Snippets IV - Of Rings

Snippets are small pieces I am considering expanding into larger works.


It is elegant. A band of metal with no special quality or luster, it is unremarkably caught closer to silver than to white in hue. There is an unnatural heft to the thing such that when dropped, if one is careless enough to do so, it remains fixed where it first strikes the floor without bounce, rebound, or slithering cymbal crash.

The ring is pleasantly cool to the touch as if it was fresh from the ice box on a summer day. That delightful sensation persists from the moment it slips down around your finger, deposited comfortably smug in the soft walls between your digits, until the time when you foolishly remove it.

Never take it off.

It is a gift receivable only once, Catholic in its ideal but not technically so as you may voluntarily divorce yourself from it. But, once so divested, you may never again gain from it. The ring will not remove by force, through what arcane mystery no science has been able to fathom. And there have been rumors that the finger, the hand, and arm possessing the ring cannot be removed from the body.

What is known is that the dead hold their rings for eternity. Cremation destroys both body and sorcerous metal, but none have been so adorned and dead long enough to know if putrescence bites the mysterious band as it does the flesh. And all agree, who have slipped the wondrous thing over two knuckles, the world is a better place behind the gifts of the ring than it ever was without it. It quiets the systemic storms of noisy nothings, it is a sliding glass door falling with the heavy grace of engineering locking out the caterwauls and wretched cries of the world beyond.