A festival story. The characters are imagined; the clothes are real.
The clay at the bottom of the pit is barn red and slick as frosting, and it keeps whatever you give it: boots, knees, the hems of your jeans. Mom kneels in it like she's in church.
"Tate. Look at this one."
She holds up a quartz point as long as her pinkie, rinsed in a puddle and shining, six faces running up to a tip. She turns it in the April sun until a splinter of rainbow lands on her knuckles.
Then she drops it in my jar.
That makes nine since Friday. Every one of them hers for three seconds and then mine.
"Dinged," I say, because it is. The very tip has a chip in it, a little white bruise in all that clear. A perfect point has six faces meeting at a tip nothing has ever touched. We have been hunting one for two days, and checkout is Sunday at noon.
Mom wipes her hands down her shirt, the purple marble one, violet and lavender and white swirled like the stone it's named for. She owns it in cotton and in velvet. When Mom likes a shirt, she buys it in every fabric they make.
Her phone buzzes in the clay by her knee. The store. It has buzzed eleven times since Friday. Mom has worked the deli counter every Saturday since I was in kindergarten, and the manager had to look up how to approve a weekend off. She turns the phone face down without reading it.
I have never seen her do that. Not once.
My phone is in my back pocket, under the blue marble swirls of my tee, with an email in it I have read forty times. Congratulations, Tatum. The math and science boarding school in Hot Springs wants me for junior year. Reply by Monday, 5 p.m.
On Friday, in the truck, Mom asked if I'd heard anything.
I said waitlisted.
It has been just us since I was two. If I go, she comes home from the deli counter to one plate in the drying rack.
✦
Saturday night the festival rises out of the pasture next to the mine. String lights loop between shortleaf pines. The dogwoods are blooming, white blossoms floating in the dark at head height. A fiddle, an upright bass and a girl of maybe twelve on banjo play from a hay wagon while families sprawl on quilts, and somewhere past the parking field a whip-poor-will says its own name over and over, in case anyone missed it.
By the fire pit, Norma Tackett, who owns the mine, sits on an upturned bucket with a shoebox in her lap. Kids crowd her knees. She lifts out a crystal and turns it in the firelight. It's pointed at both ends.
"Floater," she says. "Most points grow stuck to a rock, so they only get one good end. This one grew loose in the clay, nothing holding on. That's how it got two."
Across the fire, Mom's eyes slide over to me. Then back to the flames.
At ten the band packs up, and a DJ in a fleece vest eases in a house track: one warm piano chord, a kick drum as gentle as a hand patting a quilt, a disco string line looping over the top. Kids in big ear defenders bounce on the grass. The air has dropped to fifty, and it smells of pine pitch and woodsmoke.
Mom walks out onto the grass alone.
She has changed into the velvet one. The string lights find it, violet, then silver, then violet. She closes her eyes, lifts both arms and moves, and it isn't the careful sway she does at weddings. She dances the whole track with her chin lifted toward the pines, as if somebody up there had finally asked.
I sit on a hay bale with my hands in my sleeves and watch a woman I have never met.
Then I decide. Tomorrow I find her a perfect point, something in the house that is only hers. And on Monday I say no.
✦
It rains from two in the morning and doesn't stop.
By nine the truck is packed and we're back in the pit in ponchos, rain drumming on the plastic over our ears. The pit is soup. Overnight, water has cut into the east wall and left a lip of clay hanging out over the floor, long as a couch and dripping.
At 11:09 I see it.
Under the lip, at knee height, a glint. A tip. Clear as tap water, sticking a quarter inch out of the red.
The sign at the gate says it in red paint: NEVER DIG UNDER AN OVERHANG. I'm already on my knees under it, working the clay with a screwdriver.
"Tatum." Mom's voice is flat and quiet. "Out."
"Two minutes. It's right here."
A string of red water runs off the lip onto the back of my neck. The tip wiggles. Above me, something in the clay gives a slow, wet sigh.
Mom's fist closes on the collar of my tee, and she hauls me backward so hard I sit down in the puddle.
The shelf comes down. All of it. A wheelbarrow of red clay lands with a sound like a wet sack dropped from a truck bed, right on the spot where my knees were.
Rain hisses on our ponchos. Mom's hand is still twisted in my collar, and I can feel it shaking.
"Two minutes," she says, in a voice I have never heard her use.
Then I see the glint again, in the middle of the heap, out in the open now, with nothing hanging over it but sky.
"Mom."
11:31. We dig with our hands. Mom takes one side of the pile and I take the other, clay to the elbows. Norma leans over the rim in a yellow slicker. "Y'all are parked in the field?" We nod without looking up. "Then you've got about twenty minutes, girls."
11:44. It comes loose into my palm. At the wash trough the clay slides off it in red ribbons, and there it is: water-clear, six faces running up to a tip at one end and six more running to a tip at the other.
A floater.
I press it into Mom's hand. "It's yours. For the kitchen windowsill. So the house has something in it besides—"
One plate. I can't say one plate.
She looks at it for a long time. Then she closes my fingers back over it with her own red hand.
"They copy the parent on those emails, Tate."
Rain ticks on the plastic.
"Since Thursday," she says. "I was waiting on you." She taps my fist. "Points at both ends, baby. You don't have to choose which end is home."
I make a sound that isn't a word.
"I put in for Saturdays off," she says. "Starting in August."
"To visit me?"
"Some of them." She grins, clay on her chin. "The rest, I'm going dancing."
✦
At 11:58 the gate volunteer waves us out of the field with both arms, rain streaming off his hat brim.
The collar of my tee hangs in a stretched loop where Mom grabbed it, and the blue marble is ground through with red. It will come clean in cold water. The collar never will. I'm keeping it that way.
The floater rides in the cup holder. At the stop sign Mom lifts it to the gray window light and turns it end over end, point and point, her purple marble sleeve still dark with rain where the poncho didn't reach. She sets it back down as if it might spill.
Her phone buzzes. The store.
She turns the radio up instead.
"Next April," she says, "you're driving."
The tees from the red clay
Our Marble designs first ran through a forest fair in Meet Me Under the Salmon, on two little kids. This time they went digging. Tate's collar-stretched favorite is the Blue Marble cotton T-shirt ($60), cobalt, sky blue, white and deep navy swirling like a creek over stone. Rae digs in the Purple Marble cotton T-shirt ($60) and dances in the Purple Marble crushed velvet T-shirt ($60), the same violet, lavender and white swirl with a soft sheen that catches string lights. One print, two fabrics: cotton for the dig, velvet for the dance.
- Cotton T-shirt: 100% cotton · listed fabric weight 190 g/m² · short-sleeve crew neck · regular fit · XS–5XL · dye sublimation on cotton, so the swirl is part of the fiber.
- Crushed velvet T-shirt: crushed velvet · listed fabric weight 240 g/m² · short-sleeve crew neck · regular fit · XS–5XL.
- Both: made to order; colors won't fade and the image won't crack. Wash cold with like colors, hang dry and skip the iron.
More tees for the whole camp: cotton festival shirts · crushed velvet T-shirts
What do you wear to dig for quartz crystals in Arkansas?
Wear clothes you're happy to see turn red. Arkansas quartz comes out of iron-rich clay that stains fabric, so dig in a dark or busy-print tee, old jeans and waterproof boots, with gloves and a rain shell. Spring nights in the Ouachita Mountains can drop to around 50°F, so pack a warm layer for camp.
- Dig-day kit: gloves, a hand trowel or old screwdriver, a bucket, a spray bottle or jug of water for rinsing, and a padded kneeling mat for clay that grabs at your knees.
- Read the walls: rain softens clay banks. Dig on the open floor or from the top down, and never under an overhang, however good the glint looks.
- Family camping festival layers: a cotton tee for the sunny afternoon, a velvet tee or hoodie once the string lights come on, and ear protection for the kids at the dance.
- Folk to house: daytime fiddles and banjos call for easy cotton, while a late house set rewards a little shine. A marble print hides red clay better than plain white ever will.
- After the dig: keep a clean shirt in the car for the drive home, and wrap your best points in a sock so their tips stay sharp.
For dance festivals closer to crystal country, Wakaan brings experimental bass to Mulberry Mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks in early October, with nights around 45–55°F, and Gem & Jam pairs crystal and mineral vendors with bass and livetronica at the Pima County Fairgrounds in Tucson each early February, with nights of 35–45°F.
Frequently asked questions
Can you keep the crystals you dig in Arkansas?
At the pay-to-dig quartz mines in Arkansas's Ouachita Mountains, generally yes. You pay a daily fee, dig in the mine's designated areas and take home what you find, though some mines cap the amount or charge by the bucket. Rules, hours and fees vary from mine to mine, so check with the one you choose before you go.
What is a double-terminated quartz crystal?
A double-terminated quartz crystal has a natural point at each end instead of one. Most quartz grows attached to rock at its base, so only the free end forms a point. When a crystal grows without that attachment, often suspended in soft clay, both ends can finish. Diggers sometimes call these floaters, and a clear one is a prize.
How do you clean red clay off quartz crystals?
Start with water: soak the crystals, scrub with a soft toothbrush, and use a wooden pick for clay in the crevices. Iron stains from Arkansas clay often stay behind, and many diggers lift them with an iron-stain remover. Those are strong chemicals, so it's a job for adults only, with gloves, eye protection, ventilation and the label's directions.
Written by Magus & Lylyth Fawn, the Los Angeles artists behind Magus Fawn. Magus makes VR and digital visionary art and produces Psy EDM. Lylyth makes fractal digital art and runs design and customer care. We've been selling wearable art since 2020 on Etsy (4.7★ from 144 reviews as of October 2026) and here at magusfawn.com. Come say hi on Instagram @magusfawn.
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