Parasites make red pearls – by Lucy Haughton
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLYFROM THE UTAS ‘LOVED STORIES’ PROJECT
2025’s UTAS third-year creative writing students were challenged not to ‘write what you know’ but to ‘write what you love’. What they produced were stories that range from horror to rom com, lyrical writing to memoir, comedy to absurdism, social commentary to fantasy. We’ve featured excerpts from seven stories on Island Online: read all the excerpts here.
It was their sixth year at school and the first person in their class, Strillia, had started to Bleed. Conversations erupted in every corner as the children debated when and where they were going to Bleed. Luna took it upon herself to bring her mother’s nail polish in and paint Strillia’s nails all the shades of blood. Crimson red, magenta, deep brown, and baby pink proudly covered Strillia’s fingers for the entire week.
The celebration and conversation exhausted Akoya. The anticipation to Bleed was unbearable. She couldn’t fathom chattering more about it without actually Bleeding. Thank the Moon she was the half that got to Bleed!
Amid all the excitement, a memory prickled up against her. When she was a child – a smaller child than now – her father would let her help with the cooking. One afternoon, when it was just the two of them in the house, her father used a knife to cut broccoli and Akoya placed the cut-up pieces in a bowl beside him. In one of her reaches, Akoya lost her balance and tumbled into her father’s forearm, knocking the knife out of his grip. The knife pierced his index finger, and a hot flash of red blood spilled onto the broccoli.
‘Daddy, you’re Bleeding!’ Akoya squealed.
‘No.’ Her father stared into the palm of his injured hand. ‘I’m not.’
‘Look, you are! It’s red!’ Akoya was excited. ‘Does this mean you get to have a party every Moon too? I didn’t think dads could bleed.’
‘This isn’t Blood, Akoya. This is a sin.’
Her father put his lips to the sin on his finger and sucked it out. His face folded into itself and there was silence.
On the day Luna started to Bleed, her father brought the class ginger lemonade and raspberry crumble. Luna told any willing listener about the details of her Bleed – how she knew it was her time before she even saw the Blood, how she had been on a hike with her entire family, how she was finally allowed to go to the school’s Respite Room for the remainder of the week (where there was plenty of open windows with crispy air, sweets, tea, and heated blankets), Akoya couldn’t stop watching Luna’s red nail polish as she spoke. Ten shades of red twirled in the air around her, punctuating the excitement of her every sentence.
That evening, Akoya toyed with an alphabet block that had belonged to her mother since she was a baby. She turned each face, searching for its similarity to a real person’s face. She could make out the eyes, the frown, and the smile in the letter B. Kind of. It looked more like an ass. She liked all the letters on the block the same – meaning she didn’t really like them at all.
Akoya studied each corner of the block. Its perfect ninety degrees met another ninety degrees, creating a sharp point. Akoya ran her fingers across the sides of the cube. She pressed her thumb into a corner. It left a deep imprint. Akoya pressed deeper. She heard the skin break. On her thumb there appeared a tiny dollop of blood. Carefully, she pushed her thumb against the index fingernail of her opposite hand. She took her bleeding thumb to her mouth and sucked the sin out while admiring her red nail.
Akoya waltzed down to the kitchen, a book in her red-fingered hand. She especially liked this time in the evening when she could nestle herself in a chair by the kitchen table while her father prepared dinner. Her father hummed to himself as she leafed through the pages of her book.
‘What are you reading, love?’ he asked.
He drew closer to look at the cover. Instead, he caught sight of Akoya’s dull red nail.
Her father lifted her red finger. ‘Akoya, darling, what is this?’
‘It’s nail polish,’ replied Akoya.
‘You’re not allowed to have this kind of nail polish yet,’ said her father.
Akoya’s father was abruptly reminded of his daughter’s hand pushing his arm with sudden force, his red insides spilling onto their broccoli. She had smiled with glittering satisfaction afterwards.
‘I made it,’ said Akoya.
‘Not from your vagina.’ He looked at his child quizzically.
‘No, from my thumb.’ Akoya grimaced.
‘Did it hurt?’ her father asked.
‘A little,’ she replied.
He held her finger up to the kitchen light. Soup started to bubble on the stove. Her father spat on a dirty tea towel and wiped Akoya’s finger clean.
He threw the tea towel in the garbage. ‘You can’t ever do this again. And do not ever tell your mother.’
Her father was quiet until Akoya’s mother came home. As always, she fluttered around the house like a trapped wasp, hissing something about how Luna’s father makes sure the family eats all the food groups in every meal and how important that is for everyone’s health.
‘That’s a nice thought dear.’ Akoya’s father ladled soup into her mother’s bowl. ‘We should all have dinner together sometime then.’ ▼
Image: Pawel Czerwinski - Unsplash
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