Grandmother Said My Skin Was Good. Don’t Break It

Grandmother Said My Skin Was Good. Don’t Break It.

NOVEL STATUS: COMPLETED

PUBLISHED CHAPTERS: 15 CHAPTERS

Grandmother Said My Skin Was Good. Don’t Break It- Sneak Peek

Ivy

The village had a secret that everyone knew and no one mentioned: it was built on bones.

Not metaphorically. The bones of the mountains were real jade — red jade, specifically, the kind that glowed faintly in the dark like an ember that refused to go out — and the bones of the men born into the village were real too, settled at the bottom of the pond behind the mountain, accumulating for so many years that the skulls had started to look like river stones.

My village was wealthy. We had the mine and the jade and the reputation, and everyone for three valleys over knew that a woman of our clan would outlive her grandmother and her grandmother’s grandmother, provided she was careful with the jade cream and obedient to the matriarch. What people on the outside didn’t know — or preferred not to know — was what that longevity cost.

There were no men in the village. Not living ones.

I had two older sisters. I would have had three brothers, but they were killed at birth: drowned before they could cry, because their screams might anger the mountain gods. That was the official reason. By the time I was old enough to think about it, I had doubts about the mountain gods. I was also old enough to know which thoughts to keep to myself.

I was seven the first time I saw it happen.

The clan moved in a quiet procession to the deep pond at the back of the mountain, and I followed at a distance, half-hidden behind a pine tree. Grandmother was at the front, her gold-inlaid bird cane striking the earth at steady intervals. She didn’t look down when they threw the baby in. She’d stopped looking years ago, I think.

The pond took him without ceremony. A few seconds of arms windmilling at nothing — the frantic motion of something that didn’t yet understand it was already finished — and then stillness.

W𝘦 u𝗉𝖽𝘢𝘁𝗲 𝗲𝗏𝖾𝗋𝘺 𝘸𝖾е𝗸 о𝗇 𝗀𝗮𝘭𝗇𝗈𝗏еl𝗌.co𝗆

I stared into the water long after the procession had gone. At the bottom, pale shapes were packed so densely they’d become nearly indistinguishable from stone. Nearly.

I did not, by nature, think of myself as a dramatic child. But I didn’t sleep well for a month.

My grandmother was ninety-nine years old and ruled everything and everyone in the village. She decided disputes. She distributed the jade cream. She chose which girls participated in the coming-of-age rituals and, apparently, which newborns were permitted to keep their lives. Her hands were gnarled and brown with age, and she moved like a woman who had never been ill a single day — which should have been reassuring and was not.

My eldest sister Hazel was eighteen that year, and restless in the way that meant trouble. She was beautiful, though not exactly in the way people usually mean: it wasn’t her face, which was fine, it was the expression on it, which suggested she was always calculating something just slightly beyond the room she was in.

Grandmother adored her. Or something close enough to adoration that it looked the same from a distance.

When the adolescent girls lined up outside the temple for the coming-of-age ritual — smoothing their traditional robes, trading whispers, pretending they weren’t terrified — Hazel was conspicuously absent. Grandmother had forbidden her to participate.

-Continue in Grandmother Said My Skin Was Good. Don’t Break It chapter 1 –