Wild ginger smelled metallic, the cool wind lifting lightly, playfully through the hair stranding her skin, her collar. Her tongue slid brightly in and redly out the levrous ripened slit of the fig’s belly, earlier and lovingly caesareaned by her cousin’s pocket knife. Her button-cover was a blue wasp, the menace of its drone parallel to her mouth’s hungry feed. Later on that froglegged afternoon the cousins became official blood siblings, to make real the paper version which said she was his adopted sister. Sting swooned to clammy warmth, watching the black coagulate slow from flow to chevroned badge and then to conspiratorial scab. The ritual required a sharing of secrets.
Looking back she would agree that neither of them could have then defined ‘incest’ or ‘neurosis’ or ‘gone for good.’ But oh, they could have acted out the descriptive blow-by-blow. The summer moon, like a bloated spider. Above them as they kissed goodnight-goodbye, their drawn out embrace a drumming hug against her auntie’s backyard gate. They both agreed. Her blood tasted better than his, having taken turns to dip and suck in each other’s afterbleed.
-I wonder why? he asked.
She wondered the same thing.
They came to no conclusion.
Mary’s auntie was, of course, Robin’s mother, which made them cousins with marketable secrets. A rosary of minor ones to necklace round the big black star of the one they swore to never reveal. Not to priests, hunched bored and irritable in their Saturday afternoon confessionals, not to future lovers, future spouses, future therapists on their doomed Grail-quest for the poisonous worm at the heart of all things.
His mother was unkind about hers, speaking ill of the dead on every occasion, although she tried to be subtle in her dispraise, not wishing to remove the option which the distracting girl provided to her son, not wishing to have him underfoot at all times, not wishing to blame herself if he should get into trouble. Out of sight, out of mind, a cliché that bore lovely fruit when tended just so.
-My sister’s motto might as well have been ‘be ever indiscreet’. She was the most flamboyant widow I’ve ever known. Don’t you think so, darling?
-You mean because she was always happy?
-Not just that. She planted an awful lot of germs in your poor cousin’s mind. That child will either wind up as an actress or … You really like your cousin, don’t you?
-Yes, Mary’s great.
-Well, that’s good then, I suppose. It’s a special thing to be friends with your own family, especially since, God knows, we can’t choose them. Now can we?
And soon after, Mary’s uncle scandalized the neighborhood by running off with his adorably pneumatic, wasp-waisted secretary, and Mary’s rage-wrecked aunt mollified her fury by turning her laggard attentions on her adopted niece and, unskilled at attention-spliting, packing Robin off to a military school in one of the dread Carolinas.