"The Girl Who Swallowed Coins" by Cole Beauchamp

The girl who swallowed coins

Let’s say the first five pence went down between handfuls of popcorn. As Elizabeth’s teeth hit metal, it was a do or don’t, spit or swallow moment.

Let’s say she calculated the risks of this coin getting lodged or causing mischief at the other end and found them within tolerance limits. She swallowed, thinking of Carmen, the precise lines of her bob, the moon pebble perfection of her teeth when she laughed. 

The next evening, she gulped down another five-pence piece.

Let’s say she began to see these coins as protection, as a way to steel herself through all those do or die moments at school, like whether to eat lunch with the artsy crowd (tolerated, not much to contribute) or the outliers (lots to say, not much listening) and how to stop when she could see people’s eyes glazing over but hadn’t finished her story. In short, how to navigate the mysterious world of other people. She found the metallic lick of the coin, the brief pressure at the back of her throat, reassuring.

Let’s say the coin girl correlated the greater percentage of copper, nickel and steel in her insides to a greater strength of character. She made friends who didn’t mind her iffy eye contact. When Carmen started dating a football player, Elizabeth honed her attention on a gutsy girl who hung around the edges like she did. Marina had sea green eyes and the lean energy of a whippet. She liked how much Elizabeth knew about dogs, her encyclopedic knowledge of different breeds.  

Let’s say Elizabeth’s mother discovered the coin swallowing and booked her in with a therapist to rid her of this “dirty little habit.” While speeding through twenty-mile-an-hour zones and zipping through amber lights, her mother monologued a series of “If you think… I keep telling you… You have no idea…” while breezily cheerful Magic FM DJs chimed in: “Tell us what you like for breakfast. Cold pizza? Hula hoops? We don’t judge!” 

Let’s say in the soothing greens and plastic plants of the therapist’s office, Elizabeth found a person who asked questions and listened. After multiple conversations were stalled by her mother’s “I keep telling her… She seems to think…” the therapist asked her to leave. In the quiet that followed, Elizabeth decided that swallowing her mother’s judgement exceeded tolerance limits.

And so she learned to say when she was overloaded, to say “I’d rather you didn’t” and “What I think is.” She called out social rules she found meaningless. She learned illogic wasn’t always a stumbling block for other people. 

And so a family truce was eventually negotiated.  

And so she discovered that coins and character were not cause and effect, that she was already made of copper and iron and strength and forged her path without them.

Cole Beauchamp (she/her) is a queer writer based in London. Her stories have been in the Wigleaf Top 50, nominated for awards and shortlisted for the Bath, Bridport, Oxford and WestWord prizes for flash fiction. She's been widely published in lit mags including Mr Bull, Ghost Parachute, The Hooghly Review, Gooseberry Pie and others, and is a contributing editor at New Flash Fiction Review. She lives with her girlfriend and has two children. You can find her on bluesky at @nomad-sw18.bsky.social