Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 21:09:20 -0800
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: "Just Another Gin Joint"

			 "Just Another Gin Joint"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 The triangular pile of snow on the fence post to the left of
the gate looked like a witch's hat. The wind was searing and
almost burning cold.  It hurt the woman's ears. Cut into her face,
her eyes. The sound was an echo of cotton round her. The snow
fell heavily. In blue shadow drifts. And Inez Glenn wished she
was a witch, that she could put on that witch's hat; wished she
had magical powers; wished that she was anything other than
herself.  Why had the snow made that formation on the post and
why had Marcie come to stay with her?

  It seemed, the snow pile on the post, which she had put
one frozen hand out to touch, then had drawn back, was also like
the kind of snuffer to put out candles late at night before
bedtime,  in Gothic movies Inez sometimes watched when there
was nothing else to do and she decided to laugh dryly at a
television bodice ripper; and bedtime reminded her of Marcie, as
did almost anything these days. There was a short in Inez, a lack
of spark, this small boned woman with the thinning hair that was
snow covered now. People believed that only men lost their hair
as they aged. She had believed it too for a time. Until it had
started happening to her. And then she noticed how many other
women her age, and, shudder, older than her, were also balding.
Odd things, not noticed, were noticed by her now. Anything to
get Marcie, age 15, out of her mind, out of her soul and bones.

 It was three weeks before Christmas and the snow was
sparkly and the air felt edge of the world. And Inez, social
worker, was such a hypocrite, as she moved her cold hands into
the warm pockets of her fleece lined parka, as she huddled
herself together, chin tucked down, and walked back to the small
house, stepping through the thick snow, and on the flat stones in
place of a sidewalk, that led to the rickety snow ladened back
porch steps, up to the screen door with patches of it pulled away
and never repaired. She shoved opened the always sticky kitchen
door, and walked into the heat blast of the kitchen. The oven hot,
and one eye of the stove on, made things toast warm that
shriveled her and ate sand into her bones. She sighed, got her
bearings, and continued breakfast, from which she had taken a
moment or two respite, to go outside, to clear her head, to get up
the nerve. She shook the snow from her leather Oxfords. She felt
blistered all over.

 She took off her parka, new because warm, modern
because cold got to her so the last few years, shrugged it off,
revealing her severe gray dress buttoned up to her neck, snow
flakes melting on it and in the collar, chilling her neck, her hair
pulled back into a sleek bun, her glasses cats' eye glasses circa
1949 or so. She put the parka neatly on the back of one of the
two yellow ladder backed chairs at the kitchen table. She walked
across the saggy yellow linoleum flooring that bunched in places.
She broke some eggs, holding them over the grease coated skillet
that was popping, as she dodged the spatters from long
experience, and let the eggs sizzle for a time before turning them
over. Marcie liked scrambled eggs, and she always did what
Marcie wanted. But, no, that was not so. Why did Inez think
that?

 Pretending, did Inez, that she did not notice that conical
witches hat candle snuffer outer pile of snow on the fence post in
the gray world of winter also looked like a young girl's breast,
still small, still childish but with woman hood now inside it and
working its construction and wiles and firming the nipple to bud
and to tighten in sexual heat, hiding intently, sagaciously, slyly,
naughtily, against bra, tender and dismaying, giving vent to
whatever was the pain of adolescence and its unobtainable goal,
which in the case of Marcie was, Inez knew, a choice between
three of four pimply faced voice cracking boys who were no
great shakes at anything other than they seemed to like her, and
Marcie was in love. Hot and horny and lustily in love. Inez
chastised her for it. Marcie always buckled, did what she was
told. But always in the wrong way. Always in a know it all way
as though her aunt was too stupid to see.

 It hurt Inez, this blatant obeying of her niece's, it would
almost be a relief to find open defiance in her instead, she
thought, as she stirred the eggs with the spatula; the dim yellow
whispery morning light coming in slats through the blinds on the
windows in back and to the side of the old white dented
dangerous stove. Inez sipped her coffee from the cup beside her
on the speckled oil paper covered counter, as she conscientiously
finished the eggs. She did love Marcie. As any aunt loved their
niece. Especially when their niece had been through what Marcie
had. Things that happen to girls in this world. No one would
believe. Never though in Inez' day, the days back when of P's
and Q's and service with a smile only make sure its for business
purposes only. Tight white collars were not bad things.

 Inez dressed like an outcast from pain, as she always had,
because her mother had been sensible too. Had warned her of
boys, of men, of what sadnesses happen, and how it can turn you
mean as a snake, and she did not want to see that happen to Inez.
And also because it proved she could be other than she was, but
if she lost this identity, sleek in efficiency, bloodless in nature,
sharp and sometimes bluntly rude always for the sake of her
clients of course, then she lost any chance to try another identity,
lost any chance to put this one off and slip into a new one. But
she didn't want to change character. She wanted to be what she
was. And if spinster was good enough, then she didn't have to
worry too much about make up or making a good impression or
waiting the night away for someone met at a bar or somesuch to
be calling her on the phone. She had her duties at work. She did
them well. She was admired there. There was no need of going
outside the box. Anyway, she was who she was, and even if she
could be someone else, who would call her? She would waste
her life away still, hoping. And anything was better than that.
Hope is a lie. Carrot on a stick. Hope is what kills. Not the lack
of it.

  She could get the stuff over with in the five minutes or
so she allowed herself one night a week to masturbate. Though
sometimes, many times, she had to force herself to do it. It was a
chore. It was a sneeze. It was duty. It was she sometimes thought
the last bodily function she had that kept her tied to the earth, to
life. She was getting old. She should be allowed these fanciful
notions, these fanciful fears. It was her business after all. And
she was most efficient in business.

 She did not enjoy the stuff. After all. It was not undulant
waves or golden pins in her pricking her apart and putting her
back together again. She always felt quite horrible afterwards.
Punished. She would lie on her bed during it and a few minutes
afterwards. She would be fully clothed throughout. She did not
touch her breasts or lie naked. She just put her finger into her
vagina (not her fault she had one--Eve's fault, not hers), no bad
words for her, no sex words, not ever, and tickle the clitoris, and
massage it, and feel the waves of tight banded freedom expand
as little as possible in her body, like a bee hive inflating a small
bit and then deflating far more, empty scabby unkempt hive,
deserted by bees centuries ago, in her abdomen and groin, and if
her breasts tingled a little in the process, she could not be held
responsible for that, could she?

 She ignored as much of it as she could, did it, thought of
no one's body, no specific person at all, felt weary beyond
expression and her face seemed tight, the skin more parchment
drawn. She thought, feared, wanted to die during it, though she
honestly didn't know why. It just seemed important. But always
she lived, after the dry wash was over. She always washed her
finger for she never touched herself except with one finger, and
then went and did the dishes or watched PBS for a while or one
of those Lifetime movies she guiltily enjoyed. Culture and
knowledge were everything for her. Guilt was what it was and
she would not have it any other way.

 And then Marcie came to live with her. Marcie with the
big suitcases, the little girl face, the woman's body, the too tight
clothes, the fearful expression on her face that also bled a kind of
giddy irrepressible happiness. And then the house was suddenly
filled with an untenable thing with a name like "life." Like
"freedom." Conjure words. Voodoo words. Incautious words. A
small bright tight stretched to the breaking point dazzling colored
red balloon, which was Marcie, she and it that Inez was forced
up against, but never would Inez enter inside it. Not ever. For
Inez would have no part in that of course, but it was still around
her; not that she allowed Marcie to bring her friends over, and
she had quite a few, not that she allowed her niece to lock her
bedroom door or play loud music at any time, but did have the
grace to let the girl play some of her CDs as long as they were on
low, and only after homework was finished, and she let her niece
talk on the phone for one hour no more each night, before ten
o'clock which was the girl's bedtime. And Inez made sure her
niece was in bed on the dot of it each night. Even on weekends.

 Marcie pretended to listen. The clothes that Inez bought
Marcie, no matter how loose fitting, still clung to Marcie's taut
body which paid no attention to Inez or to the preacher each
Sunday morning, but paid attention only to itself, only to the fruit
of itself, the burgeoning blossoming.. And the taut, strong,
poking out breasts, and the legs that were longer and with more
curves every single day or so it appeared, and which looked so
sheer and so sexy even though the girl was never permitted to
wear stockings. What has God wrought here? Inez would
wonder. Is it to test my sense of duty? Why put the girl through
the torture of being a sex pot? Why, God? Marcie of the creamy
dreamy face and the too red lips (naturally red, nature's own
mistake, nature's own devising for the devouring of boys and
men--again, God, why punish her for Eve? Her. Me or Marcie?)

 Inez did not let her niece wear make up, especially not
lipstick, and would have been appalled that Marcie and some of
her girl friends who also were caught in webs of strictness would
duck into a woods on the way to school and use confiscated
cosmetics on their faces, especially on their lips, blue was the
color favored by Sue Ann, but Marcie and the others stuck with
red, bright hot burning red, all to break the rules. And for
Marcie--to make her aunt less of a harridan. To somehow or
other make Inez care about her. Marcie's face seemed born with
the right complexion that made make up ineffectual and a
conceit. And Inez hated conceits.

 It was all so terribly strained, especially this holiday
season, the first one that Marcie and Inez were to spend together,
and the girl, obeying more suffocatingly, more honey sweet
about it, so furious in her stilted obeying, desired to be let out of
jail. She called her aunt, Aunt or Auntie, or Auntie Glenn,
(saying the Aunt with first letter nuanced into a capital) and
never used the woman's first name alone. Her aunt had no need
to fear Marcie's becoming pregnant by boys. For boys did not
interest Marcie at all. Instead she thought of girls, because that
was what occupied her heart, her groin, her lusts, her needs. She
loved fucking them and their fucking her. In groups as well as in
pairs. And Inez thought of Marcie more and more, because that
was what had come to occupy her heart, her fear, her retribution,
her need for revenge, and the odd realization, pushed away
mostly, but still the thought came to her, that she, Inez, did have
feelings, no matter how hard she had worked to kill them, and
somehow or other, this was Marcie's fault. As though Marcie
had brought them with her that day when she came to live here.
Had found them somewhere and knew they needed to be home.

 When the eggs and toast with butter and marmalade were
ready, and Inez had taken the  browning steaming hot rolls out of
the oven, she turned off the red burning eye and the oven, poured
the orange juice, the coffee, only for herself, and arranged it all
on the scarred scratched wooden kitchen table, and called Marcie
in for breakfast. She hoped she didn't have to wake the girl up
again. One time, when she had had to shake her from her dream,
Marcie took such a long time to open her eyes, and she snuggled
into herself kitten-like, full bodily, sensuously. The girl had been
unaware, of course, even when she pushed the cover down a bit
past her breasts, one of which had come out from an opened
pajama top, as Marcie had opened her mouth in a pout and had
licked her lips with the tip of her too red tongue, as she had
placed her left hand in her disheveled hair and had stroked it
with her fingers on the pillow, from all of  which Inez had
turned, and fled. She had not heard the girl laugh behind her as
she had closed her niece's bedroom door. She had not.

  There was a curtain in the doorway of the shadowy hot
small sparse kitchen, separating the kitchen from the living
room. There had never been a door there, not in Inez's life time
or in her parents' either, for this house had originally been built
for her parents when they had just gotten married. Inez had
grown up here. She had entered as into a nunnery here and she
had grown, early on, contented with it. Content with never
looking out windows. Ever. Or even considering that anyone was
looking in. If Inez wanted to fart at home, she did so. If Inez
wanted to leave the bathroom door open when she went to the
toilet, she did so. If she made a steaming urine sound when she
pissed, she did not mind. But with the girl here, bodies must not
be exposed or heard. That was what she had forgotten, since her
parents died, and she had lived here alone for so long.

 Inez was looking in her direction, as Marcie came
through the curtain, like a show girl through a stage curtain,
expecting thunderous applause. Languorous. Sleep filled. A hand
to her eyes, brushing the bruises of dreams away. She was
wearing only a baby doll nightie with blue ruffles on the end that
extended barely past her crotch. Where in god's name had she
gotten such a thing? Inez's brain exploded with fear and anger
and irritation. She wanted to run out the back door, stumble
down the tumble down steps, to the snow and the cold and the
gray sky and out the fence and running through the field and
never ever to stop. But she could only stand and watch.

 Her niece's hair was a lustrous auburn, and this morning
it wreathed round her face and rested  lightly on her shoulders,
was not pinned up and back as Auntie Glenn had always insisted,
no matter the occasion, no matter how Marcie chafed in the
doing of what was wanted.. There was the distinct smell of
perfume from her niece, a dizzy, noxious smell. Perfume of any
kind not allowed in the house at all. Inez's eyes were frozen on
the girl.  Magnetized.  It was like an inner world that had made it
out of that tight bright squeaky balloon of red that was Marcie,
and now Inez, who had held it in for so long, ignored it, thought
of nothing else but it, was helpless to do anything to peer into its
perimeters. As for Marcie: her eyes hopefully hauntingly half
closed, as though she was seeing through cigarette smoke at a
nightclub,  she felt she as though she was a pimply faced willful
little six year old brat standing in naked shame in front of the
silent lethal wrath of God. As though lightning would strike her
dead any second. But she had made up her mind to go through
with this, and go through with it, she would. Even if it killed her.
Either one of them.

 Her aunt's eyes were treed like a frightened cat, on the
rise and fall of the girl's breasts which were larger than Inez had
assumed, had imagined?, soft glowy pert teasing mounds of
rounded flesh with heavy dark nipples that shown through the
sheer bluey material of the nightie. The flesh of them shown
through. The meat of them. The lilt and need and passion quick
and sharp and evanescent right there as though they were stuck
right into Inez's eyes, making her blind Lot's wife turning round
to Sodom.

 Even the girl's thick dark pubic patch, a perfect bridge
and more than whispy puff of pubic hair,  it seemed to form an
upside down wave of sorts, did she shave it?, Inez had not looked
at her own in years, but now remembered that it was somewhat
straggly and embarrassing, not that it mattered, for no one but
she saw it,  but the fact that even this part of the girl was visible
stung Inez like lemon juice in the eyes. The girl appeared so
much larger, so much more a woman, more--there-- to her aunt,
not the small girl she remembered even from yesterday. As it
seemed being nearly naked unleashed a giant that had been
hiding in the girl who Inez thought had been diminutive, even
with the breasts and legs. Had Inez even seen her niece at all
before?

 . Marcie's legs, as she leaned on her left hip, and put one
leg forward, and put her right hand above her to the joist of the
doorway as though she were modeling herself on Gypsy Rose
Lee, ( though how would Inez know of her?, save for the movie?)
were lovely and tender and delicate and dimpled and molded in
such outthrust sexuality and animalness and the altogether need
that they be placed round a lover's neck, (the dreadful
thoughts--god, she was corrupting her aunt who had always been
so sure she was there to protect her stupid giggly innocent niece
from being corrupted), but Inez could not stop thinking in the
gutter, imagining those young legs resting on a lover's
shoulders, while Marcie was eaten of  deeply inside and given
the electric prods of sexual needs met and wildly magnificently
fulfilled; those legs that seemed  as though they might have been
formed by pink clouds on an especially creative sun drenched,
sex drenched summer meadow of a day. Inez  felt these things as
well as thought them. It seemed winter had come inside forever
to stay. And she hated Marcie for that, absolutely riotously hated
her for it, and for so much more she had not been aware of
before.

 Inez crashed into all of it. The emotions. The vice of it.
Everything countered. Nothing had been held back from all those
years, all the pains she had escaped, all the love she had never
known, all the hurt she had ducked out on, it all came fast
screaming like out of hell with open viper mouth, straight at her
neck, striking her. The squeeze. The loud wailing silent bone
breaking cry of the whole thing. The long ago memories. They
came from the pit of her, where they had been hiding all this
time. From the knowledge that her own spindly legs were
trembling, that she had closed everything out so she could
survive, but she had been closed out of herself as well; that was
what she had not seen before.

 The room around her seemed to have broken off into a
sea of danger and fear cruel laughter and all the crumbling walls
of the world came stumbling down on her, and the walls were all
the chances wasted, (there had been no chances!) all the steps
not taken, (she took only all the right ones, the approved ones)
all the times she had turned her face away when there might have
been a possibility of something more than she had, (there had
been nothing to turn away from) for it was all a runaway life for
Inez, (the world ran, left me in its dust, but I maintained
integrity) but for Marcie it was a life to stay and see and feel and
kiss and enter and experience. It seemed Marcie was now fully
locked into her role, her life, as a stripper, that she would,
hesitating before the good stuff, with one long arm reaching for
the doorway, start masturbating right in front of her aunt. And
Marcie did indeed, one long arm extended, eyes flashing, one
hand raising her thick lustrous hair, tilt back just a little so the
nightie was pulled up a bit from some of her pubic hair. So it
actually was exposed. It was more than a fluff of hair. It was
dark and it was thick. The opening of it dared almost raise its
head and wink its sacred eye at Inez.

 Marcie tongued those damnably red lips. Her bright green
eyes glistened with want, as she cradled her breasts and pinched
the firm tips of them with her hand through the fabric which
somehow made the act even more obscene. She was not wearing
her glasses. That was what to her aunt seemed to make her the
most naked of all. She turned around slowly, proudly, so her aunt
could see the girl's hips, could see the girl's stately and graced
hillocks and the crack and the spine that curved sexily down to
them. All pink and fine and fragrant and fresh. Then the girl
turned round once more and took off her nightie softly and
slowly and deliberately, like she was pulling the winter off the
day. It fell from her in a certain disdain for all clothing of any
sort, even this sexual wrap that made itself fit Marcie more like
skin than apparel.

 Marcie stood there brazenly, and almost unwillingly, as
though her body had spurred her to this, without herself
personally wanting to do it. And Marcie, trying to hide her fear
of this woman,  go through with it, Marcie's mind buzzed, go
through with this and let nothing stop you, it's so important, your
entire world, your entire life is riding on this, as she brushed her
own far too visible pubic hair and put two fingers up into her
vagina, while with the other hand she cupped her left breast and
held it out to her aunt, beseechingly, wantonly. The girl's tongue
snaked out of her mouth and somehow all of itself leered at the
old woman. In another circumstance, though Inez did not know
what that circumstance might be, even when she could think
back on this clearly, she would have told the girl to stop acting
like a spoiled brat trying to be Marilyn Monroe and embarrassing
herself and accomplishing nothing more than being an absolute
fool who should be put in a mad house for the things she was
now doing. She would have laughed at the girl for being such an
infant. She would have shamed her mercilessly. It seemed Inez
had gone through her whole life for this moment, unknowing of
course that she had been doing so. Now that it was here, now that
she could prove her mettle, she could not.  Not this, and not now.

 . And in all of it, Marcie seemed still innocent, still
seemed like the little girl Inez had known from time to time over
the years. That the girl was innocent made the girl more sexy,
made her more desirable, made Inez's gorge rise but that was not
the only thing in her that rose, that tipped over, that stumbled
falling down inside of her, and Inez standing there like a fool in
her sensible shoes, her dress plastered by perspiration, no, by
sweat, her eyes staring like pain at its creator, at her naked niece,
as though the girl had finally taken off the human part of herself
and displayed her true alienness, though of course to Marcie it
was just the other way around. It was all such a fine balance for
the girl. And for Inez who had to get this over with, who had to
get this done with, who had to exert will power, not think what
would it be like to touch and feel and see and press and explore--

 The heat from the stove had made the kitchen a furnace.
Big fat tendrils of overpowering throat drying heat that fogged
the windows that froze on the outside.  So Inez, steeled her
broken self, stuck in arctic waste that was melting into more
Arctic waste and ice and snow but of a different kind that Inez
could not tell the fabric, the feel, the temperature of, certainly
not its name--and she walked steadily across the little distance
that were huge galloping gulping lifetimes between old and
young, new and mature, not knowing which was which. Going
closer and closer to the girl's nakedness. Right there. Reach out
and touch.

 As she began to get glimmers of what she was and what
she believed and did not believe, and there was an illness in Inez,
that pressed the deeps of her, and that roared out of her eyes as
tears, Inez thought maybe they were in the form of blood jewels,
and she forced her arthritic legs to circumnavigate even closer
through this sexual spatial distance, as her niece stood brazenly
naked and began, god, began to masturbate, began to caress her
breasts, to kiss her shoulders creamy white, to put fingers, one
two three, up herself, to rotate them, to rotate herself, to moan
and groan like she was a farm animal in heat, and pulling on the
tit of her right breast, hard tight pimpled like a seed--Inez walked
determinedly to her niece and, god, longed to touch with her
finger, with her mouth, stop it!. and  the girl was now stroking
her flat stomach with a winkeye navel, and rubbing her hand
down her left leg, reaching behind herself to pinch her own
buttocks, and now had spread her legs and was raising her vagina
so that it seemed to be looking uncuriously at Inez who now
stood inches from the girl, felt the heat of the girl, the sex of her,
the musky smell, the perfume smell, and the old woman drew
back her right arm, and flattened her hand and with all the
strength in her slapped the girl, the 15 dammit to hell year old
girl, across the face.

 Marcie, struck cheek turned bright fingers of indented
red, took with only a small stagger the blow like a prize fighter,
as though she had been expecting it, and the only surprise on her
face was that it hadn't hurt like she would have imagined,
looking at her aunt. Not closing her eyes. Winning. Inside,
Marcie cheering, I win, I did it, god I did it! In a matter of
seconds, so much was accomplished, and so much was built up
and then destroyed. This aunt of hard bones and angular mind
and objectives, this aunt who, before she moved to supervisory
position, had had the job of talking to children who had been
molested and who had had to penetrate into their shame and their
sadness,  their anger,  with their silent and sullen broken words
for what they did not understand, who depended on her and the
psychologists as to what to do next, how to cope with the thing.
Inez had been so good at this. The kids loved her severity, loved
the stern school mistress who would look after them, and if not
feel for them, at least, express their outrage when they could not,
that they dared not.

  This aunt whose job it was to turn over the information
to the D.A. and to talk with the molester(s) if they would talk,
and then to decide on whether or not to recommend prosecution.
This aunt who had seen so much pain in all of this. Who had
seen so much betrayal of trust and hope. Who had seen so many
dreams shot through never to be recovered or  stuck in the center
of the throat, even relinquished again. Who had seen so much
domination of children, not for their own good, but for the power
and greed of those who held such truncheons over them. Who
had seen children freeze up and hide behind shells even harder
and more lethal than her own. It was coming back on her now.
She felt it before the words Marcie was about to speak. She felt
it with all those eyes that stared at her out of  all those childish
faces down through the decades, eyes that trusted Miss Inez, not
because she was a decent person, not because she was a humane
person, but because she was akin to their abusers, with the power
and the unspoken threats, with the guilt she put on them, which
they were so used to, and she making the children again feel this
step of the assembly line process was also their fault, that they
were damned lucky to have Miss Inez put up with them. And for
this the children were required to give something to her--to show
their thanks--something the children were so familiar with, long
before they sat before her desk, trembling. The thing they had to
give her was, simply and distinctly, themselves. In totality.
Forever more.

 "I hate you and your frigidity--it's embarrassing and I
want you to see what I have that you don't and never did, and it's
not wrong!," the girl said, shouted, trying to be strong, forceful,
trying so hard, and it was at this point, the girl sensed the losing
had begin, that she had not won at all, that she had had
something to prove to this old harridan, and it was so important
for her to show the old bat a thing or two, that she had made
Inez, no, Auntie Inez, her audience, her sole and complete
audience, and what actor can exist at all without an audience?
Never let them see you sweat. Inez was watching Marcie sweat.

 And Marcie was powerless before this bent gnarled
cranky tired silly old bird woman who seemed to swell more in
her form and her visage in front of the healthy sexually charged
girl who now took her fingers from her vagina, the liquid
glistening on them, as she felt as though the insides of her might
just fall out, felt as though she was never to be sexual again, just
a mannequin, told what to do, and obeying. Her nipples softened.
Her body seemed to dwindle and shrink. Her face lowered. The
eyes demurred. The slap on the cheek seemed to hurt more,
delayed reaction almost.

 Because this was such a real situation, because it had
come from the fabric of something that neither of them
understood, because it was filled with a broken back kind of
desperation, of a pushing the basalt underground aside and
sticking a head above surface, if such a thing could be
accomplished in this house of heavy furniture, dim lighting, dark
curtains, a funeral home kind of atmosphere, even to the
overpowering smell of the flowers in the cut rate vases on the
table in the living room beside the heavy dark patterned couch,
the stodgy chairs, the dim lighting, the black dead airlessness of
the place. It was a house of shadows. It was a house of little
rooms of the mind that could never be gone into, and that was
what made them important. It was a place of death and winter
was the time of death that is so beautiful, and it was driving
Marcie out of her ever loving  motherfuckin mind.

 So on awakening that morning, she had taken off her
pajamas, had put on the nightie that she had secretly bought a
week before and smuggled into her room, hiding it behind some
boxes in the closet, so hopefully Inez would not run across it in
her periodic searches of the girl's room for clandestine boys,
drugs, and whatever else teenage girls were "into" these days.
Her aunt was just so fuckin' quaint. Marcie had put on the
nightie and had looked at herself in her compact mirror, for her
aunt allowed no mirrors in her niece's room because that could
lead to concern for the body, and Inez knew how girls get lost in
mirrors and never come out sometimes, which can only be a bad
thing. So the girl had taken the small oval mirror and looked at
small parts of her body's reflection, and pronounced it, with a
great deal of unsureness, good, then had thrown back her
shoulders, said to herself "this is it, kid," tossed back her long
flowing hair, with a flip and a promise to herself, and had gone
from her room to the living room to the kitchen.

 Feeling the cold of the living room, for her aunt was a
penurious woman of course, and this included heating the house,
or not heating it, rather, even in the coldest winter months.
Marcie in the cold living room felt so wonderfully dirty, being
virtually naked, and not in the bathroom or in her bedroom. At
long last. Felt like she was a vixen on the cover of one of those
old yellowed battered paperback books that she had found
secreted in her aunt's closets and cedar chest, in those treasure
hunts, when the woman was away at work or at the market; felt
like one of those "strumpets" there on the covers of those old
detective novels, big bulging barebreasted, curved these women
were to almost cartoon proportions, with only a slip on to cover
their privates, with a  deadly whip or ominous gun somewhere
close by, being tortured by a man or torturing a man, and being
stared down at by all those unseen lusting male eyes all those
decades. Except in Inez' case,  it would be those closeted
muffled sick with fear and loathing lesbian eyes. There were a
couple of lesbian novels too. Women writhing in angry fucking
needful panting painted passion in a Nazi death camp or in a
women's prison. Those were the novels most battered. Gee,
wonder why that would be?. Marcie had read some of those
particular novels. Was it a joke? Were people once really that
stupid and oppressed and just so out of it totally?

 Marcie had just had it with claustrophobia and being
terrified to breathe almost in this house. The boys she loved that
she dropped hints to her aunt here and there, to throw her off the
track, were really the girls she loved, and that was easy to hide,
because she couldn't bring them to the house anyway for a little
muff diving. She and the girls at one time or another had made
love, had sex, fucked each other silly with their fingers and their
mouths and some sex toys found at a nearby sex shop down
town.

 She was tired of the cold bleak roll of thoughts and the
words that came from it that had begun to affect her, even
though she had lived here only nine months. She had found a
certain kind of cardboard morality rhetoric in her speech
patterns, as though her aunt had somehow contaminated
her--some dirtiness coming through to what had not till now been
dirty to Marcie--though she did what she pleased when she
pleased--as long as she obeyed her aunt's rules at home, and she
was careful everywhere else not to be found out--she had adapted
that kind of hard boiled super moralistic deep shadowy eyed
code of voice pattern and way of looking at everything as though
it had just been created in front of her eyes by a spider of length
and largeness and heavy fur. And that made the whole thing
wrong headed. Seen from all the angles her aunt would see it.

  It had become unpretty, and the excitement and
wildness, as it once had been, had turned cheap and laughable
and tawdry. It had become like a dream that had been sand
bagged down too much. These last few months, she had felt she
had had to jump down into it. It had become a grimy duty that
was little increment by little increment, unpleasant, much like
Inez's masturbating.

 The lighting of it had become different, like some old
black and white frayed at the edges movie, as though part of her
were breaking off from herself And the whole damned thing was
spooking her endlessly. Her aunt turned away from her niece
sharply, walked to the sink, her back still turned to the girl, took
off her cats' eye glasses and put a hand to her eyes and was
statue still. She wanted the girl to think she was brought to tears.
She had not been. It was all an act. Everything a game, a play.
Innocence and sexual lust and propriety and decency and fucking
your brains out. It was all the same thing. It was hollow and
counted for nothing. And at that moment Marcie was as dead in
the water, in her own way, as Inez.

 And Marcie knew it. Marcie put her weight on both feet
now, took her hands from her body, felt as though she was never
going to get away from this woman, that it was a certain
character her Aunt had put on her that she would shoulder and
deny and fight against and club to almost death, but not total
death, for it would come back swinging for sure and harder still
this time and next, leaving her bloody. Until finally she would
like that part of it the very best. Gravity had claimed her.

 She felt stupid standing here naked. She wanted to
confess everything to her aunt. She wanted to tell her who had
molested her, but that was ridiculous for no one had, except her
aunt, and that made the need to tell her even stronger. She had
thought over the week of building up to this that she would make
her aunt watch her masturbate. That she would make the woman,
if she was a woman, watch her niece tweak her young breasts as
she lay on her bed, with her legs wide open, her vagina and ass
hole openings exposed to the woman, and she would offer
herself enticingly and impossible to have to this crazy woman,
that she would rock her body and feel the ripples and pinch her
sides, put her fingers in herself and then put them in her mouth,
then sniff them, then roll to one side and the other and knead her
buttocks while her aunt watched with resentment and bitterness
and shock at the girl, who in her own way was doing to Inez,
what Inez had done to her. The girl, naked and unavailable mere
inches away, with her pink tipped breasts, on the cusp of life and
leaving her aunt back in the shadows for all time, as her aunt was
forced to watch and to also listen to her niece say the words that
were sex and fucking and cunt and tits and asshole and bitch and
fuck my brains to the ceiling and eat me while I eat you, and tell
her aunt all about the girls and Marcie and what they did
together.

 Her aunt had never shouted at her. Had always spoken
softly to her. Had never done violence to her. Except this slap
across her niece's face.  She had won by quietly humiliating her
in public, by refusing to allow her to buy the kinds of clothes the
other kids were wearing, making her dress modestly and
ridiculously and the irritation and shame of that in front of the
store clerks and customers and then having to wear the damned
things to school, and not being able to hit the laughers because
her aunt would be called to school for a meeting, and everything
might be up then, and thinking somewhere later on, not distinctly
or with any particular awareness, if I remain modest on the
outside, if I become little Anne of Green Gables, then I have a
chance to bring out the real me when I have sex when I drink
when I do grass and coke and eat cunts and get eaten while being
fucked from the rear with a dildo. The prim exterior thing
Marcie could use for a gimmick. And that was what she realized
it was. That and nothing more. It was to Inez as well.  And from
that moment, Marcie was dead in the water. But Marcie might be
able to handle it, might be able to make it work for her. She
would cast it aside when she pleased. Besides it might be the
only identity she would ever have. Without it, she might be
nothing at all. And she had to be something.


 "Get dressed," her aunt said, strong unwavering voice,
her back still turned to her niece, "the food's cold, you'll have to
eat it like that."

 "Yes ma'am," her niece said, this time the obeisance was
real, this time not exaggerated, just sick and heavy and dead
inside. She covered her crotch with her hands, and reached down
for her nightie, held it against her breasts and all but ran back,
fled back to her room to change to her school dress which now
was not despised, now was something to cling to, to hide away
in. Everyone gets molested sometime. It's the socially approved
kind that is among the most dreadful, that leaves the most scars.
It burns deep. It feels good. Even when it's so terribly wrong.
That's the definition, after all.

 Marcie then walked unsexily into the kitchen, and
breakfast began.

				  the end