March 22, 2023

Gargoyles Don't Cry
by Jill Trade

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Trevor was an inquisitive man. He was fascinated by science and obsessed with geology. His obsession stemmed from his mother, Clara. She had 12 children, each born in a different month, and Trevor was born in April to complete her calendar. Unfortunately, his mother died during childbirth and was never able to hold him in her arms. Her face, though, was etched on her tombstone. That’s how Trevor knew his mom, etched in rock. When they would go to visit her grave, Trevor thought that the stone was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His father once told him that his mother desired to wear a piece of jewelry that contained all 12 birthstones, one for each one of her special gems. 

Trevor devoted his life to finding a way to honor her legacy. His goal was to create beautiful stone gargoyles, each embellished with a birthstone, twelve in all, just like the stones his mother wished to wear. His would not be typical gargoyles, however, and he experimented in a home lab for many years to come up with a special concoction that would fulfill his vision.

One day Trevor met an attractive woman at the grocery store whose name was Ruby. Her name caught his attention. Trevor never realized there might be women out in the world named after the birthstones. He held on to Ruby’s number while he continued to work on his experiments. 

Finally, Trevor found success.  He could turn rats into stone from the inside out. The only problem was it had to be applied internally for it to work properly. Ingesting didn’t work because the stomach acids broke down the binding agents too much and the compounds passed right through. He found that if he inserted the serum directly into the rats by way of their reproductive parts, the serum could do its job. It quickly turned the rats’ cells into hardened masses that multiplied through the nervous system. Their blood backed up when the vascular system hardened and pooled in their hearts. That’s what eventually killed them, but not until most of their cells had turned to stone. In a six-pound rat, the process took about three hours. 

Attaining his vision was so close. He just had to try it on an adult-sized human. He called Ruby.

She answered the phone and did recall meeting Trevor months ago at the supermarket. He told her he was now single and asked her on a date. With the excitement of him getting to try his first human experiment, Trevor became energized. On the date with Ruby he did all the right things. He said the right things. She was totally smitten by him. When he asked if she would like to come back to his place for drinks she eagerly agreed.

Once inside, Trevor set his trap to get Ruby vulnerable. Their kisses grew more and more passionate, and when it was time for the two to move as one, he excused himself to get protection. In the bathroom, he filled a condom with the serum. He put on a condom, then placed the serum-filled condom on top of that one. He poked a slight hole in the outer tip. When he emerged she was waiting, naked on his bed. He thrust the serum-filled condom between her spread legs, and imagined it squirting inside of her with each of his thrusts.

When he came back to the bed from another trip to the bathroom, Ruby lay under the covers. He asked how she was feeling. Great, she said. Trevor wanted to monitor her transformation, so he offered to massage her to sleep and she could leave in the morning. She was so taken by him she agreed. He rubbed her feet, neck and back until she was out. Then he sat in his chair in the corner of the room with the lights on. He took notes of anything unusual he saw, a twitching foot, an arm spasm, anything that would indicate something was taking place in her body. 

Around 4:00 AM, Ruby awoke and saw Trevor sitting in the chair. She asked what was happening. He asked if anything was wrong. She told him her legs wouldn’t move and that her stomach hurt terribly. She tried to lift her arm and could barely get it an inch off the bed. 

Nothing is wrong he told her. Everything is working correctly. She looked confused. She asked him to call her an ambulance but he assured her she was fine. He knew he had to move her into position before she became too stiff. He went to the bed and picked her up. He sat her naked body on the floor. Ruby began to cry. She couldn’t feel the floor underneath her. He struggled to push her legs apart. He had to get under her knee and push up with his shoulder to bend it. He did the same to her other one as she sat helpless and bawling. He put her arms on the floor behind her legs. He sat on the bed and watched and monitored her as she wept. After about eight hours the skin around her groin began to turn bluish-gray. The color slowly swept over her body. It crept up her torso and down her arms. It ran down her legs and soon covered her toes. As the last cells hardened, he wiped away her tears. 

“Now, now, Gargoyles don’t cry,” he said. And with that, the whites of her eyes turned gray and her last breath exhaled. 

Trevor couldn’t believe he had actually done it. He turned a woman named Ruby into a human gargoyle. Now to adorn her with her namesake. He went to the jewelry store that afternoon and purchased a necklace with a big dazzling ruby. He went home and hung it around her neck. It rested in between her stone breasts. 

Now Trevor wanted the complete set.

After setting on his quest, he met an Opal and an Emerald at the gym. Then he discovered that strip clubs were breeding grounds for gemstone-named women. Once he had found a woman with a birthstone name, he would ask them on a date and take them back to his place. He used the double condom to inject his gargoyle serum into each of them. Every time they would wake up around 4:00 AM and he would start the placement process. He would position them in a way that would expose their most beautiful parts. And he told each and every one of them, “Now, now, gargoyles don’t cry,” as he wiped away their inevitable tears. Then he would make a trip to the jewelry store the same afternoon to buy their birthstone necklace. He placed them together in a row in his solarium. 

Now despite Trevor’s success at strip clubs, he was still missing his Peridot, despite searching for seven months. One day, he ran into his jeweler at the bank who mentioned he’d been to a bachelor party the night before where a stripper named Peridot danced. When Trevor showed interest, his jeweler gave him the address of a place fifty miles away. 

That night Trevor drove to retrieve his Peridot. At the club, a woman wearing only a light green g-string twirled on a pole. When she swung around and flipped her behind up, the word “Peridot” was tattooed on her lower back. That’s her, he thought. When her song was over, he asked for a private dance from Peridot and was led up a staircase and into a small room with wall-to-wall mirrors. Peridot soon emerged and began dancing, but Trevor told her he wasn’t just interested in her body, that he really wanted to get to know her. She paused her routine and started to show signs of interest towards him. He asked if she would be interested in going home with him where they could just talk. She agreed and got dressed. Trevor thought he was so slick for picking up his last birthstone. 

At his home, Trevor went through his now well-practiced routine of trapping his victims. When they were ready for sex, he excused himself and prepped his deadly condom. When he emerged from the bathroom, naked with his protection on, three policemen burst through his front door. They told him to freeze and that he was under arrest for the disappearance of eleven young women. Trevor’s jaw hung open in shock.

Peridot guided her fellow police officers to the room with the gargoyles and the birthstone necklaces, which she had found while Trevor was in the bathroom. She recognized the faces as the missing women she had been investigating for the last several months.

The next day in the jailhouse, during Trevor’s interrogation, the police told him they’d had a credible tip from a jeweler that anytime a jewel-named woman went missing, Trevor visited the store to buy a necklace with the same name or stage name as the missing woman. 

“Peridot was a sting," the interrogating officer told him, “and you fell right into our trap.”



Jill Trade is a married mother of three boys. She is a trained meat cutter, cosmetologist and formerly worked in finance. She enjoys passing time at the playgrounds writing poetry and short stories while her boys run out their energy. Her short stories have been published in Kaidankai: Ghost and Supernatural Stories and Blood Moon Rising Magazine.

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