The Ribbon

Pearl was awestruck by the ribbon. It was diaphanous in its sway and frighteningly graceful in its colors, and its earth-shattering beauty was potent enough to burn a hole through the very bosom of her being. Every time she clutched it in her hands she felt almost ethereal, as if the swaying strip of gentle fabric was stroking areas deep within her soul like a sort of benevolent spirit.

Brilliant. Beautiful. Raw. Breathless. 

And forever gone.

She had been given the heavenly ribbon about a month ago, and one day after it came into her possession she had thrown it out, cast it into oblivion with only a light dusting of silk-scented regret. The ribbon’s mysterious and volatile charm was left to be viewed by only the wrinkled lining of the dusty trash can in her kitchen, and she had continued to prepare dinner after tossing away this magnificent streamer, ignoring the film of wetness that filled her vision.

“Mommy, can I play with Richard again? He always flies the kite so well, and he said he’d teach me, too!”

Pearl smiled a smile that was as bright as sunlight and as easy as the spring wind. It was genuine and pure, the kind of smile she could only ever crack for Jade, her beloved jewel.

“Ok, but make sure you tie your shoes. We don’t want you tripping!”

Jade gave a small laugh before quickly putting on her shoes and rushing out the door. Before the girl’s chaotic strands of blonde hair disappeared, Pearl thought she caught sight of one dangling shoelace, untied in Jade’s hurry and just waiting to trip the excited girl.

Sighing, Pearl grabbed her hat and went to chase her daughter into the warm spring sun before the lace could launch its assault upon Jade’s balance. The calls of flitting avians danced among the lush leaves of tall maples as the drying dew of morning sparkled like shimmering droplets of light. Pearl squinted into the cloudless sky as she made her way across the lawn, pursuing Jade’s frantically-sprinting silhouette. Jade’s laughter was innocent as she made her way towards Richard’s house, frighteningly awry hair billowing like dangling serpents of a blonde Medusa. 

Goodness. I ought to get something to tie up that hair, too, or else Jade’ll look like a banshee after five minutes with Richard and his kite, Pearl thought. 

Smiling to herself, Pearl began to run back towards the house. She knew just the thing that would keep Jade’s golden locks in line.

Pearl hadn’t discarded the ribbon because she hated it, but rather because it had been too beautiful, too terrifying, for her to keep. She found herself haunted by its brilliance, her brow brewing with a dewy sweat as the dancing fire of the ribbon’s slim figure and the fluttering ash of its shimmering touch flashed like nightmarish specters in her mind.

Fire. Ash. How she wished she would never see those things again.

Six days after the morning she had cast the ribbon in the trash, the garbage collector had come and the ribbon was whisked away, emptied from her home like a soul sucked out of a youthful maiden. Pearl had been relieved that it was no more. 

Yet try as she might, in the weeks following she neither could brush the streamer from her thoughts nor remove it from her dreams; its ghostly, exquisite flair had imprinted itself permanently onto her mind like a branded emblem of horrifying elegance. Even now she still found her thoughts swarmed with those tiny strings of silk as they wove themselves into an impossibly-smooth lattice, a lattice which wrapped its way around her heart like a sacred present. 

A sudden thump from across the field, then the sound of crying. Pearl instantly felt on high-alert, her senses overclocked with nervousness and fear.

She ran across the street, willing herself to go faster, feeling in her pockets for a gauze or bandage.

“My jewel, my perfect opal, are you alright?” Pearl asked as she rushed over to Jade, who lay sprawled upon the grass outside Richard’s house with a badly-skinned knee and bruised arms. A frisbee skimmed the hot air nearby as a boy next door ran to retrieve it. Richard was already running back to his house to get help, the multicolored kite all but forgotten.

“Of course, Mommy, I just fell down! Richard said he’d go home and get me a band-aid, so don’t worry!” Jade was now trying to be brave in the presence of her mother, but Pearl knew her daughter was fighting tears.

“But you’re bleeding! How many times have I said to make sure your shoes are tied before you start running? You could have been seriously hurt! Oh, I just knew this would happen...”

Shaking her head, Pearl quickly assessed that though Jade was injured, nothing looked too serious and she could easily be cleaned up indoors. Richard’s folks would have bandages at the ready. Relaxing slightly, Pearl took a shining pink ribbon from her pocket and beckoned to Jade.

“Come here, my emerald, your hair is a mess again. This will keep it nice and tidy.”

“Mommy, stop calling me ‘jewel’ or ‘emerald!’” Jade groaned. “The other kids will laugh, and then-”

“I’ll stop loving you the day you die, Jade. And if other kid’s dare laugh, I’ll-”

But Pearl fortunately caught herself before describing an image that was much too graphic for Jade’s young mind. Instead, she set about fixing the ribbon to Jade’s hair until it was tied in an orderly ponytail. Then she made her daughter tie her shoes, double-knotted.

“There you go, now let’s go inside Richard’s house to get those cuts cleaned up!”

Pearl held Jade’s hand as the latter shakily hobbled along, the two of them working their way towards Richard’s front door. As the sun shone down upon the mother and her beloved sapphire, Pearl was struck with the feeling that she adored being a mother more than anything else in the world.

Pearl could not forget how the ribbon had felt in her hands as she worked it around Jade’s strands of hair, how its tail had danced in the breeze as it lay upon her daughter’s head.

Brilliant. Beautiful. Raw. Breathless. 

Oh, why had she succumbed to her fear of the ribbon and thrown this satin-smeared blessing away? She may as well have surrendered her soul itself. 

That powerful strip of fabric, with its ghostly touch and soothing softness, would not permit Pearl another chance to hold it, to look upon its endless, priceless beauty, not even if she knelt before God and asked. Celestial things like the ribbon came as seldom as eclipses of the heavens, and one rarely lived to see more than one of those daytime displays of darkness.

Pearl sighed as she walked into her living room to place an embroidered box of custom-crafted gems back onto the shelf, a gift she had received from an old friend. The jewels were pretty, of course, looking extra polished in the evening glare, and Pearl took a moment to admire them, even if they were not the ribbon. Using fingernails painted with carmine layers radiating an intense scarlet, she adjusted her hair and stroked the cyan-tinted clip that held her own smooth blonde locks together.

A quick glance at the clock and Pearl saw the time was 6:30 p.m., about when Jade’s after-school art program would be over. Smiling to herself, Pearl began to visualize a tiny figure in an oversized fleece jacket waving from the front steps of the school. Jade would be bounding over to the car, eager to give her mother a hug and show off the illustration or sculpture she had created that day. Sometimes the girl brought home works so beautiful they made Pearl forget who she was as she lost herself in the creases of her jewel’s unbounded imagination. 

As Pearl left her house and walked to her car to drive to Jade’s school, she was forced to accept that the glamour of the ribbon’s wind-streaked sheen and the unrestrained energy of its radiant luster were long buried. 

There was nothing left but fire and ash.

Jade is gone.

Pearl would never be able to hold the ribbon, find her everything, fill her soul, see her daughter again.

“She’s gone, forever. We’re sorry, but it’s the truth. There’s nothing more that can be done.”

As the distant city’s proud silhouette pressed firmly against the amber-soaked streaks of a tired sun, Pearl pulled out of the driveway, quartz-covered purse beside her on the seat. And though the blue-eyed laughter she would love to hear from her daughter when Jade ran to meet her at the school entrance resonated deeply and euphoniously in her mind, those soft, chime-like tones were false and wrought with hopelessness.

“She was an amazing girl, I’ll tell you that...it’s so unjust...her mother’s a wreck…Pearl won’t answer my calls! I’m afraid for her, grieving alone...”

Pearl arrived at the school fifteen minutes later, taking in the sight of the demolished building for the hundredth time. The fire had been years ago, but its blazing roar was still etched in the nape of her eardrums and the folds of her damaged subconscious. 

On a particularly hot summer day last month, and only a few weeks before her daughter’s eighth birthday, Pearl had received the call.

“There’s been an incident, a terrible one. Your daughter was caught in the midst of the blaze, trapped. We couldn’t get to her in time.”

Pearl still cried deep into the evenings when the world was blind to her anguish and the stars had not yet appeared in the soothing curtain of night to give her an insufficient yet welcomed solace. But she knew that no matter how many times she drove to that destroyed hall of academia to pick Jade up from that after-school art club, there would never be anything but aged ash to meet her. Raw, hopeless, colorless ash. 

Pearl wondered what her daughter had painted that day before the fire had consumed the work and its maker. She wondered what colors had been splashed onto that doomed paper, that destroyed canvas of creation. She would give every article she had ever owned to see the crayon-covered painting just once.

Pearl tore into the parking lot of the smoldering school in a grief-shrouded trance, her legs barely able to control the pedals of the car. Screeching to a halt, she found that she was just in time to see the plumes of water from the fire department’s power hoses douse the very last arcs of blistering flame. She left the car with feeble legs, terror clenching her rib cage like a steel vice. 

As she neared the front of the school, Pearl watched the spiraling arms of smoke lift themselves towards a sinless sky with a tiny, irrational flicker of hope as if Jade would simply walk out of the rubble - with her yellow overcoat covered in soot - and embrace her mother with arms that one day would have all the desires of the world in their warm, gentle grasp. 

Please, please, please. Come out, Jade. Come out so I can fix your hair, so I can tie your shoes...

But all that Pearl could see when she peered with desperate, salt-stained eyes out at that desolate, broken landscape was a single firefighter, somber and stoic, making his way towards her trembling form with that bright, pink ribbon held firmly in his hands.

Brilliant. Beautiful. Raw. Breathless. 

And forever gone.