Chapter One: Before the Bliss
I sit on sloped shingle and toy with my last keratinous protrusion to try and quell the itch. This thorn, barb-rooted to my femur, anchored to the meat of my thigh by a red cable, is part of me and has been there, growing, since birth. It stings. But soon, it’ll detach and fall, and I’ll be peach-smooth all over. All woman.
In front of me, Alora crouches awkwardly so as not to hurt herself on her five small hip spurs. She rummages through her rucksack and takes out handfuls of something from where childish treasures—shells, sea glass, dead moths—are usually stashed. “What’s in your fists?” I ask.
“Nothing.” Doe-eyes. My little sister smiles sweetly, then runs off, into breaking waves. I shrug at Emmanuelle—my friend beside me—and yawn. At least we’ve the beach to ourselves this evening and the sun, low in the sky, feels warm on my skin.
I stop twisting the thorn and, instead, hold it in place and imagine the snapped ligaments deep within my thigh re-attaching it to the bone of my leg. If only I could slow time. What lies ahead terrifies me: womanhood, the consequential trip to Marmos.
*
“Don’t swim past the outcrop,” I shout after Alora. “Ah, do what you like.” Leaning back on a cobble bed, I snag my sore spot. “Ay—This one hurts.”
Despite my desire to remain a child, the perseverance of this fourth and final hip thorn—my fifth never emerged—frustrates me. It’s sore.
“But you’re glowing, ripening well,” Emmanuelle says.
“Apart from this thigh and my tatty hands.” I show her my knuckles and palms, calloused from labour. But Emmanuelle’s right. Velvety dappling, swirls of tangerine and russet now cover my body, and for this, I’m grateful.
I run the back of my hand over my lower leg. Of recent, something within me, my groin a bag of honey bees, finds enjoyment in self-touch. The flat terrain of adult, spike-free skin, the way my shoulders, waist, hips feel. New sensations ripple within at night, when I caress myself in the dark, alone, under my quilt.
A twinge in my thigh. My fingertips return to my hip. I twist the thorn again, in time with the breaking waves. The irritation eases. Perhaps I do long for total smoothness, to be adult. Maybe I do want this last thorn out.
*
Alora, still so young, a bundle of spikes and quills, tumbles and splashes through wave crests and wades further into the ocean, giggling all the while.
“Why can’t I remain carefree, like Alora?” I ask. Emmanuelle stares ahead.
And why must I work so hard? Since my first quill fell away, I’ve laboured each day, levering a diamond-tipped chisel in and out of the quarry face. All shedding adolescents stand and chip there, together, liberating precious resources from a millennia of geology for our leathered elders. And before and after each long shift, I care for Alora.
*
I stare at the ocean. With each breath of the tide, a pattern hinting at what my future may hold, a heedance, comes into fruition on the ocean’s surface, then, before I’ve a chance to interpret it, the missive disperses back into loose liquid form, blue and white froth, and the vision becomes lost.
*
“You’re bleeding.” Emmanuelle’s face contorts. Smooth for over a year, memories of shedding for her, I expect, are forgotten, like childhood dreams. She pushes my picking fingers. “It will drop when it’s ready, when you’re ready,” she says.
Will I ever be ready? My body? Maybe. But, my heart? I yearn to play, skip, and swim in the water like Alora, not labour and care for others. What happens after Marmos petrifies me.
Emmanuelle squeezes my hand. She smiles, closed-lipped. “And you’re nearly ready, darling. The future’s nothing to fear.”
“But what about the pain?”
“Pain? This final thorn will hurt no worse than the others,” she says. She must know it’s the other pain I ask of, because there’s something hidden, a whisper behind her eyes.
“I mean the pain that comes after Marmos, before the bliss—”
Emmanuelle takes my chin in her hand. “That pain is a gift. A blessing from the feminine celestial.” Her warm breath graces my cheek. “It’s more of a universal, all-encompassing . . . deep discomfort. At its peak, the sensation is almost . . . sentient.” I swallow hard. For a moment, the quickening of my pulse and the rush of blood around my cranium drown out the insidious alternative story the waves have been whispering. “But as with all in life, dearest, there is balance. Polarity.”
“Go on,” I say.
“When the pain is nothing but a memory, a thing of no mass or matter, there will be pleasure.” She caresses the markings which dust her upper arm, then strokes mine. “My husband lies with me and thrusts as he sings until a bliss like no other fills my soul. Between his melodies, I hear the beautiful truth of his love.”
A bolt, a longing, shirks down my spine to the place where bees buzz at night. She draws my face kiss close. “Womanhood brings equal measures of joy and despair. You’ll embrace it, darling girl, the pain. You’ll cope. Women do.”
She reaches for her water flagon. My fingers return to my thorn. Sharpness. It comes free in my hand. Warm red gushes down my thigh. “Dammit,” I say, and show Emmanuelle. “It’s out.”
Root now exposed, the thorn’s longer than my palm is wide. The hole in my thigh gathers at its edges, puckers, starts to seal. Fresh epidermal tiles tessellate into a new holoscar of orange and pink.
I’ll pass the thorn to Mother. She saves all my shed protrusions—countless flaked quills from my back and shoulders, the three thorns from the infantile frills that once decorated my thighs. Currency for Marmos.
Emmanuelle pays attention to my thigh.
“I am now a woman?” I ask.
A line forms between Emmanuelle’s brows. She speaks slowly, holding each vowel too long. “You’ll get there,” she says. Her eyes remain on my leg. “Patience.”
Where the sun touches the water, plums and oranges mottle, like the patternations swirling into place where my thorn shed from.
“Listen to the waves.” Emmanuelle’s dulcet words. “There’s balm in nature’s rhythm.” She strokes the back of my neck and hums gently.
And like this, like reaching a cliff edge, the path behind you having fallen away, my childhood is over. What will become of me? Relentless spring tide waves crash in.
*
“Alora,” Emmanuelle shouts, stands and strides towards the water. “Where’s Alora?”
I stand too. “I can’t see her,” I say. Rushing towards the shoreline, one hand hat-peaked against my forehead, my other arm eagle-winged for balance, I scan the expanse of ocean all the way to where sea becomes sky. “She’s there,” I say and point.
In the distance, the top half of my baby sister, smaller than she should be, too far out, her body a spiky mark against the shifting sheet of sea. Alora throws her arms in the air. An arc of water rainbows above her head.
“She’s swum out past the rocks. How many times…” I tsk and cuss and cup my hands around my mouth and shout instructions to my feral sibling to get her sorry ass back to shore.
“She’s okay,” Emmanuelle says. “She’s paddling back. All this exercise before supper is great to release her energy.”
I side-eye my friend and in exchange, Emmanuelle gives me another knowing smile. “Release her energy?” My voice high-pitched. “Alora is young, without a worry in the world, of a time before responsibility and fear. She does not need release, she’s already free.”
*
When Alora sets foot on the beach, I reprimand her. She apologises, then sulks. Emmanuelle says goodbye and heads home to her new husband.
I yank free a thick towel from my sister’s bag and hold it out for her. It ribbons in a breeze which marks the onset of evening. Her teeth and quills chatter as she reaches for the edge of the fabric. Wrapping the towel around herself, her protrusions catch. The tip of one of her baby hip thorns tears a hole.
I sling on my old sandals. A redness spots up on my ankle where the broken strap of my footwear rubs. I think back to the sentient pain Emmanuelle spoke of, the pain which must come before pleasure—could it match the agony of lugging a wriggly, quilled and thorned child several miles home, along a beach, wrecked shoes?
I lift Alora up, her thorn spurs jabbing into my waist, and carry her home for a supper I will have to fix.
*
I prepare a simple meal. After we’ve eaten, Father slinks to his study, I tidy away dishes and instruct Alora to ready herself for bed. Then, I guide Mother to her rocker.
“Mother.” I show her my dropped thorn. “It fell.” Mother eases herself up and grapples for the thorn in my hand.
“We go now,” she says.
Tonight, I will be Mother’s eyes, hers aged, milky from too much sun, and she, as tradition states, will be my chaperone. “Your loosenings are in the cloth sack. A lantern is prepped in the hallway.” She gestures at the door. “I knew by the song on the breeze, the call of migrating swans, tonight would be the night, but first, put Alora to bed.”
*
Sat on the stool in Alora’s room, I call out instructions. She brushes her teeth and quills, tidies her petals, gets into her crib. Alora’s shelf is crammed with glass jars packed with puerile booty. Green and brown seaglass chunks glisten by the light of her bedside lantern.
“I don’t want you to go,” she says. She beckons me over, wraps her arms around my neck, and kisses me on the cheek.
“I must.” Her arms drop as I pull away. She passes Thalia, her favourite teddy, to me.
“I know.” She breaks eye contact, then shuffles down beneath crumpled sheets. “And I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? For what?”
A silence follows. She squirms.
“Marmos.” Alora finally speaks “And for losing you.”
“But none of that’s your fault.” I kneel by her, and stroke the spines on her shoulders flat for comfort. “It’s inevitable. Written in the ebb and flow of the sea. My skin patternations dictate my future, as yours will for you. What’ve you to apologise for?”
“Today. At the beach.” She pauses, sobbing gently. “I took a bunch of your quills and one of your thorns from under Mother’s bed and fed them to the ocean.”
I withhold a gasp. An odd gulp emits from my throat instead. “I see.”
“It was all I could manage in my bag pocket, in my hands,” she says, and then more firmly, “I’d have taken them all if I could.” Alora pouts and yanks the sheet back over her face.
“That was wrong, Alora, but . . . I understand. Please sleep.” I pocket the threadbare teddy. “I’ll be back later tonight to tell you a story, if you haven’t soothed yourself.” All I hear are muffled tears as I back out of her room, shutting her door in my wake.
