Miss Havisham's Diamond

The ring had slowly cut into her finger several times over the last thirty years. Each time weary grey skin had reached across that seemingly impassable silver river corrupted by long red threads that seeped past her knuckles. With each unmarked minute, a string of flesh would grab a hold across the narrow passage, slowly binding stifled memories further into her finger until the lone diamond peered out from enmeshed skin, silver glinting through cracks in the body’s repairs. Soon the skin was pulled so taut that the finger remained harshly straight while each of the others that adorned her hand curled in on themselves and grew ever more gnarled. Each attempt to free the ring failed and left the stark digit paler than before, until no blood could reach past the wilderness of tangled branches to the slight hill of bone that crested just below. At last, she could gloat over the ghostly pale whiteness she had longed for throughout her life; in her possession was a maiden’s finger, all creases worn away. The illusion of youth found in the bleached digit gradually revealed its true age, as its once snow-like pallor waned, the nail extruded from its tip and the flesh wore away like ashes until the ring sat as a halo atop a felled and rotting tree.