Nell Johnson
Limestone, shale, and granite. At a pond in Eastern Oklahoma. I sit at the foot of a pond with a long, narrow fly fishing dock. Brown clumps of wasps’ homes stick to its steel roof. I grasp at rocks on the shoreline. Some of them are round, others jagged. A few have mossy patches, others indentations that I will myself to believe are fossils of a bygone era. I envision tiny fish and bugs and trilobites, trying to imagine what the world looked like then, all colorful and explosive. My nails are caked with mud. When I reach into the stagnant water, my mother shrieks and pulls out my hand.
“Be careful, baby girl,” she says. “There’s water moccasins here.”
“What’re those?”
“Scary and quick snakes that will jump out of the water and bite you,” she tells me.
I stare at the still water in front of me. A water bug, its tensile body clinging onto the surface, makes wide circles in the pond. I put some of the rocks into the pocket of my overalls and wonder which era water moccasins came about. During the Cambrian Explosion? Or when the dinosaurs roamed the earth? And if then, the Triassic, Jurassic, or Cretaceous?
My mom squeezes my hand in a steel grip when we get back into the station wagon. I can’t stop thinking about the water moccasins—how fast can they move? What is their venom like? How quickly can it kill a person, especially a tiny one like me? I run my fingers over the hard, solid ridges of the rocks in my pocket, thinking of trilobites and their slow, peaceful lives.
* * *
Orpiment. A now closed-up lapidary in Wichita, Kansas. I am with my mother, father, and older sister. The shop is the size of a warehouse with aisles of gray bins holding various rocks and minerals. Rocks are aggregates of one or more minerals. They can be igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic. I know the difference. I have been reading my DK Eyewitness Gemstones book the entire road trip, every state on the way to DC; Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia. I rattle off the Mohs hardness scale values of the minerals in the bins and point to the ones that look like the pictures in the book. An employee comes over, an old Witchitonian in a button-up shirt and khakis, overjoyed to see a young geologist in the making.
“Do you have orpiment?” I ask.
“Why would you want that, young lady?”
“It’s cool,” I say. In the book, it’s a jagged, flaming chunk of orange and yellow, a poisonous mineral that the Ancient Romans used to tip their arrows.
My mother shakes her head. Her thin mouth is stretched into an exaggerated frown.
“You don’t need that.”
The employee shows us to the orpiment. Galena, a shiny, purply, lead-based mineral, is housed in glass along with it. I am pleading for the orpiment, I am wanting to possess such a fiery and dangerous item, and my mom is resisting. Where will we put it? What if it touches my skin, my hair, my eyes? What if I eat it, even though I am seven and haven’t put anything but pencils and erasers in my mouth for years?
“Come on. What other girl in the second grade can say that she has a poisonous mineral in her rock collection?” My father argues. He wins for the time being. And it will sit on top of the kitchen cabinet, where I cannot see it, until my mother decides to throw it out.
* * *
Mica. The Black Hills of South Dakota. As we trudge along the trail, I notice a thin white sheet sparkling on the ground. I bend down past the dirty rubber toes of my shoes and gather the piece, then I see more, shimmering under the July sun.
“Mom! Mom!” I shout, my pocket filling with dirt, gravel, and shining clumps of mica.
“Mom’s not here,” my father says.
“What? Where’d she go? I found something cool.”
“She went to the car.”
“Why?”
“To cool off, I guess.”
After my dad and I finish the hike, we make it to the car. My mother is in the passenger seat holding her phone. She is looking out the window with a strained expression on her face. When she sees me, she puts on a weary, plastic smile.
“What’d you find, little girl?”
I put the thin wedges of mica in her hand. They stick to her clammy palm.
“Make sure you don’t lose them in the backseat.”
* * *
Amethyst point. An office. I am waiting for my mother after school. My phone is chiming with messages—my friends asking me why I wasn’t at swim practice. I turn it to vibrate and settle into a chair. Ambient music plays in the waiting room and the receptionist has put out a lavender oil diffuser. She is always buying something new for the office. Last week, the oil diffuser was honeysuckle-scented. I wonder if she thinks about all of the clients that the therapist has, or if she just does her job answering phones and writing times onto a desk calendar with pretty ink and penmanship. How does she know if someone who hasn’t scheduled in a while doesn’t need therapy anymore, or if they’ve killed themselves?
I notice she’s gotten another decoration for the office. An amethyst spear lies next to the lamp, its natural color beaming next to the tacky purple label of the lavender oil diffuser. I pick it up and feel the light, celestial weight of it in my palm. I remember the days when I would’ve been able to rattle off the chemical formula for amethyst, but now I just look at how it contrasts with the sickly white of my hand and the gray of my fingernail polish like something from a Tumblr post. I look at the receptionist and put it into the gaping depths of my hoodie pocket.
My mom comes out a few minutes later with a blank expression and a piece of paper with doctor’s scribbles on it. On the way home, she picks up her prescription at CVS and buys a bag of black licorice for us to share.
“I don’t want any,” I say, shaking my head in the passenger seat. “Too much sugar.”
* * *
Six-inch geode with fluorite and calcite deposits. In the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico.
“Holy shit, I think this is a geode.”
“A what?”
My college boyfriend saunters over to me. I’m in hiking boots, an orange 49ers hat, and cargo shorts, holding a dusty, bumpy rock that fills the palm of my hand.
“A geode. It has other minerals inside it.”
I lift up my hands and get a feel for the weight of it. I start to recall the details of my childhood gem hunts. A geode shouldn’t be jagged or smooth; it should be lumpy like cauliflower. It should be shaped like an egg. I never had luck finding one before. I exhausted myself breaking open solid chunks of rock, bashing them with a hammer until my arms ached.
“Babe, do you have something in your car I could break this open with? A hammer?”
“Why would I have a hammer in my car?”
“Never fucking mind,” I say. I’ve lost all patience. I’m starting to sweat in the cool mountain breeze. I take a chunk of rock next to me and hold it above my head like a neanderthal. It makes a satisfying thud against the potential geode.
“Do you need help with that?”
“No,” I spit. My hair is clinging to my forehead, my face growing red.
With a few more swings it cracks open. White crystals line the interior of the dull rock, glinting in the high desert sun. It looks like a scene from a snow globe. I run my pinky finger along the mineral deposits—the sharp points feel like kittens’ teeth.
On the way back to Albuquerque, I call my mom when I have cell service again. At night, the city looks like a collection of glow-in-the-dark beads scattered across a dark floor.
“Hi Mom, it’s me,” I tell the answering machine. “I just wanted to tell you that I found a geode. I never found one when I was a kid, so I thought you might be interested to see what a real one looks like. I’ll send you a picture. I don’t know what kind of crystals are inside yet. I think I’ll ask this girl in my class who’s a geology major. Ok, that’s all. Love you. Bye.”
* * *
Rose quartz. A two-bedroom apartment on the west side of Albuquerque. My mom comes to visit me in college only once, just after my breakup. I offer her to stay at my apartment, but she uses her points to get a free night at the Holiday Inn Express right off the interstate instead. By the time I pick her up, it’s almost eleven-thirty and everything is closed. We make spaghetti together, how I usually do it, with the glass jar of sauce from Walmart and frozen meatballs. I tell her I don’t have a bag of salad to go with it and she tells me it’ll be okay for a night.
We split a bottle of Barefoot Moscato and soon enough we’re somewhere between laughing and crying, watching episodes of Outlander and singing Carole King songs. I take her to my room, where I’ve thrown a black trash bag of my ex’s clothes into the corner, leaning against one of his guitars. I have fairy lights draped above my dresser where my tumbled stones lie: amethyst, smoky quartz, moss agate, opalite, tiger’s eye, and my geode from a few years back. When my mom sees them, she takes a shaky breath and reaches into the pocket of her vest. A smooth oval of rose quartz materializes in her wrinkly palm.
“I know it won’t make up for getting rid of your old rock collection. I’m sorry, baby girl.”
I can’t believe she remembers it. I always assumed there was a large gap in her memory because of the electroshock therapy. I sag against my mother like a willow tree and let her frail body support my heavy one, rubbing the tumbled surface of the rose quartz with my thumb.
Nell Johnson
Nell Johnson is an Okie graduating from the University of New Mexico in the spring of 2022. She enjoys late-night drives, chicken fried steak, ignoring the existence of genre, writing about families, and open-world video games. She has been published in Bending Genders.