Untitled Story About Thorns

It was hot and humid on the day thorns first touched your skin. The cloud-speckled sky danced between rain and sun, the two intermingling as freely as lovers, steaming the world. It had been like that for what felt like forever, and the bushes had grown lush and dewy, their branches bowed down by the weight of sweet berries.

Your lips were stained with juice and your stomach full of their flesh when you realized that you’d picked the fringes bare, and, still too young to understand the need for moderation—too young to understand the need for fear—you reached deeper.

Perhaps if you had kept your shoes you wouldn’t have lost your footing, but the feeling of mud squishing between toes was as fascinating as the sweet acid curdling in your stomach, and you wanted to feel everything. It was all so new.

The bushes caught your fall, as your feet went out from under you and you flopped face-first towards the ground, their soft and dewy leaves parting as cunningly as lips ever had, the thorny branches beneath as unyielding as teeth ever were. Your skin was so soft in those days, so fragile, and you bled so beautifully. Not as beautifully as you have ever bled, not like you would learn to bleed, but thick red drops beaded your skin and dewy tears filled your eyes, and the first time is always special.

You flailed. You screamed. You sobbed.

It wasn’t long before strong hands pulled you out and soft cotton wiped away your pain, but it was long enough. That was the first time you learned what mistakes can cause, and the ache that lingered in your too-full stomach drove the lesson home. That’s what childhood is, after all: the process by which you learn to know better.

It could have ended there.

It really, truly, should have ended there.

But no one knew to squeeze the seeds out of all those little dots piercing your skin, and you only noticed those hard little pits after your wounds had scabbed and healed, and everyone you asked said it was just scar tissue. A mistake your body made in healing. Your own fault, really, and not something worth bothering anyone about.

That was another lesson you learned, long before your body found other ways to teach you: everything it did was your own fault, and complaining wouldn’t get you anywhere.

So you didn’t tell anyone when you noticed those hard little seeds sprouting, all those years later, the same year blood ruined one of your favorite dresses and left you scared to go to school on days when the moon hung heavy in the sky, the year that you learned the first of the ways people treat things like you differently—a fragile object of disgust and desire.

And the roots kept on growing, as roots do.

By the time you walked across the stage and left your childhood behind (though you felt like you’d left it behind long before), they had woven their way through you, drinking eagerly of your blood where they pressed against your veins and greedily claiming the precious sugars that would have let you grow instead of them. You were always such a small, delicate thing; you never had a chance to be anything else.

It would be wrong to say that everyone loved you for that. They wanted you for that, as something to have, something to take, something to protect or coddle or hurt or show off. Always something, never someone; there are many such cases.

But even the most welcoming, fertile soil—even years spent in the red dark, warm and pampered—can’t keep plants from the sun.

It hurt when they tore their way out, all fresh-grown thorns and dewy leaves, eagerly drinking up the light, but you were used to pain. And you bled so much during those months it took for them to claw their way out, but you were used to blood, and to the time your body took to heal.

And all that hardly mattered in the end, when their thorny vines clambered across your skin and their roots curled ever tighter around your bones, for they had made you sharp and beautiful—something that could never be touched unless you wanted it; and if someone were ever to gorge themself on their berries, it would only ever be because you had deigned to let them.