The Tearsmith: A Novel

The first time he saw her, they were five years old.

She arrived on a day like any other, as lost as they all were, motherless ducklings.

She stood there, framed against the wrought-iron gates. The colours of fall swallowed her brown hair and the leather of her unlaced shoes.

She hadn’t been anything more than that. He remembered her as dispassionately as one remembers a simple stone: lifeless, slender, moth-like, neglected. As quiet as the silent sobs that he had seen on an endless sequence of faces.

And then, she turned to face him, leaves swirling around her.

The ground shook, the world stopped, his heart skipped a beat. He was overcome by the sight of her eyes, the like of which he had never seen before – stunningly, dazzlingly grey, more sparkling than water. Shimmering like the fairy tale, Rigel saw her otherworldly eyes filled with tears and clear as glass.

He froze when she turned her Tearsmith eyes on him.

—

They had told him that true love never dies.

That’s what the matron had told him, when he asked her what love was.

Rigel couldn’t even remember where he had first heard of this fabled love, but he spent the mornings of his childhood searching for it – in the garden, inside hollow tree trunks, in other children’s pockets, in his clothes, in his shoes. It was only later he learnt that it wasn’t like a coin or a whistle.

It was the older boys who told him about it. They had felt it first. The most reckless, or maybe just the most mad.

They spoke about it as if they were intoxicated by something invisible, intangible. Rigel couldn’t help but think they seemed even more bewildered, lost, but happy in their bewilderment. Shipwrecked, castaways, lured by a siren’s song.

They had told him that true love never dies.

It was true.

It was useless to try to shake it off. Love stuck hard to the walls of his soul like pollen on a bee’s legs. It was a condemnation of poisonous nectar, smearing his thoughts, breath and words, sticking to his eyelids, tongue and fingers. There was no escape.

One glance from her had torn his chest asunder, obliterated it with one flutter of her eyelashes. She had branded his raw heart with her Tearsmith eyes, and torn it away from him before he could clutch it back.

Nica had ransacked him in the blink of an eye, leaving him with a writhing, burning sensation in his chest. Without ever having touched him, with nothing but the ruthless, devastating grace of her delicate smile and those subtle moth colours, she had left his heart bleeding in the doorway.

They had told him that true love never dies.

But they hadn’t told him that true love tears you to shreds, that it roots itself inside you and ensnares you in its clutches.

The longer he looked at her, the more he couldn’t tear his eyes away.

There was something about how sweetly, how gently she moved, something childlike, small and true in her sincerity. She looked out at the world through the wrought-iron gates, her hands gripping the bars, hoping, longing, in a way he never had.

He watched her wandering about barefoot through the overgrown grass, cradling sparrow eggs in her arms, rubbing flowers on her clothes to make them look less grey.

Rigel wondered how something so simple and delicate could have the power to hurt him so much. He pushed the feeling away as stubbornly as an obstinate child, burying it deep inside him, trying to stifle the seed of the feeling, nip it in the bud.

He couldn’t accept it.

He didn’t want to accept it. She was so featureless and insignificant, she didn’t know anything. She couldn’t get under his skin like that, without permission, breaking his heart and shattering his soul.

It was an untameable abyss. It devoured everything around it. It destroyed his control with a frightening brutality. And he hid it, Rigel, he hid it, because deep down, he was afraid of it. Articulating it would mean admitting it was inescapable, and that was something he wasn’t ready to accept.

But the writhing within him grew stronger, taking root in his veins. It pushed him towards her, touching nerves he didn’t even know he had. Rigel’s hands trembled when he pushed her for the first time.

He watched her fall and didn’t need to see her scraped knee to devour that proof, to drink it greedily. Fairy tales don’t bleed, he urgently reminded himself as he watched her run away. Fairy tales don’t scratch their knees. That was all it took for him to see her free of any doubt, shiver and shadow.

She was not the Tearsmith. She didn’t send him into floods of tears, and she didn’t slip crystal teardrops into his eyes.

But it was his heart that wept, every time he looked at her.

Perhaps she had slipped something else inside of him, he thought, a poison much more noxious than joy or sadness. A venom that burned, stung and corrupted. Something had bloomed inside of him, but its petals were like teeth. Every time she laughed, its roots sunk deeper still, plunging its claws into his mind, its fangs into his soul.

So Rigel pushed her, shoved her, pulled her hair to make her stop laughing. He was only satisfied when she looked at him with frightened eyes that were brimming with tears. The irony of seeing despair in the eyes that should have made the whole world cry made him smile.

But the satisfaction only lasted a moment, just long enough to watch her running away. And then the pain returned, as ferocious as a wild animal, clawing, imploring for her to come back.

She was always smiling.

Even when there was nothing to smile at. Even after he had grazed her knees again. Even in the morning, with the matron’s punishments still smarting on her wrists and her hair cascading over her shoulders.

She would smile, and her eyes would be so pure and sincere that Rigel felt them chafing against his darkness.

‘Why do you keep helping them?’ another child asked her just a few years later.

Rigel had seen her from the first-floor window. Sat with all her little creatures, her deer-like legs immersed in the long grass. She had saved a lizard from the children who had wanted to stab it with sticks, and in return, it had bitten her.

‘You help all these creatures…but they only hurt you.’

Nica looked at the other child candidly, blinking steadily.

The sun shone as her lips parted. There was a bright light, an incredible splendour, and the writhing inside him went still, defeated, as she lifted her outspread fingers covered in colourful Band-Aids.

‘It’s true,’ she had whispered, with a warm, genuine smile, ‘but look at all these beautiful colours.’

—

Rigel had always known there was something wrong with him.

He was born knowing it.

He had felt it for as long as he could remember. That was how he had justified to himself that he had been abandoned.

He didn’t work like other people, he wasn’t like other people – he watched her, and as the wind tousled her long brown hair he saw bronze wings on her back, fluttering, then fading away, as if they’d never existed.

He didn’t need to see the matron’s glances, or the way she shook her head when families said they wanted to adopt him. Rigel watched them from the garden, and saw on their faces a pity he had never asked for.

He had always known that there was something wrong with him, and the more he grew, the more he felt that writhing feeling spread monstrously through his body.

He hid it bitterly, suffocated with anger and stubbornness. It got worse as he got older. More thorns erupted, because no one had told him that that’s how love consumes you. No one warned him that love takes root in your flesh and grinds you up, that it boundlessly wants and wants and wants – a glance, just one more glance, the hint of a smile, a heartbeat.

‘You cannot lie to the Tearsmith,’ the other children would whisper at night. They behaved well so they wouldn’t be taken away.

Rigel knew it. They all knew it. Lying to the Tearsmith would be like lying to yourself. The Tearsmith knows everything, knows every feeling that makes you tremble, every emotional breath.

‘You cannot lie to the Tearsmith,’ Rigel tried to stifle the phrase echoing round his head.

He didn’t want to think about how she would look at him, her soul so clear and pure, if she knew about the wretched illness he carried inside him.

Love, for Rigel, wasn’t butterflies in the stomach or a world of blissful sweetness. It was a hungry swarm of moths, a devastating cancer, absences that scratched at him, tears he drank from her eyes. It was a slower death.

Maybe he just wanted to let himself be destroyed…by her. By that deadly poison she had injected into his veins.

He sometimes thought of surrendering to that feeling, letting it invade him until he could feel nothing else. If only it weren’t for that fierce, terrifying tremor shaking his bones, if only it wasn’t so painful to dream of her running into his arms, instead of away.

‘It’s scary, isn’t it?’ whispered a child one day when the sky had turned a savage black.

Even he, who never looked at the sky, raised his gaze. In the vastness, he saw dark, sometimes reddish, clouds, like a stormy sea.

‘Yes.’ He felt it blooming inside him and closed his eyes. ‘…But look at all these beautiful colours.’

—

When he was thirteen, girls looked at him as if he were the sun, unaware of the insatiable monster inside of him. When he was fourteen, girls were like sunflowers, turning to watch him wherever he went, their gazes ever more yearning and adoring. He remembered how much Adeline had longed for him, even though she was older than him. How devotedly she touched him, the way she bowed before him, and how all he could think about was long, shiny brown hair and grey eyes which would never look at him with that desire.

At fifteen, it was the girls who became the insatiable monsters. They blossomed in his hands like flowers, and Rigel staved off the writhing inside of him with girls who bore some resemblance to her, a spark or a fragrance.

But it only led to disasters. Do not doubt love, when it burns so violently, when it makes your heart beat in time with another’s. His need for her became more and more unbearable. Rigel felt bitterness sour his thoughts and sharpen the thorns and shards inside his chest.

He took his frustration out on Nica, twisting her name into ‘little moth’, as if he wanted to minimise the effect that she had on him. He wounded her with his barbed words, hoping to cause her just a fraction of the pain that she inflicted on him. She destroyed him, every day. She didn’t understand the impact she had, she would never be able to understand it.

She was so pure and serene that she would never choose to linger in that chaotic, dirty place that was his heart.

The more he grew…the more Rigel noticed her devastating beauty. It kept him awake at night, clutching at the sheets with repressed desire.

As Nica got older, he burned with an ever more agonising passion, that felt more and more like a thicket of thorny teeth, which, when she cried, no longer smiled.

But he was terrified that she could see it with those Tearsmith eyes of hers – the way he yearned to touch her, how he needed to feel the warmth of her skin.

He desperately wanted to imprint himself on her as she had imprinted herself on him. Just one look from her had made him crazy with desire to touch her, but just the idea of holding her made the writhing inside him ever stronger.

—

It had been during that period that a new boy arrived at The Grave.

Rigel didn’t pay him that much attention, too busy fighting against that disturbing, overwhelming love.

But that boy was out of his mind. He was mad enough to try to come near him, to not fear him. Deep down, Rigel didn’t mind crazy people, their irrationality entertained him. It was a good distraction.

They might even have been friends, had they not been so alike.

Rigel might even have cared about him, if only he didn’t see himself reflected in his narrow smirk and darkly sarcastic glances.

‘Do you think Adeline would do with me what she does with you?’ the boy said one afternoon, the hint of a smirk in his voice.

There was nothing Rigel could do. He had felt that smirk on his own lips.

‘You want to give it a try?’

‘Why not? Her or Camille…they’re all the same.’

‘Camille’s got fleas,’ Rigel jibed, with a crude and derisive amusement that momentarily replaced the burning sensation in his chest. The writhing within him quietened, guarding against scratches and sighs.

‘Nica, then,’ he heard. ‘Her innocent face makes me want to do so many things to her…you can’t even imagine what she does to me. Do you think she’d wriggle? Oh, that would be fun…I bet if I put my hand between her legs, she wouldn’t even have the strength to push me away.’

He didn’t feel the cartilage under his knuckles. He didn’t feel his hands violently flying through the air and ruining that sunny afternoon.

But he would always remember the red blood under his nails as he yanked him down by his hair.

He would never forget the way she had looked at him the next morning. He had never seen eyes flash from so far away, a silent scream of terror and accusation that bore into the void inside of him.

Facing the bitter irony of his fate, Rigel found himself smiling. Smiling because it hurt too much.

Deep down, he had always known there was something wrong with him.

When they had been adopted together, Rigel felt a noose tightening around his heart.

Staying with her was better than the unbearable prospect of watching her leave. Playing the piano had been one last, desperate attempt to keep her with him, tied to him by those deep, soulful binds. She would cruelly, ignorantly, delicately destroy those connections with her first step away from The Grave.

He knew he would be paying the price for this forever. He could never have imagined a condemnation more painful, not in his most tormented nightmares, than the hell of being so close, entwined, and yet divided by the same family.

The only way she felt like a sister was because she was in his blood, like a poison with no remedy.

—

‘Did you see how she looked at me?’

‘No…How did she look at you?’

Rigel didn’t turn around. He continued placing the new books inside his locker as he listened to the conversation.

‘As if she was begging me to bump into something else…Did you see how quickly she bent down to pick up my books?’

‘Rob,’ his friend said from the adjacent locker, ‘you don’t want a repeat of the freshmen incident.’

‘Trust me, it’s written all over her face. It’s screaming from her eyes. It’s always the quiet ones.’

He heard them again.

‘Oh, come on, let’s bet on how long it takes,’ Rob joked. ‘I say a week. If she spreads her legs before that, the next round is on me.’

Rigel caught his reflection in the closed locker door and wasn’t surprised to see a smile carved across his cheeks like the blade of a knife, his lips curling thinly over his teeth.

He was still smiling when he turned and saw his reflection in the boy’s eyes. He couldn’t hide his satisfaction as he pummelled him to the ground.

—

He would never forget how she looked at him.

With that irrepressible force that occasionally shone through her delicate nature, how her eyes gleamed like a fallen angel’s.

‘One day they’ll see who you really are,’ she whispered. Her voice had tormented him for as long as he could remember. He hadn’t been able to quell his curiosity, anticipation, not with her so close.

‘Oh, yeah?’ he pressed her. ‘And who am I really?’

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He was only breathing to hear Nica deliver her final verdict, because even in the dimness she shone with a unique light, clear and true. It drove him mad.

‘You’re the Tearsmith.’

And Rigel felt the writhing swell inside him. A shudder, a tsunami. The laughter that burst from him was like a heart spurting blood as black as oil.

His chest was tight. It hurt so much that he could only feel bitter relief. As he always did, he disguised his suffering with a sneer, swallowing it with the brash resignation of the vanquished.

Him…the Tearsmith?

Oh, if only she knew.

If she knew…how she made him tremble, suffer and despair…If she had any idea of it…Perhaps he felt a shred of relief, a warm spark flickering in the dampness and the dark, but it was instantly extinguished by a gust of icy fear.

He flinched away from hope as if burned by it. Rigel couldn’t imagine anything more terrifying than seeing her pure eyes stained by those turbulent, thorny, untameable feelings.

It was already too late when he realised that he loved her with a dark, wicked love, a slow poison that gnaws at you until your last breath. He felt the writhing inside him intensifying, daring him to say certain things, to do certain things. Sometimes he could barely keep it at bay.

She was too precious to be spoiled by it.

He watched her walk away, and in the silence she left behind her, there was another abyss: the absence of the final glance she didn’t grant him.

—

‘Was it you?’

Thorns.

‘Did you give me this?’

Thorns and teeth, teeth, teeth – before his eyes was the proof of his weakness, the rose that he couldn’t help but give her, that now deafeningly screamed of his guilt.

He discovered that black was the colour of the end.

Of anguish, of a love that was destined to never see the light. It was such a tragically appropriate symbol that Rigel wondered if it was a black rose that had grown in the contaminated soil of his heart.

It was a stupid, impulsive mistake, a crack in his resolve to keep her away from him. He regretted it immediately, as soon as she came into his room bearing that accusation of leaves and ribbon.

He quickly put on his mask, balancing it on such an artificial smile that it threatened to fall.

‘Me?’ He hoped she wouldn’t see how tense he was. ‘Did I give you a flower?’

He said it with as much disgust as possible, spat it out with sarcasm and disdain, and prayed she would believe it.

Nica was looking down, she wasn’t able to see the terror in his eyes. For a moment, Rigel feared she had understood. Just for a moment, doubt gnawed at his soul, he saw his life of tremors and lies shatter into pieces.

He responded to his fear the only way he knew how: wounding and attacking, dispelling any doubt before it could take hold.

A part of him died as he snatched the rose from her hand.

He ripped it to shreds before her eyes. He tore off each petal and wished he could do the same to himself, to the flower of emotions inside him.

They fell onto the bed and the world stopped.

His flesh screamed, his heart thundered so ferociously that it felt like it was shooting sprouts and roots.

He saw his reflection in her eyes for the first time.

A terrifying desire blurred his vision. He was overwhelmed by a surge of bare, blind hope, astonishment. Nica’s hair, Nica’s hands, Nica’s eyes, Nica’s lips.

Nica, just a breath away, her body under his as he’d only been able to dream of.

He felt uprooted. He madly wanted to tell her that he saw her every night, that in his dreams, they were still children, and she was always shining, perfect.

She was perfect. He couldn’t imagine anything purer than her.

He wanted to tell her that he hated her for how kind she was, for how she smiled at everyone, for how her moth-like heart could care for anyone, anyone at all, even including him. That she pretended to care for him, but that was actually just how she was, how she treated everybody.

He wanted to tell her so many things. Things that were burning on the tip of his tongue, a tangled mass of words and emotions, fears and stabs of anguish. His love was like thorns in his throat, brambles caught in his teeth.

But before he could say a thing, she had pushed him away.

Everything shattered into a shower of shards. He exploded into fragments of glass and regretted every crumb of hope.

He knew she would never want him; he knew it. Deep down, he had always known it. He had made sure of it.

He closed his eyes, to spare himself the agonising suffering of watching her leave.

—

He had to get out of there.

He had to get away from her, from that house. If he had to hear her voice again, or feel her fingers through his clothes when she tried to touch him in the hallway, he would go crazy.

His clothes were drenched, the rain had soaked his every emotion. Rigel clenched his fists and gritted his teeth, pacing back and forth like a caged beast.

‘You!’

A shout broke through the thunderstorm.

Rigel saw someone approaching him furiously. It didn’t take much to recognise him, even through the rain.

He suppressed the writhing feeling as the figure came closer.

‘Leonard?’ he asked hesitantly, an eyebrow raised.

‘It’s Lionel,’ he snarled, now just a few steps away from him.

Rigel thought to himself, at the end of the day, whether his name was Lionel or Leonard, it didn’t matter. Both names annoyed him. Everything about the guy annoyed him.

‘And is there a reason, Lionel, why you’re roving around the neighbourhood like a maniac?’

‘Maniac?’ Lionel stared at him, his face scrunched up with anger. ‘I’m the maniac? How dare you?’ He approached, burning with tension. ‘If there’s a maniac here, it’s sure as hell you!’

Rigel looked at him mockingly, curling the corner of his mouth.

‘Oh really? Too bad I live around here.’ He saw flashes of anxiety in Lionel’s staring eyes. ‘Can’t say the same about you. Now beat it.’

Rigel attacked him like he attacked everyone else, but as sarcastically, as derisively as possible. He sunk his teeth in, wanting to cause him pain, pain, pain. Lionel clenched his fists in anger.

‘Your tricks won’t work on me,’ he snarled, soaked to the skin. Rigel found him so intensely annoying. ‘You think I don’t know? You think she hasn’t told me? You’re not her brother! You’re nothing, absolutely nothing. You’ve got no right over her, she’s not yours!’

The writhing inside him reared up. He clenched his fists, crackling with anger.

And him? What rights did he have? What did he know about the bond between him and Nica? What did he think he knew?

‘Oh, but you do, do you?’ He leant forward, furious, reeling at the idea of Nica being treated like an object to possess. ‘You’ve known her for all of a day, but you’ve got rights over her?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Lionel replied. Rigel made out the curl of his smile through the sheets of rain. ‘She’s been messaging me all day, saying she can’t bear to be near you. She wants me,’ he said emphatically, and it felt to Rigel like a slap in the face, a stab in his heart. It burned, it felt like his stomach was being corroded away, and he had to strain to not reveal just how painful that revelation was.

Lionel beamed with satisfied triumph.

‘She wants me, and all she does is tell me how much she can’t stand you. She despises having to live with you, having to see you every day. She hates your guts! And…’

‘Oh, she talks that much about me?’ he shot back venomously. ‘Shame. She never mentions you.’

He clicked his tongue.

‘Never,’ he repeated forcefully. ‘Are you sure she knows you exist?’

‘She sure as hell does!’ Lionel hurled at him. The air between them was crackling with anger and tension. ‘She’s always messaging me, and when you’re finally out of the way…’

Rigel threw his head back in gruff, angry, contemptuous laughter, that ached with a black, all-consuming pain. It hurt like hell. Those words – her hatred, her closeness with this guy – shook with an undeniable truth that damned him for all eternity.

Rigel had always known it, that thorns would beget more thorns. That what he carried inside was so soiled and damaged that a soul as pure and gentle as hers would never want him.

He had always known, but hearing it spoken aloud destroyed whatever was left of him. It was stupid, paradoxical: he was disillusioned, but he could still find pricks of hope among the thorny bushes. It was those that hurt the most.

Among the ruins, the only light he could see was the one that haloed her.

It was a light that kept him awake at night. That made her glow in all of his memories.

She was like a shining star. A star that, in the devastating loneliness of that feeling, did nothing but bring him comfort.

It was even shining in that moment, that light.

A warm glow – her, she who always smiled. Rigel wished he could extinguish it, free her from his cruel love.

He would have if he could but, as always, there was nothing he could do to smother the flickering light of his feelings for her. He clung to it with all his might, grasping, desperate, unable to let go.

‘When you’re out of the way…’

‘Yeah,’ he sneered caustically, sheltering the memory of Nica within himself. ‘Keep dreaming.’

The first punch split his lip.

Rigel’s blood mixed with the rain. He couldn’t help but think that, all in all, the physical pain was more bearable than how he had just felt.

The second punch missed, and Rigel turned back to Lionel like an incensed beast. His fist hit Lionel’s jaw with a blood-curdling crunch, louder even than the thunder.

Rigel didn’t let up, not even when Lionel punched back, splitting the skin over his eyebrow. He didn’t let up when his knuckles were red raw, and strands of wet hair pierced his eyes like needles.

He didn’t let up until he was the last one standing, and Lionel was rolling on the ground grimacing in pain.

He looked down at him. Lightning flashed and an ocean of black clouds loomed above them. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the asphalt.

He didn’t want to think about what her face would look like if she could see him now.

‘See you, Leonard,’ he snarled and walked away.

He left him curled up in the rain, reeling from his own mistake.

—

He saw his wretched, miserable guilt in Nica’s always shining eyes.

It was more prominent than ever before, a dark stain on her beautiful, pristine purity. When she lifted her eyes, full of condemnation, from her phone to his face, it was like a wave violently hitting his chest.

He would remember the way he felt like he was dying for the rest of his life.

He looked into her Tearsmith eyes, and knew he would never be able to lie to her.

He couldn’t deny it. His knuckles were bloody and grazed, and Lionel had already told her it was him. Rigel understood then, that her disappointment was the price he had to pay for every single lie he had ever told.

For having lied and hidden, for having pushed her away before she had a chance to understand.

He smiled a thorny smile, but felt himself wilting inside. His chest tightened sharply, agonisingly.

He had only given her what she expected. He had worn the mask that was tattooed on his face. He only did what he always did because, deep down, he knew that that was how she saw him: irredeemably vile.

‘Oh, the boy cried wolf!’

What happened next, Rigel would remember only in part.

Confused, blurred fragments – her eyes, her light, her hands all over him. Her hair and scent, and her lips forming words he couldn’t hear. He was too busy trying to escape the sun-like heat she radiated.

Her Band-Aid-covered hands dug into his arms, and inside he writhed and growled and yearned. She was close, so close, so angry and close that it made him tremble.

And as he desperately, urgently tried to move away from her, Rigel couldn’t help but notice that even despite her burning rage and distress, Nica was devastatingly beautiful.

Even with all those Band-Aids and bruises on her fingers, Nica was devastatingly beautiful.

Even as she struck him, tried to hurt him, to scratch him, to return to him everything that he had only ruined, Nica remained the most beautiful thing his eyes had ever seen.

It was his fault, and the fault of the spell she carried unknowingly within her, that he couldn’t stop himself in time.

She had gotten too close, and when he pushed her away, the writhing within him spurred him on and his mouth landed on hers.

…And for the first time…

For the very first time in his life, he surrendered to all that beauty and pain. He let it consume him, died with an exhausted sigh of relief, threw himself into the abyss and landed on a bed of rose petals, after having spent his life among the thorns.

He surrendered himself to her warmth and could feel nothing else.

He yielded to her, to the peaceful light shining sweetly inside her, lighting up every corner of that endless battlefield.

Perhaps, our greatest fear

is accepting that someone can truly

love us for who we are.

I staggered backwards.

I had pulled away from him so abruptly that the room was spinning. My phone fell to the ground and I continued retreating, stunned, staring.

I couldn’t breathe. I shuddered as I touched my lips with trembling fingers.

I stared at the face before me with devastated eyes, the taste of blood, his blood, on my aching mouth. I felt a small cut on my lips.

He had bitten me.

Rigel had finally really bitten me.

I stared at his heaving chest. He wiped the blood from his glistening, red lips and I thought I saw a fleeting bright spark behind his veiled eyes.

In his eyes, for a moment, I thought I glimpsed a memory reflected back at me.

The same silent, accusatory way in which I had looked at him, one evening long ago:

‘One day they’ll see who you really are.’

‘Oh, yeah? And who am I really?’

‘You’re the Tearsmith.’

—

Rigel’s jaw clenched. ‘You’re the Tearsmith.’

His voice was sharp, he spat it out involuntarily as if it was poison he had held in his mouth for too long.

I was reduced to a heap of astonished shudders. He quickly turned around and disappeared up the stairs.