Lips Touch: Three Times (4 page)

"Nah. We plant our bones in our own soil."

"Really? Why?"

Kizzy shrugged. "My family's weird." She wasn't about to
tell Jack Husk about the swans' wings and the singing, and the ghosts slipping
from their graves to begin their next adventure. "Your uncle buried
there?" she asked.

"Uh-uh. Cremated."

"Oh." Kizzy shivered. "God." Her people
believed cremation trapped the soul in the body and then shattered it into
millions of tiny flakes of ash. "Did you know him well?"

"Hardly at all." Jack Husk was still wearing his aviator
goggles and they disguised some of his beauty, but not the most distracting

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part: his red lips. Kizzy could barely look at them without
thinking of kissing. Of being tasted.

Too quickly, they arrived at the Christmas tree farm. Neat rows of
trees stretched back toward the misty hills where Kizzy's uncles hunted.
"Home sweet home," said Jack Husk, motioning to the little trailer.

Kizzy eyed it. She'd never thought much about it when the old man
lived here. He was always outside working, planting trees or digging them up or
cutting them down. He'd hitched at his suspenders and waved sometimes when she
walked by, and she'd waved back, probably without much enthusiasm, and she'd
never imagined him inside the trailer, living in it. But she couldn't help
imagining Jack Husk sleeping in a dead man's narrow little bed.
"Cozy," she said unconvincingly.

"As a coffin," he replied.

The fat dog lifted his head up slowly and looked at them.
"You inherit him too?" Kizzy asked. 1 guess so.

"Laziest dog I've ever seen," she said. But then the lazy
dog, the dog that Kizzy walked past every single day and who couldn't even be
bothered to bark, curled his snout into a snarl.

"He's not crazy about me," Jack Husk said as the snarl
grew louder.

1 guess not.

The fat old dog actually rose to his feet, something Kizzy had
rarely witnessed, and with his head lowered and his teeth bared in a vicious
growl, he looked much more menacing than she'd have thought possible. Jack Husk
frowned and pushed back his goggles onto his forehead, making his hair stick out
in tufts. Anyone else

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might have looked silly, but he looked like he was posing for one
of those fashion spreads in
Rolling Stone
magazine where bored,
beautiful people loll around like they're waiting for the bus in Purgatory,
usually with some nipple showing. "Well," he said, "I'd better
deal with him."

"What are you going to do?"

"Honestly? Give him a wide berth and slip around the back.
But I'll wait until you're gone so you can't see me scramble if he comes after
me."

Kizzy laughed. "Maybe I'd better watch, you know, just in
case."

Smiling the crooked smile, he said, "No. Go. Please. It's
unspeakably uncool to be seen dodging fat dogs."

"Okay, then. See you around, Jack Husk. Be careful."

"See you in the morning, Kizzy," he said, and Kizzy
felt, for an instant, as if her blood fizzed inside her like champagne.

40

Three Ripe as a Plum

After dinner had been cooked and eaten -- scorn and all -- Kizzy
went to her room and closed the door. She sat on the end of her bed and looked
at herself in the mirror. Really

looked.
She was still wearing the green scarf, and
though her hair billowed out at the nape of her neck, wild and coarse as always,
it was captured flat around her face and hidden, not springing up in its usual
topiary way. The effect was to bring her face into focus, and Kizzy stared at
it for minutes, getting the feeling that something had happened to her since
the last time she had looked at herself, if indeed she ever really had.

She saw proud cheekbones beginning to rise out of the thick husk
of adolescence. She saw a coy curl in the corners of her lips, lips that had
practically
touched Jack Husk's lips. Staring at her face, she began to fancy her outer
layer had begun to melt away while she wasn't paying attention, and something
-- some new skeleton -- was emerging from beneath the softness of her
accustomed self. With a deep, visceral ache, she wished her true form might prove
to be a sleek and shining one, like a stiletto blade slicing free of an
ungainly sheath. Like a bird of prey losing its hatchling fluff to hunt in
cold, magnificent skies. That she might become something glittering, something
startling, something dangerous.

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Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a
sailboat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and
who could dance a tango, lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an
enemy's blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn't possibly keep, and then
shift the world to keep them. She wanted to write memoirs and autograph them at
a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley.
She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric
knowledge, watch strangers as coolly as a cat. She wanted to be inscrutable,
have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome
adventurer's small airplane, champagne-christened
Kizzy,
which would
vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that she would have to mount a
rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging
sand, just like the nomads.

Kizzy
wanted.

She pushed back her shoulders from her usual sullen slouch and
made an effort to sit up straight. It felt unnatural; her sinews resisted. She
had a sudden terrifying thought that if she had waited, if she had gone on as
she was, her poor posture might have calcified like that. She might have
hardened into a slumped carapace of a person who would never,
could never,
throw
back her shoulders, walk tall, taunt vampires with her white throat, toss her
head in joy or disdain. She would have curled over herself like a toenail left
too long untrimmed. She flushed now, looking at her reflection, shoulders low
and calm, neck elongated, almost elegant, light moving over her green silk
scarf like a river, and she felt a sense of narrow escape in the ache of this
new posture. As if she could still become someone else.

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Maybe Jack Husk had already glimpsed that new girl within her,
guessed how she was ready to slice free in one clean move like a stiletto blade
flicking forth. She thought of his perfect face and sly eyes, his hand catching
hers in the air, of his lingering gaze, and the sensation of being penetrated
by it. And looking at herself in the mirror, minute after minute, unveiling
herself to herself, she began at last to see her great-aunt Mairenni looking
out at her, filled with her hungers and her secrets, and radiant with her weird,
succulent beauty.

Ripe as a plum ready to drop from its branch at the lightest
touch.

Kizzy slept restlessly and dreamed many things that night -- lips
and fingers and fruit, and Jack Husk taking off his goggles and tasting her,
beginning with the tender insides of her wrists. Strange images came to her all
night, and she was greeted by another strange sight when she was awakened in
the morning by the wretched cry of the peacock right outside her window.

She opened her eyes. A swan feather drifted past her face, twirled
when her breath caught it, and sailed to the floor. She blinked, sat up,
blinked again. The room was asift with swan feathers. They were settling to the
floor as if she had just missed the strange storm that had deposited them here.
A glint on her pillow drew her eye and she turned to see, laid alongside the
impression of her head, the mother-of-pearl handle she knew so well, and tucked
up quietly within it, resting now, her grandmother's stiletto, back from the
grave.

She reached for it, and it was cold as a mountain winter in her
hand.

The first thing Kizzy did was check the small circle of family

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graves in the back field. She stood there in her nightgown, the
knife clutched in her fist, looking at the undisturbed ground of her grandmother's
grave. She felt the stir of ghosts all around. She
would
feel them now.
It was fall, after the harvest and before the first freeze -- this was the time
when the veil between the worlds was draggled and thin, and voices murmured
through its sodden membrane from the other side. It was always in the fall that
Kizzy felt the ghosts lingering about, skittish as stray cats and drawn by the
same thing: the whiff of food.

The cats came for the odor of the smokehouse where Kizzy's father
and uncles made sausages from the various things they killed. With their little
rough tongues, the cats lapped up pooling blood before it could congeal in the
dirt. The ghosts had no such thirst, but came for the clumps of asphodel that
bloomed round the graves all summer, and for the bowls of boiled barley the
rest of the year. Cats and ghosts both partook of the saucers of milk and that
was okay. They consumed different parts of it: the cats its substance, the
ghosts its essence, and none went to waste.

They came from afar, cats and ghosts both, because normal families
didn't spill hot blood in their driveways or leave out food for the dead, and
they weren't exactly spoiled for choice. Kizzy thought most of the ghostly
visitors came from the cemetery down the road; surely all the spirits in her
family's little plot had moved along, well provisioned as they were with coin,
food, weapon, and wing for their journey. Surely
they
didn't linger
here. Surely her grandmother hadn't.

How, then, had her knife come to be on Kizzy's pillow, and her
swan's wing, torn feather from feather, in Kizzy's room? Kizzy frowned,
puzzled, and went back in the house, passing her mother

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in the kitchen and choosing not to speak of the feathers and
knife. Her people would be terribly disturbed by it; they'd surely keep Kizzy
home from school to scry the meaning of the ominous visitation, to bless the
grave, and to try to return the knife to its rightful owner. And Kizzy did
worry that her grandmother's ghost was weaponless and vulnerable in the
shadowed land. But her mind kept turning back to Jack Husk. She had to see him
again, to see if he was
real,
so she said nothing of the knife.

She showered, dried her hair, and tied, untied, and retied the
green scarf, deciding at last to go ahead and wear it. She pulled on a pair of
jeans and a sweater and slid her grandmother's stiletto into her back pocket.
She had a cup of coffee and a cigarette, brushed her teeth three times to scour
away any yellow flavor, put on lipstick and then wiped it off, hopeful of
kissing and scowling at her own absurd hope, and she almost left the house. But
at the last minute she pulled off her clothes and stepped into a vintage dress
she'd bought at the thrift store and never worn. It was made of apple-green
kimono silk in a rippling pattern, with a mandarin collar and a row of big
black buttons all the way down the front. She stood in front of the mirror for
a minute, watching the way the silk slipped and shone when she moved her hips,
then she pulled on black boots and hurried out the door.

Jack Husk was waiting for her in front of the Christmas tree farm,
and he whistled low when he saw her. "Great dress," he said, his eyes
sliding all the way down the row of buttons.

"Thanks," Kizzy said, blushing just as deeply as she had
the day before, at school. She'd have to get used to him all over again, taking
small sips of his beauty as if it was too hot a drink to swallow all at once.
One shy glance revealed to her that Jack Husk wasn't

45

carrying his new school books but a picnic basket. "What's
that?" she asked.

He held it up and smiled, mischievous as an imp. "Breakfast
picnic," he said. There was a checked blanket folded carelessly under the
basket's handles. "Care to join me?"

"What,
now!
What about school?"

Jack Husk shrugged. "I'm not such a huge fan."

"Yeah, me either."

"Good. Then you'll come with me." He held out his arm
for her in an old-fashioned, courtly gesture, and there was no question in
Kizzy's mind how she would be spending her morning. She hooked her arm through
Jack Husk's, laying her fingers lightly on the velvet nap of his sleeve, and
walked beside him, noticing as she turned that the old man's dog was not in his
place on the porch.

"Everything go okay with the dog yesterday?" she asked.

"Sure," he answered. "No problem. So, is there a
park around here somewhere?"

Kizzy shook her head. "Just the cemetery."

"Oh, well, that'll work. Yeah?"

It was just ahead, behind a neat fence. Kizzy walked past it every
day, but she hadn't been in it for years, not since she was a child and snuck
there to listen to the snatches of ghost conversation that blew in on an icy
wind from the next world. It wasn't a Gothic cemetery; there were no mossy
angels weeping miraculous tears of blood, no crypts or curses or crumble. No
poets or courtesans were buried here; no vampires slumbered belowground. It was
only a collection of stone rectangles standing straight and ordinary. Even the
dead loitering here spoke of dull things, like the one who worried she'd left
the stove burning when she died.