When I was a child, my parents never kissed me goodnight. My father would return from the factory stinking of fish, and then slink off to steal a few hours of sleep before his next double. No time to say goodnight. I never could remember a time when I saw joy cross my mother’s face, or, for that matter, any emotion except rage. Years of her dinner being nothing but what she could scrape from the dishes had worn her down to an apathetic matriarch, unsmiling and spine perpetually bent. Instead of tucking me in, my mother brought me a glass of cold water. Each night, there was a void much more palpable than the one that was left from their lack of affection. The muscles of my belly throbbed, my stomach shriveling about nothing but crumbs and bile. As I gulped down the water, I knew that happiness belonged to those who didn’t fall asleep hungry.

Our pockets empty, I watched as my brothers came of age and were sent off to earn their keep. I knew that when I turned ten I would join my brothers in the factory, making meager pennies by crawling between gears to dislodge the very apparatus the kept me from being crushed between static, mechanical teeth.

Until then, I earned the right to live in my parents’ house by joining my mother as she went to the market. As she argued for a discount, I searched for wealthy outsiders who frequented these poor spaces looking for smuggled opium or a desperate man for hire. Each time I spotted one, my heart would flutter, and beneath my breath I would pray. Please, please, take pity on me and sweep me away from the safety of my mother’s gaze. Raise me in splendor even if I never saw my family again.

Everything changed on my tenth birthday. Father swept me off my feet when he walked through the door. As he returned me to Earth, he pulled three tickets from his pocket, saying, “It isn’t every day you turn ten, Anna-May.”

Soon my parents and I were putting on our best clothes. We were an unimpressive lot. Father in his scuffed shoes and his navy jacket worn thin at the elbows. Mother in a dress the color of soot, and me in a shift made from the leftover cloth scraps. We stood before a cracked mirror as my mother combed our hair, grumbling beneath her breath that I had not only inherited his red curls, but also their unmanageable quality. Eventually, my father took the brush from her and shepherded us towards the door, insisting, “We may look ungroomed, but that is no reason to arrive late.”

The city in which we lived was a shanty town, collapsing inwards around the factories that had sprouted from the lifeless, salt-licked coastal rock. The people like us, the poor and rundown, the lost and the misfortuned, hardly had reason to venture out of the region around the canneries and fisheries where they worked day after day. But that night, we ventured across town, my mother and I holding our skirts up to avoid them becoming slicked with the mud. We walked until we reached the paved road that served as the natural border between the common folk and the rich who owned the places that operated on our bruised, bent backs and callused hands. But we did not cross through the wealthy part of town, even if it was a shortcut, Instead, we stuck to the edge of the road, never stepping out onto the pavement. We were people conditioned to the feel of mud beneath our boots, and that didn’t change even as we ventured out to the fairgrounds.

           

Planks of wood crisscrossed the fairground, the muck threatening to overtake the makeshift walkways as the rain persisted. Father hoisted me onto his shoulders, but Mother protested, “What will we do if you hurt your back?”

           

He ignored her protests as we entered a candy-stripped tent, squeezing onto warped wooden benches. The crowd was boisterous till a goateed man entered the ring, donning the tasseled outfit of a ringmaster. He stood atop a stage in the center of the tent, announcing through a horn, “Ladies and gentleman, what you’re about to see tonight might repulse you. It might mystify you. It might even amaze you. Please put your hands together for my merry band of misfits.”

The applause was louder than the thunder that boomed outside the tent. And with each act, it grew louder. We ooed and awed at clowns juggling flaming pins, cheered and hollered at a pair of twins attached at the hip tap-dancing, and shielded our eyes as a woman with an extra bulbous head balanced atop a tightrope with nothing but a long metal bar in her hands and impending doom below.

But there was one act that caught my attention and held it, despite the show going on for nearly another hour. There was the trumpeting of an elephant, who proceeded to stampede towards the audience before coming to a halt, one leg up in the air, after a whistle sounded. I looked to the entrance where a woman stood in a golden leotard. The crowd erupted as she strutted towards the elephant. I couldn’t tell why the crowd was so loud, then I found my eyes settling on her chest, on the way the tight outfit hugged not two but rather three breasts.

“Disgusting,” Mother mumbled as she covered her eyes. Other women in the crowd were doing the same while swatting at their husbands to look away.

But my father was transfixed, unable to tear his eyes away as the elephant hoisted the woman atop its back with its trunk. I knew then that I had inherited much more than just my hair from my father. We were both mystified by the woman, by the curve of her body, by how her skin sparkled beneath the spotlights. She made my heart beat so fast I could hardly breathe, and as each of the following acts entered the tent, I wished she would emerge instead.

By the end of the show, my voice was hoarse from yelling and cheering. I tried my best to swallow, but no matter how much saliva I could muster, something seemed stuck in my throat.

“I don’t feel good,” I said as we returned home.

Mother snapped, shouting, “We can’t afford a doctor.”

“Are you okay?” Father ignored her.

“It hurts so bad to swallow I feel like I might vomit.”

“Not all over my rug you won’t,” Mother hissed as she dragged me to the bathroom.

She lit a candle and instructed me to open wide. I did my best, but the muscles in my throat felt impossibly taut. Mother roughly felt around my neck, starting at the base and inching her way up till she dug her fingers in beneath my jaw. I yowled, yanked back from her as I felt something shift within me.

“Open up.”

“It hurts.”

“I can’t help you if you don’t.”

But I couldn’t bring myself to do it, so instead she grabbed me hard around the cheeks, forcing me to open. As she prodded, I sobbed at the discomfort, but when she dug her index finger into the place where the tongue rose from the floor of my mouth, discomfort became blinding pain. On instinct, I bit down. Mother screamed as she pulled her bleeding hand from my mouth. In retaliation, she smacked me. I spit something out, and it bounced across the floor to land at the foot of the bathtub.

Mother knelt and picked up the thing in her bleeding hand. A pearl slicked in blood.

***

With that first pearl, my father purchased himself and my brothers a fine shirt in the hopes that even if this was a single blessing, we could impress our way into better jobs. But with each subsequent pearl, my father ventured further across town, now donning the fitted jacket and cane of a richer man as he first stepped onto the paved road. By the twentieth pearl, the whole family had joined him. Instead of walking with our skirts held high to avoid the mud, my mother and I ventured into the cobble-stoned roads of the upper class with our hems sweeping the streets.

We went from nothing to something to excess, and while tears spilled down my cheeks with each pearl, the smile on my father’s face when I presented them made it worth it. I learned to relax my throat and heave until I spit up another calcified gem on the bathroom floor.

But the gift was sporadic. When my parents expected another gem and made the mistake of buying fine liquor and the priciest meats instead of putting money in the bank, every member of the family looked at me with desperation.

When we went several months without a pearl when I was eleven, my mother yanked me into the bathroom. “We aren’t leaving till you puke up a pearl.”

She jammed two fingers down my throat so I vomited up that afternoon’s lunch. Then a few minutes later when no pearl emerged, she tried again. And again till my father came home. The sound of his footsteps was enough to frighten my mother. “Don’t speak a word of this.”

Each morning, I would watch another piece of fine furniture disappear from our home. While my mother scowled from across the room at me, her goose who was no longer laying golden eggs, my father grew more affectionate.

He would arrive from work with tokens of his love. A chocolate, or an apple, or on the days when food once again became too expensive, he’d sweep me into his arms and spin me around like a little girl. Father beamed with his love for me. And I for him.

One night I awoke to my mouth void of saliva. I tried to lick my lips, but my tongue had atrophied. I climbed from my bed, and suddenly overwhelmed by the room spinning around me, fell to my knees. I crawled to Father’s bed, then I reached up and clawed at the sheets. He blinked awake, looked down at me.

“What’s wrong?” he whispered as he took my head in his hands. With his callused thumbs, he massaged my jaw till the glands in my body began to secrete saliva. Finally, I found myself spitting into his hand the biggest pearl yet, nearly as large as a peach’s pit.

“I love you, Father.”

“I love you and your beautiful gifts. Now come to bed,” he mumbled as he pulled me into his arms.

***

The household of my girlhood was ruled by my mother, but as I grew older, she lost ground. When I was unhappy, our blessings became sparse, so Mother had no choice but to satisfy my whims. Thirteen to fourteen, fourteen to fifteen, I expelled at least three dozen pearls a month. Each time one emerged, I would bring it to my father and he would look at me like I was the most beautiful thing in the world, to Mother’s chagrin.

But my gift was our secret. The thought that society would discover I was the source of our wealth, instead of him, shamed my father. A single, unexpected pearl bouncing across the floor mid-sermon at our local church when I was fourteen put an end to my public life.

Solitary life turned me into a teenage nuisance, bursting into my father’s study mid-meeting or interrupting my mother’s solitude as she snuck to the hidden corners of our large manor. I was a girl with no outlet, hidden from the public eye to protect what we had reaped from my remarkable gift, but I itched for something to keep me occupied through the days that stretched endlessly on with domestic minutiae.

“I would like to go to school like my brothers, Father,” I demanded, puckering my lips and shriveling the valve beneath my tongue that yielded his most precious treasures.

He shook his head, replying, “But there is no point, Anna-May. A woman has no need for an education, and even if she did…well, it isn’t possible in your condition.”

For a week, I kept my brow furrowed, my lips pouted. I let my presence be known by the slamming of doors and the stomping of my feet. Normal adolescent antics? Yes, but I knew how to make my parents hurt. Although the mechanism by which the pearls emerged evaded me, by adopting a permanently sour mood I cut my weekly production nearly in half. After only a week or two, he knocked on the door of my room, announcing, “Your tutor has arrived.”

The man who entered was scrawny. The fabric of his suit fell undeterred down the length of his body. He introduced himself as Peter.

“Shall we start with mathematics?”

“Must we?”

“It’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?” From that very moment, I disliked Peter.

“But why mathematics?”

“Well, how else are you supposed to count all the pretty red hairs on your head.” It was then that I hated Peter. “Now, let’s begin with fractions.”

Justin Moritz (They/He) is a non-binary writer of queer horror, exploring the grotesquely campy and the filthy underside of society. Raised on true crime and horror movies from way too young of an age, their work tends to explore the terror of living as a queer person in modern times with a speculative twist. Their short fiction and poetry have been featured in Tales of Sley House 2022, Death Knell Press’ Nightmare Sky: Stories of Astronomical Horror, and several Scare Street anthologies.

Lymphatic Pearls was originally published in Scare Street's Night Terrors Vol 23 in November 2022. Keep an eye out for Part II, coming soon!