Herring

JINX

Three days in a white room with a beeping machine and a television that only played daytime courtroom shows. I watched a woman sue her ex-husband over a parrot. I watched a man cry about a broken engagement ring. I watched the ceiling tile with the brown stain and decided it was blood from a murder the hospital had quietly buried.

The nurses were efficient and indifferent. I learned their names and forgot them immediately. One of them—Gary, I think—brought me Jell-O and didn't flinch when I asked if it was made from real horses. I decided he was my favorite.

Gary: "You're getting out tomorrow, yeah?"

Deia: "Yeah."

Gary: "Good. Hospitals are for sick people. You're not sick. You're just broken. There's a difference."

He wasn't wrong.

Discharge day. A nurse I didn't recognize handed me a clear plastic bag. Clothes. Wallet. Keys. Phone. A marker. A fish-shaped eraser I didn't remember keeping.

And a ring.

She held it out in her palm like it was a pill I'd forgotten to take. Like it was nothing. Like it wasn't about to become the center of my f*****g universe, maybe.

Nurse: "This was yours. You were holding it when they brought you in. Clenched in your right hand. The doctors had to pry your fingers open one by one. Took three of them.”

Not mine. Hers. The thing I grabbed when she—

I reached out. My hand—the bandaged one, the one that had been stitched back together—closed around the ring. The metal was warm. Not from her palm. Warm on its own, like it had been sitting in sunlight.

I brought it up to the light.

It was—and I need you to understand this, I need you to really f*****g understand this—it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Not beautiful in the way of things you see in jewelry store windows, things that sparkle and catch your eye and then fade from memory the moment you look away. Beautiful in the way of things that were inescapable, inevitable. Things that feel like they've always existed and you're only just now being allowed to see them.

The band was gold. Not the pale, timid gold of a chain you buy at a mall kiosk. Real gold. Deep and warm, with the faintest reddish undertone that made it look almost alive. It was thick enough to feel substantial but delicate enough to be elegant—a balance that shouldn't have worked and yet worked perfectly. The surface was engraved with patterns that looked like embroidery, like something a medieval artisan would have spent years perfecting. Vines, maybe. Or veins. Or something else entirely. Something that seemed to shift when I wasn't looking directly at it, moving in my peripheral vision like a slow breath.

And the stone.

Opal. But not the milky white opal that looks like someone sneezed into a gemstone and called it art. Not the blue-green opal that's pretty but forgettable. This was pink. A pink so deep and rich it was almost red at the center, blooming outward into softer shades—rose, coral, the color of a sunset reflected in still water. But that wasn't the thing. The thing was the kaleidoscope.

As I turned it, the colors shifted. Pink gave way to flashes of gold. Gold dissolved into threads of green so pale they were almost silver. Silver deepened into violet. Violet fractured into sparks of electric blue. It was like watching a galaxy be born and die and be born again in the space of a single rotation. Like someone had captured a nebula and trapped it inside a stone and set it in gold so the rest of us could witness it.

I couldn't stop looking at it.

Inside the band, almost invisible unless you knew to look, was an inscription. Tiny letters—if they were letters—etched into the gold with a precision that seemed impossible. Not English. Not any alphabet I recognized. It looked old. Ancient. Like something that had been written before writing was invented and then preserved in metal because words that old shouldn't be forgotten.

I turned it over again. The pink bloomed. The green sparked. The blue fractured.

This belonged to a dead woman. A dead woman who used me as a stepstool to save herself and died anyway. Wearing it is probably stupid. Probably cursed. Probably the worst idea I've ever had. Add this to the list.

I put it in my pocket.

The nurse handed me a clipboard to sign. I signed. She handed me a packet of discharge papers. I took them. She told me to follow up with my primary care physician in two weeks. I said I would. I was lying. I didn't have a primary care physician. I had a cactus and a library card and a will to live that had recently been stress-tested and found barely adequate.

I walked out of the hospital on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else. The automatic doors opened. The air hit me—cold, wet, Seattle air, the kind I'd grown up with, the kind that seeped into your bones and stayed there. It was the best thing I had ever felt.

I'm out. I'm f*****g out. I'm so f*****g out.

I hope I never— not gonna jinx it.

That was jinx enough…