind, humidity, drought.
Susana did not put stones in her pockets, but instead waded deeper holding the CVS bag above her head like it held something precious. She could feel her toes sinking into the river muck, her chest now disappearing. If she stayed, she thought she might herself become a part of the river. The wind whipped little waves on the river’s surface, and the water pushed against Susana, threatening her stability. She dug her toes deeper into the muddy bottom and remained as still as she possibly could given the pull. Somewhere on the wind Susana could smell the brine of fish. She wiped her dripping arm across her face, the water trailing down her cheek. Susana opened the bag, plastic slick with condensation. She got to work picking stones, feeling the river’s current moving swiftly around her. Her father had told her many times that the whole earth was moving, alive as always, just a different kind of alive than what humans trained themselves to see and know.
It breathes differently than you, he’d said. Imperceptible to the human eye. But there are exceptions.
Susana scooped out a handful of rocks from the bag and plunged them into the river, watching as she lifted them up bright and deep as jewels, the water straining through her fingers like trails of shining life. Then, Susana opened the whole bag at once, letting the river wash over the rest. The stones—which had been dull gray with some slight tinges of green and pink here and there—glimmered fully into luster. A dulled blue became saturated azure, like lapis lazuli, while a faded beige streaked with pink lustered into bright, rich marble. Only the jasper did not drastically change. It stayed Mars red and shone in the sun.
Lou was calling her name from up the hill, “Susana! Come back!”
Susana didn’t want to. She knew when she left the water and shared her newfound treasure with Lou, they would begin the process of separating for real, they would possibly not see each other again, everything between them so thick, everything so laden. Susana could not let Lou come home for the funeral, she knew it, so she let herself linger in the river for as long as possible. Susana lapped up the moment; the sun, river, and wind together breathing, her gleaming skin alive in the light like the surface of every rock that had its chance to touch the water. She could soak here until the next epoch, keeping her sister clean and pure. Maybe that was it. Maybe all the games were a way to stay, stay together forever.
Bec Bell-Gurwitz is a writer living in Northampton, MA, on unceded Pocumtuck land. Their work appears in the anthology Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance, The West Trade Review, The Citron Review, Thrice Fiction, and others. Bec won Writing by Writers’ 2022 San Juan Residency, is a 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, and placed as a finalist for The Southwest Review's Meyerson Fiction Prize. Bec is currently an MFA candidate in prose and teaching associate at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Jordan Tierney lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Always an artist, she has also worked as an illustrator, building renovator, gallery owner, and museum exhibit fabricator. Her artwork has always been the result of intimate knowledge of the terrain she walks. She worries about climate collapse, and especially her daughter’s future. She is awed by the abused urban streams and forest buffers of Baltimore City. The beings struggling to survive there inspire her to use her skills and a little sorcery to change the valence of trash she collects from negative to positive. This process of observing nature, collecting trash, and making visual poetry has become a spiritual practice. Her sculptures are objects a shaman of the future might create to speak of the mysteries of the universe. She enjoys the resourcefulness of working with what she can find. Each piece is a manifestation of many days of labor. This kind of devotion only happens when we love something. Jordan loves this planet and is grateful for the places where her feet touch the ground here.