brined by Al Kramer

You keep buying pearls. Pearls you can’t afford. From an online auction. You get to see them squish your treasures out of their host before words of affirmation pour in from the Popper — you don’t know his real title but he gets a bonus for so-and-so amount of likes, ass kisses, and innuendo. You watch your pearls’ mamas discarded after their meat has been picked clean. You are sad, watching their violations. But not sad enough. Not enough to stop watching the livestreams every night — your visceral lullaby. When the Popper pulls the blue clam shells out, your eyes sparkle. Big shells, bursting with baby blue hues. Your heart speeds up. You pull the phone closer to your face, retinas burning in the front row seat you share with thousands of others, all scrolling and buying.

There’s a rush in buying up to the limit of your funds. Maybe you would hit the bottom of your bank account. Maybe you’d lose everything. Maybe you’d finally get kicked out of your apartment, on the lam with pearls for teeth and toes.

You want to be one of them.

Hitting “PAY NOW” feels like swallowing creek water by the mouthful: you know you’ll get cancer from the chemical runoff, but you are so damn thirsty. Satiation over survival. Survival by satiation.

One of the pearls.

“Oh that’s a beautiful haul there, Shannon,” the Popper coos in a North Carolina Louisiana? drawl, leaning on the ‘b’ and ‘u’ in ‘beautiful.’ He shows off a dish of rinsed pearls. Probably 60 pearls at his fingertips. Lucky bastard. You wonder if he’d been born on the clam farm. In the water. Surrounded by shells. His fingertips slick as oysters, calcium carbonate bound to his heart's protein — his heart protected by its own shell. You wish you’d been born in the swamp, wish you could slough off your Midwest like your sister had and probably still does. You don’t know where she’s at these days. You’ve lost her count.

How do you turn a body into a pearl?

“Now, Shannon, you have enough pearls for a full-strand bracelet. Would you like to customize? Let us know in the…”

Your mouth feels briny just listening to the Popper, saliva collecting on your tongue. Three more orders until your clams. Giddy. The man throws two ‘Treasure Boxes’ — the Octo-Moms of the clam world — to the side. Clack, clack. Many nights you wonder what they do with the scraped-clean, treasure-less moms. You hope they eat them. You don’t enjoy thinking about a pearl farm’s dumpster. 

After two painfully slow orders, your number comes up. You sit up straighter, cheeks flushing as they grab your first bumpy oyster.

“Bang, bang,” the Popper slaps the shell twice. It bounces, mouth already parted. “Okay, what we got here… Oh… kay…”

He scrapes at the thin skin until there it is — your first pearl of the evening, small and ruby pink. You love it immensely. You can’t wait to bring it home. That oyster gives you three more girls. Not the best haul, you have to admit, but you aren’t new to this game. You’d ordered six more Pink Ponies, the store’s moniker for baby-pink-to-ruby clams. The mother of pearl determines the colour. You’ve been craving pink. Maybe you’re in love. You suppose you could get an astrologist to tell you just that. How fun love might be. How hard. You aren’t interested in labour without a tangible reward. 

Your next clam.

Something is wrong.

“... doesn’t align with our guarantee. Got a lazy one. So we’re gonna open up uh-nother for ya, don’t worry.”

The extra shell annoys you. Bad luck. Like the Popper manifesting a false start in your life. You take a lot of signs and symbols from this humble religion you’ve promised yourself to: divinatory tea leaves via recorded pearl harvesting. Fret not, friend, your luck is about to change. Your next shell produces a beauty from the centre meat. Sickly centre meat, by the looks of it: the Popper tries to hide the thick organ paste heaving from the middle as he pushes the strange, oblong pearl out. Someone chimes in on the constant flow of comments, “DIRTY MEANS FRESH!!!!!!” Maybe you don’t know as much as you think. The gloved hands buff cloudy fluid from your gem’s splendour before hosing it and the table down. The sea gunk clears away.

Your order totals 113 pearls that night. You drop into sleep like a rock in a sock.

⬤

You can practically hear the bubble wrap popping in the sun, in that hot metal box shared with the rest of the building. You’ve timed your run with the delivery. You needed to stave off the prickling rush, to take your excitement out like a dog on a leash. You don’t want to crash. You fear the Crash. Running your toes blue seemed like the safest option. You can’t feel your toes anyway. Bygones. There it is. That bulbous mustard mailer lounging in your lockbox. Package under armpit, you bound up to the fourth floor. Key, hole, slam, kitchen, table, butcher knife.

Dissect.

12 baggies wriggle out of the bubble guts. You pluck them gently and lay them out in neat rows. The full line-up winks. Variegated opal overlays your vision. You are seeing pink. The first baggie gasps as you pull it open, the crackle reverberating through your knuckles. You sniff: ever so slightly, saline and algae and gutted fish. You hadn’t noticed it the first time. Now, you want to bottle the stink and wear it in your hair. If you had any. Two pearls topple into your palm, and for a moment, you think — hope — they’d fall straight into your skin, embedded and cosy. Beauties. You cup the irregular — baroque — pink pearls, cradling their ridges. You raise them close to your eyes, studying each millimetre, when a loud knock shocks you out of your observation. 

“I saw you come in, NAME HERE. It’s Mike, come on, open up.”

Your gut lurches. You hear him clear his throat outside the door. Your knuckles turn white as you ease toward the door. The knocking starts again as you stand next to it.

“You’re overdue and ya know it. Wouldn’t be avoidin’ me if you didn’t. You owe me three months' rent already so… open the fuck up now.” Your running sweats start again, soaking the dried salt on your forehead.

“I know you’re in there! Don’t make me say it, NAME HERE, huh? I’ll spell it out for you: E-V-T…I… fuck, never mind. Open up, NAME HERE!”

There it is. The pumping in the pipes again. Like a million small hearts in the walls. You hear it a lot lately. Your muscles twitch with the plumbing. Hot breath hits the other side of the door.

“Open the fuck up, NAME HERE! I swear to god, you don’t open this door — MY DOOR — in the next two minutes, I’m hitting you with an eviction notice.” He shakes the doorknob to punctuate each sentence. Easing one eye to the peephole, you stare at the vein pulsing in his receded hairline. Maybe that’s the sucking sound you’re hearing. The vein crawls closer, peeling from Mike’s forehead. The end drips brownish-red as it sucks toward the peephole. 

“It’s been two minutes, NAME HERE,” Mike says, his fire draining through the leaky vein. “I’ll be back tomorrow with an eviction notice. Fucking bitch…”

Mike spits on the door and walks away, swearing. You stay still until your legs shake. Later, you collapse on the floor, knees clacking together, feet splaying out. You sit there for hours, the apartment dark and your legs numb when you finally regain your vertical. You feel like you’d been crying, but you can’t remember tears. Knee joints pop as you walk back to the kitchen table. Your nerves extend past your body — you feel the second baggie before you take it in shivering hands to open up. 

⬤

Dewdrops. Ancient people believed pearls formed when dewdrops fell into a clam’s mouth. Imagine a hydrated clam offering its lovechild pearl babies to the heavens as a thank you. The heavens laugh at its luck, having gotten what they came for all along. Everyone is happy. Right? You like that explanation better than the medically inflicted gestation clams endure now. The transplanted bits of shell. Irritation induces a glinting, glittering labor. Beauty is pain.  

You are buying again. Mike had come knocking today, but you’d been out. He’d left a note. Not an eviction but in that same vein. You need something to calm you down. You find your stride in the scroll. You happen upon two pearl auctions along the way. The first is too high-end. You stop at the second. Your negative bank account chides, but you like voyeurism in doses. Safe spaces are few and far between sometimes. 

“Alright guys, if just joining, we got some great deals going on tonight. Hit the shop at bottom left of screen,” it is a woman or someone of the femme diaspora today. If you’d been born a pearl, inoculated of the mother rather than the sperm, you would like the way this Popper handles you. Delicate and fast. Efficient in a way that makes your nipples hard. God, you need to get laid. 

Laying in the dark, emergency lights pulse past your building. They catch the light of the Med Bottles. Orange plastic prescriptions, emptied and refilled with your pearls. Good storage, in a place of pride on your mantle. Remembering the name and dosage of your meds is an added bonus, for when health insurance finds you again. You watch the bottles show off their shiny innards and return to static bubbles. You grin, a tickle in your belly.

Halfway through, the livestreamers switch DJs. You like this one too. The way his hands stroke the clam around, moving between and around its folds in a practiced scavenge. His accent you can’t place, but liked his tone. You want his hands to unearth you like that. You could touch yourself to it. Why don’t you? You wouldn’t. Disgusting. That’s the juicy part. This is your most sacred ritual. You cannot taint it. Taint. Cheap shot. You could move your fingers in those same ways. This is a live stream. Thousands of people there for your climax. And you never know. You could make new rituals.

After, you smoke two joints in the shower. The water runs cold after the first hour, but still, you stay. You think about anything else and laugh at the jokes you make of it in your head. You go to sleep hungry, on the couch, covered in dewdrops. Without your blessing, the pumping in the pipes lulls you into unconsciousness.

The next morning, you call out of work. You decide it’s time to start your Etsy shop. Parting with the handmade bits and bobbles the pearls would wrench your heart but you need to do something other than suck up to rich people for coin. Your coffee table laden with half projects, piles of pearls, and their accoutrement, you set to work on a thingy. A little figurine of sorts with pearls for eyes. And tumors. It turns out remarkably cute for a monster — that was the power of the pearl. You decide to keep this one. A few hours in, the glass bowl on the kitchen counter moves. No, something inside moves. Swims. 

“Beta, baby, I’m sorry! Oh my god, your silly, stupid bitch mama forgot to feed you!” It had been days. At least. You can’t remember the last time you’d smelled the fishy flakes. You float past the guilt, burn through it in your rush to salvation clean the bowl. You drop beta into a glass and coat the water line in fish food. As you do so, irritants itch your wandering brain. You want to be cherished, to be strung around a neck, laid on a collarbone, in an identical line. You taste like luxury, like seaweed and granite — chewing your nails had taught you that much. 

You want to be a pearl.

To grow, learn, fuck, marry, reproduce, live, die, kill in nacre-gilt glory. To be the Mother.

You start small. You begin as an oyster. Or rather, with an oyster. One day, you crush its nacre into dust, snort it, and sneeze it out. It wouldn’t do to have your body reject it. So you julienne the shell, make it into a slaw. The cod in the back of the fridge would pair great. You breeze toward it, dig through the back of the refrigerator only to find a fuzzy fish. It lives in the garbage can now. Instead, you toast a hunk of bread, smear it in butter, and garnish with pearl dust. Salt. Bite. Eat. It tickles on the way down, larger bits getting stuck between your teeth. The fish smell hangs in the air. It isn’t spring, but more cleaning is imminent. The fridge begs to be gutted like succulent fish cheeks. You fill a garbage bag full of soft, cold food before deciding it is high time to dive into the laundry mountains and make the place smell like Tide. You call your friend as you sort colours and dirty underwear. 

“Whadduuup, big dog.” Laughter bursts from your chest.

“Heyyy, killer,” you reply.

“I was just tryin’ something out,” she laughs. “Seriously. What. Up. Homo skillet.”

“My day, now that I’m talking to you, sugar cheeks.”

“It’s not my cheeks that are sweet, but thank you for playing.”

“You drink too much piña over the weekend then?”

“Preparation is key,” she says. You chat the day away was it just a day? Time doesn’t keep you in the loop anymore as you move from task to task.

Your hand slips while scrubbing the ground. The sponge squeaks away as you fall into the tile. You laugh until you cry. Then keep crying.

“You okay, dude?” crackles through the phone.

“I’m great, I just… man, I love you so much. Thanks for being in my life, ya know? I miss you like I miss the womb.” Your heart pumps hard, with the pipes again, the symmetry like lying in the sun.

“I love and miss you too, dude. If I could teleport right now, I’d show up on your musky ass couch. With party favours.” She takes a deep breath. “I don’t wanna be rude, but can I ask? Are you maybe a little uh…”

“No.” Anger floods your hot ears. “Why would you say that, can’t I just be grateful for my friend? I mean, fuck.”

“I wasn’t trying to—“

“No, I get it. I can’t ever just be happy, only manic, right? I’m stuck in a fucking loop. Up and down, up and down, same old bipolar bullshit. And you bought tickets to this carousel, you freak! Why would you every fucking DO that, huh?”

“Okay, I’m gonna go before you say some shit you’ll regret.” 

“I—“ the line goes dead. “FUCK.”

Fuck all of them. Face hot, East Coast hardcore blaring through headphones, you scrub until the apartment sparkles, chemicals tickling your nose hairs in a beautifully astringent song. The cabinets, the counters, the rest of the food you aren’t eating, the oven, the couch, the baseboards, the rug, the floors. You finish by taking out four bulbous garbage bags, a nagging voice already pleading, its pitch rising, for something else to do. 

Later, you realize your gums are bleeding.

⬤

Loud knocks bounce off the front door as you are fighting for your life on the toilet. The pearl slaw cramped your guts. It had been an hour already. You’re giving birth. Never easy. Stop complaining. You want this.

“I heard you flush three minutes ago! I know you’re in there!”

Your toes clench as another nauseous wave insists you get caught in its undertow. Then the cramps. Your homicidal period had never been so violent as this. Then again, it rarely showed up anymore. The moon’s found you a new order to serve. Your uterus is not a concern you can have right now, despite the irregularity, the pain, the almost continual spotting. No insurance, no gyno. 

Mike keeps knocking. With a push, you experience things exiting your body. Solid pellets of something, your anus pushing them out one at a time. You hope against hope they are what you think. The last pops free and you jump up and around, sweat helicoptering around the bathroom. Panting, you stare into the bowl. Red wisps float on the surface, reaching toward the bottom where a small mound of slimy pearls wait. You pull them out as fast as you could. You don’t want the porcelain vacuum to swallow them. You pluck out the stragglers and hold the lot up to your face. They smell like shit. You don’t care. They’re beautiful. Still a bit red, but that can be washed away. You chuckle at your fortune, at your ingeniousness, tears welling. Another huge knock shakes you from your moment. The pearls jump with you, and you almost drop them. “It’s okay, it’s okay, I got you.” Anger flares. You ease them delicately into a jar on the sink, palming a few, and stomp toward the front door. Bloody mucus dries on your legs and underwear as you whip open the door. Mike’s cocktail of astonishment and anguish make him stumble. Between your red fingers, you stick the gooey pearl in his face. Mike gasps, recoiles. 

“Is this what you want?” Mike takes another step back as you inch into the hall, careful not to slip. Your asshole is still dribbling fluids. “Huh? Here you go, buddy, what I owe you with interest. Worth more than anything I’ve paid to hole up in your asbestos-filled pile of shit. At least my shit is worth something!”

“What the fu… is that a…”

“You bet your dumb ass!” Your eyes flare, your upper lip twitching. 

“Crazy bitch…” Mike hoofs it down the hall. 

“Come back to say ‘hi,’ baby, we’ll be waiting!” You laugh loud and large. The heart in the pipes backs you up.

“You’re outta here for good, NAME HERE, you can count on that,” Mike calls over his shoulder as he scurries away.

That night, riding high from the excavation, you invite friends over to craft. The urge to share the wealth, to share your fruit with people who claim to love you, is overwhelming. The night goes something like this:

Wine, cheese, tinned fish, cherry preserves, olives, weed, a theremin album no one listens to on the speaker. “So where’d all the pearls come from?” I made them myself. “Oh, so they’re not real.” No no, they’re very real. “Right… but… oysters? Or… yeah. You need some oysters to make a pearl, right?” Not if you’re persistent. “Okay, dude, whatever haha.” Your face feels hot. More wine, anyone? “Hell yeah. My fingers are burning. Let’s take the edge off.”

You dump more into the empty glasses.

“This tastes like celery salt and ballsack. I’m a fan.”

The rest of the night devolves into laughter and gossip and strands of pearls long enough to wrap around your neck twice. 

⬤

Days later, you wake up to find your toenails are pearls. Nacre, maybe, but very round. Bulbous and sturdy. You spend the morning pondering what to do with them: if you should harvest or let them grow. As the the kettle boils, you fidget with your digested pearl necklace. Every barista and bartender who’d seen it sent their compliments and condolences already. You watch a clam opening on your phone to contemplate.

“‘What’s the difference between cultured and uncultured pearl?’ Great question, Dani, thank you,” the Popper reads. You watch a clam split open on your phone while clear-coating your new toenails. “Pearls form from irritants in the clam. Beautiful process but hard to come by. So pearl farmers implant their own irritants — usually mother pearl bits — into the clam, sometimes multiple, to speed up the process. 99% of pearls on the market are cultured, what you see here tonight are cultured. More quality control, why you can get what you want when you want…”

An idea balloons in your mind. Grafting. You could be grafted. 

As you prep, you prop the phone’s black mirror against the bathroom’s silver. The username “FoxyMisty” — accompanied by a too-close selfie reeking of self-tanner — hoards the comment section.

HOW YOU KNOW ENGLISH??? JUST ASKING

HOW DO YOU KNOW ENGLISH WELL JUST CURIOUS?????

WHERE DID YOU LEARN ENGLISH PLZ ANWSAR??/

The Popper breathes deep before politely explaining: a short story of personal education and globalization. A political answer. FoxyMisty comments, OK THANK YOU YOU SPEAK ENGLISH SOo GODO!!! CONGRATS. You hum ‘colonialism’ under your breath but otherwise move on. Not your fight. Some white savior would jump in soon. More clams spit pearls for the camera as you shave your vulva smooth. You scrape the nacre from your toenails with a higonokami. Using the same pocket knife, a deep breath, and a swig of rum, you nick three incisions on either side of your inner labia. You plant the pearl chips gently inside and clench. Keegle. Whatever. It doesn’t matter once nausea, dizziness, fever come to play. Heat radiates from your groin.

But it is worth it.

Right?

If it works.

All night, you hold yourself in a ball on the bathroom mat, sliding in and out of consciousness. When awake, you read your most perverse thoughts, scribbled on the bathroom wall from previous episodes. “You don’t deserve to eat.” “May excess find you suffering.” “They will laugh at your puttering tears.” These your! stories, the ones you remember and the ones you don’t, lull you to sleep. After midnight, you come to. You blink out the eye crust, the dizziness falling with it, and stare at the walls. They’d turned into something dark and textured. Shells, dummy. Right. Your scrawl had distorted as the shells grew under it. The wall is slick, adorned by parasitic barnacles. You giggle at your fortune. It’s working. You peek at your crotch. As you slept, nacre grew in asymmetrical structures from your pores and clit and labia. It crawled down your legs. It shimmers in the night light plugged into the wall by your ear. 

You hear a gurgling in the toilet. As you turn, 

She crawls from the porcelain, gooey body clinging to every surface. She caresses the walls before suctioning her lips to them. She sucks, bites, slurps the parasites from the shells. She burps as she spins her attention toward your prone body, paralyzed by the sight of the god. Her breath is sea air as she leans in to sniff your pearl structures. 

Good, she coughs, licking along their curves. Her black tongue makes you shiver. Panting, small moans escaping your lips, you remove your the pearl strand from your neck and offer it up to the being licking you. Venus stops, gags.

Dirty pearls, she hisses. No sea sanctions her own destruction. 

Venus grasps a handful of your nacre and pulls. You scream. She pulls again. Again. Until the roots lift, your dying bits of flesh clinging to the ends. Venus leans into your face, licks from one cheek to the next, plugging your nose with agar. 

You grow a beak. Sharp and getting sharper. You rise, take Venus’s ass in your palms. Her pelvis leaning forward, you suck the erect cock she presents to your mouth. You feel her tense, close to coming. As she does, salt coating your mouth, her penis pinches off between your jaws. She gasps. You spit it out and hand the still-hard dick back to her. Head flung back, she gulps the member down. Her nails grow longer, sharper than your new squid-beak. An off-white foam — no, paste — runs from her mouth. Her belly and throat bloat before the splendor begins. 

The pearls. 

Venus heaves them from her stomach. Small orbs fall into your eyes, sticking to your shoulders and chest as the goddess chokes. You laugh, mania multiplying happiness, until your laugh remembers it has a beak now and corrects into a clicking sound. Changes in anatomy will do that, you know. 

The clicking stops as the violins start, playing from the pipes. Heartbeats pumping the rhythm, the copper tunnels found their sound somewhere between a shanty and a lament. Their music slides up your spine, into your brain stem, your throat, and out your nose. You feel good. You feel great. You feel thirsty. Your cheeks drink your tears. The pearls don’t need you anymore. You don’t need them. You are sure of it. 

You’d forget your lack of need by the morning.

Inspecting the wall again, Venus stuffs a grapefruit-sized wall oyster with her pus, climbs in,

and drowns in it.

She calls it ‘brining.’

⬤

You pack up the shells. You move to a new apartment. You pay rent on time. You feel worse. You feel better. You find god. And you lose Venus in the move.

---

I am a nonbinary writer, poet, artist, and music journalist who strives to conjure visions of things gagged, romanticized, and unknown. Though I mostly write in the horror genre, I am a big old fanboy for all the brilliant trans art I can get my hands on.

@x_kramer_