Author: A.R. McHugh

Diamonds won her as a child. Looking at sedimentary quartz under 200x magnification, she was fascinated by the possibility of so much clarity, such mineral perfection.

Somewhere between her mother’s flashing ring and her father’s relentless pressure to produce better grades and faster times, a harder carapace around her teenage soul and a deep love of diamonds was born.

Earth, with its exhausted supply of diamonds, bored her.

A rover brought one back from Saturn, formed from the compression of methane soot in the thunderstorm alleys ten miles above the planet’s surface. She stared at it in its glass case at Houston, trying to comprehend its being. This thing did not simply bear up under pressure, but was formed by it. The Saturnian diamond was the expression of distant matter under pressure, and thus of the very texture of life as our phylum feels it.

Years later she found herself in another rover, going to that Saturnian diamond’s origin. She entered the atmosphere gladly, knowing there was no return. The many moments of her life, like inclusions, were pressed together as she fell in the tiny craft through Saturn’s diamond rain. Dropping downwards, the pressure increased until the rocks struck the wings of her craft, bonded with them, and melded into a speeding crystal of impossible hardness.

When the pressure grew beyond even that, the chimera melted, drowning what had once been a woman, in a diamond sea.