Words by Hayden Naar
Content warning: sexual references, depiction of a relationship with a minor
You’d be forgiven for failing to notice that Rachel is not a tall person. She stands tall. Even with feet flat on the ground it’s like she’s standing on her toes. Fresh runners on her feet and decked out in active wear and gold jewellery.
She’s into crystals, and she’s what a crystal enthusiast would describe as a high vibration human. You can feel her energy – a blue buzz around her. It pulls you in, and you can’t help but match her enthusiasm for life. Her whole person seems to glow with this energy; bright blonde hair, shining blue eyes, and pearly teeth in a permanent smile.
She carries a small blue crystal in a gold chain around her neck. The crystal is embedded in a piece of gold engraved with Sanskrit words that she can’t read and doesn’t know the meaning of. She was given the crystal by her first boyfriend, Zach, who in turn had been given the necklace by a yogi in Nepal. Or so he said.
They had been pulled over in his van on the shoulder of the highway somewhere between Melbourne and the NSW border. He was twenty-six and she was seventeen. She was skipping out on her family and school to follow him to Confest – a nudist convention just across the border. They’d known each other for six weeks. Sunlight slanted through the dusty driver’s side window, lighting him up like a saint. He was shirtless, lightly scented with marijuana and incense, wrists strangled with bracelets. She admired his worldliness and spirituality – he had spent months finding himself in Nepal and had done ayahuasca with a shaman in Peru. She had never left Australia.
“This is a special place,” he had said, nodding slowly.
She had looked around uncertainly. The stretch of highway was the same as it had been for the past hour. Flat and completely unremarkable, bordered by trees. She looked at him and shrugged. He held her eyes, and a shiver went through her. There was something about his self-assurance that made it hard not to trust him.
“You can feel it right?” He gestured to the large crystal mounted on the dashboard. “The vibrations are good here. Close your eyes and you’ll feel it.”
She closed her eyes.
“Now take a deep breath.”
She did. All of a sudden, he had placed his fingertips onto her neck at her pulse point. A shiver ran through her.
They had gotten out of the car and walked into the bush. After about ten minutes there was a creek and a small waterfall. They had’d fucked by the waterfall and afterwards she had cleaned the cum off her thighs with the clear, cold water.
After she had pulled her underpants back up and pulled her skirt back down he had told her he loved her and given her the crystal. He said that it had been blessed to always give good luck to the wearer and that it had never let him down.
He must have been right since he was hit by a truck and killed two days after giving it away.
She had needed to call her parents to come and pick her up from NSW. For three months they hadn’t let her out of the house except to go to school. As soon as she graduated she left home and never spoke to them again.
She moved out to Coburg and now she works as a psychic. She isn’t sure if she believes in it or not – Zach had been the first, but not the only man to show her that confidence can make all kinds of things seem true. And she had believed all kinds of things.
The only time she ever takes her crystal off is on the night of a full moon. On those nights, she puts it inside a bowl of purified water and leaves it out in the moonlight to charge. She’s learnt that you need to charge a crystal if you want it to keep working.
She lives on the top floor of a six-story apartment building, and she climbs onto her balcony railing, stretching her arms up to slide the bowl onto the building’s flat roof. It needs direct moonlight – her balcony doesn’t always face the moon so it needs to go onto the roof. The night after a full moon she wakes with the dawn, lighting incense and meditating with the sunrise before retrieving the crystal.
But this morning, she stands on the railing to pull down the bowl and finds it empty. The crystal is gone. She thinks of Zach. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Where the fuck could it have gone? She climbs down from the railing and puts her hand into the bowl, hoping that somehow her hand will find what her eyes could not. It’s not there of course. Not that she had much hope for that. That would be irrational.
She places the bowl onto the floor and climbs back onto the railing. The sky is cloaked in clouds, painted blood red by the sunrise. She fumbles her hand across the rough surface of the roof, hoping to find where the crystal might have fallen out of the bowl. But her hand doesn’t find anything. She raises up onto her toes, stretching as high as she can, her fingers splayed and her tongue sticking out in concentration.
She shifts her weight slightly to get a better angle. Her feet are bare and beginning to sweat. A toe slips on the rail and she throws her arms out to steady herself. But it’s no use. Her left foot slides off the railing and she overbalances, toppling out into empty space above the road below, arms spinning and legs kicking.
Time seems to slow down. She watches as the ground below pulls her closer. It should be frightening, but she seems to be going so slowly that she doesn’t even feel like she’s falling. She glides past the fourth floor, and then the third. She thinks about Zach getting hit by a truck. She wonders if it was a coincidence.
As she goes past the second floor she catches a glint of light in a tree across the street. She sees a bird’s nest. She sees a crystal. Her eyes work like telescopes and she sees the finely engraved, angular markings of Sanskrit.
Now that she thinks about it, she’s not sure that the necklace was real gold. And to be honest, the crystal was probably made of glass.
