I Became a Gem in a Necklace

by Aimee Parkison

The sun and water are husband and wife. Their courting, being timeless, goes on forever because the necklaces the sun gives the water are food chains. While dying in the ocean, I witnessed the sun romancing the water and became an unwitting part of their romance. I saw the sun giving the water the most dazzling timeless romantic jewelry — violent jewelry of life, death, and hunger — necklaces so magnificent they sometimes hurt to gaze upon, so I had to cover my eyes. Eaten by sharks, I became a gem in a necklace the sun gave the water. I was devoured into the chain.

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Aimee Parkison's Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize and named one of Brooklyn Rails Best Books of the year. Her newest book Girl Zoo is a co-authored fiction about women in captivity. Parkison writes to explore voices and open doors to unusual journeys through language. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, in translation in Italian, and in the Best Small Fictions anthology series. Since 2019, she has served on the FC2 Board of Directors. Her fiction has won awards, including a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review, the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction, the Jack Dyer Prize from Crab Orchard Review, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Fellowship, an American Antiquarian Society William Randolph Hearst Creative Artist Fellowship, and a William Faulkner Literary Competition Prize for the Novel. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Oklahoma State University. For more, visit her webiste and follow her on Twitter.