The Lust for Gold
Her ancestors were gold diggers. No, not the kind of women the word is used for nowadays, but real gold diggers with washing pans made of iron and cracked dirty hands from the wet mud. Their mouths were filled with rotten teeth, and their smile was also foul.
Just one of their teeth was gold, blinking in the sunlight when they told rude jokes about the women in the village. Their minds were always full of the promises of a shining future that never became the present or the past.
In her sleep, the gold diggers’ daughter heard the sound of moving stones and felt the cold water on her skin. She dreamed of the fingers with dirty nails that touched Welcome Stranger with its body of 72 kilograms of gold. It was the biggest nugget of them all. Her life started as a tragedy since her family was capable of many things, but loving her was none of them. The only problem with her was that her eyes looked like Persian turquoise, while her kin had a lust for gold running through their veins.
Her ancestors hurt the ground with their picks and her delicate soul with their hard words and deeds. She started to wear a veil to spare them from the blue sparkle she was carrying and began to wear fool’s gold because her family treasures never touched her neck or hand. Their misunderstanding was that they believed gold was found when they wounded the earth’s skin, and she would be just like the earth: Revealing her brightest sparkles when injured.
They didn’t know that the earth cried in silence when they swung their picks, and she still cried into her pillow years after she escaped without a hint of gold dust on her cheeks but gaping wounds on her soul. She learned from her past that gold meant no luck and rough hands were not very likely to offer softness. She ended up working in a coffee shop on the highway, serving a little bit too dry cake and a tad too hot coffee to truck drivers wearing lumberjack jackets and calling her Miss Hollywood.
Maybe it was the reflection of the gold of her ancestor’s desires in her eyes. Perhaps it was the absence of it on her alabaster neck or the melancholy that was always around her like a cloud or her very personal perfume. Maybe it was just the desolation of the highway and the lonely life on the road. Something about her made people dream of sparkling things.
It was so easy to be shining compared to highway reality. On the other hand, the tragedy was that no matter how brilliant or beautiful a woman ever was, she could never outshine the outlandish glam of pure, genuine, solid gold. But she was all left alive, the first in her line of family who was no gold digger and the last one breathing. She smiled, her pink lips moved, and the coffee pot was ready. “What can I bring you?”.
