Kill Marguerite and Other Stories (12 page)

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The End

INCEST DREAM OR SLAM POEM FOR E

I had sex with my cousin. It was a dream.

I had sex with my cousin, who is from a different walk. She is in the proverbial mud, while I am two floors up with three degrees and cats with special diets. We are both poor.

I had sex with my cousin, who is black; I'm white. Or she's biracial, but identifies as black, or has Gone Over to the Dark Side, as my mother has said. My mother says the same thing about me, substituting Other for Dark, because I'm a dyke, and discomfiting. I am not, actually, poor.

I had sex with my cousin, who is fat. She has three kids by different fathers. She is in and out of jail, of rehab. She stutters. Her mom is mean. Her nose is always running. We're the same age, born the same year, slept in the same bed at our grandmother's house when we visited as kids. My middle name is her first name. She was and is a heavy breather. We are the only girls of eleven cousins, thirteen if you count our uncle's two adopted sons from El Salvador but we don't because our parents don't.

I had sex with my cousin. We're talking father's side of the family. My cousin's mom, who's my father's sister and my aunt, is a manager at Wal-Mart and a seasonal school bus driver. My cousin's father left before or after she was born. I can't say if my aunt expected him to stay. I can't say if child support has been arranged or given. One of my cousin's mom's three brothers, my cousin's uncle, my father, earns six figures with a government job. Another of her brothers, my and my cousin's uncle, is a business consultant millionaire. The third of her brothers, my and my cousin's other uncle, who adopted the two refugees from El Salvador, lives quietly on a small smelly farm from which he sells chickens and eggs. Possibly he's gay. Possibly my cousin's mom is also gay. My cousin's possibly gay mom and our possibly gay uncle are the black sheep of the family. They're both fat. The millionaire uncle is also fat; nobody calls him that.

I had sex with my cousin, who has stolen checks from my grandmother and made them out to herself to support her drug habit, I guess. This interpretation comes from my mother who gets it partially from my grandmother, my mother's mother-in-law. My father, whose family it is, can't be bothered to call.

I had sex with my cousin, whose first kid, whose name my parents make fun of, idolizes me because I was able to give him undivided attention once for a few hours when he was four. I'm told he's been asking about me ever since, which I understand could lead someone like my cousin, or her mom, who's my cousin's son's primary caregiver, to pretty deeply resent me.

I had sex with my cousin whose mom, my aunt, is kind of butch, and my mother suspects that growing up in a sexist family full of catered-to men made my aunt Want To Be a
Guy
, and I wonder if this is her theory about me, and I wonder if this theory could be partially right, and I wonder so what if it is, when I'm having better sex than she is.

When I had sex with my cousin it had been years since we'd last seen each other, a few Christmases ago, and she'd had her new baby with her, a daughter whose name my parents have not bothered learning. I had been having a stilted conversation with her about her shit job at a gas station when my millionaire uncle interrupted to ask me about graduate school. I turned from her to him like a dog smelling power and so enabled an insipid conversation that spread to the whole room. Nobody asked my cousin anything. Nobody asked my aunt anything. Nobody asked my probably gay uncle anything, except to be mean (“I take it you're eating well?”).

When I had sex with my cousin, it was shortly after learning that she'd been pulled over for driving without a license, or for some crime that had to do with driving that led to her being penalized for also driving without a license. Because she didn't have a license, she didn't show them her license. When the cops asked for her name, she gave them mine. I mean, she told them she was me—she used my name. When the cops searched that name and saw the smiling face of a dykey-looking white girl with Illinois residency, the jig was up. The cops maybe called her mom, who maybe called our grandmother, who must
have called my mom, who called me to let me know. Or else she was charged with something, which included her being charged with giving a false name, and she had to explain this to her mom, who told my grandmother so my grandmother could tell my mom who could tell me, in case it ever showed up on my record. Because otherwise why would I know, since her mom and my mom have no reason to speak except after Thanksgiving dinner if they're both there and because they're The Women and my grandmother's old, they are charged with the dishes and so do them together, and I have not once offered to help, not wanting to participate in such offensive gendering even though I equally hate the idea of two women doing everyone's dishes, everyone being mostly men. This side of my family is overgrown with men. Tall, heavy men who interrupt you when you talk and share a largeness of cranium that I've inherited. I'll also inherit their jowls.

I had sex with my cousin and as I explored her body with mine, I apologized for getting everything before her, the Walkman, the CD player, the second Boyz II Men album. I had sex with my cousin and as I probed her cunt with my fingers, I told her I hate them all too, how they treat people, how they dismiss and disparage their own family. I had sex with my cousin and while sliding two fingers inside her, I told her she can't hate me, I'm not like them, I can't be, I am not this person sitting silent and well dressed in a stuffy room making little to no effort to play with her kids. I had sex with my cousin and taking a moment from sucking her clit I told her hey, guess what, she is doing okay, she is doing just fine, her children are
beautiful and so is she. I don't remember if she responded. I had sex with my cousin and as I shoved into her harder and fuller and faster and deeper until I lost all sense of my hand, I told her I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Then I woke up.

EARL AND ED

with images by Marian Runk

There once was an orchid named Ed. He fell in total love with a wasp named Earl, who loved Ed back, totally. Together they became something else, not Earl and not Ed but Earl&Ed, wherein there ceased entirely to be Earl or Ed separately, although Earl&Ed retained the specificities of both its components.

Earl + Ed → Earl&Ed.

Earl&Ed ≠ Earl + Ed.

i.e., Earl&Ed > Earl + Ed.

i.e., Earl&Ed = (Earl → Ed) + (Ed→Earl).
*

*
where → is a form of becoming.

*

Earl&Ed started off as any other insect-flower pair, each being one of many partners for the other. Earl&Ed met in the full bloom of Ed's second spring and Earl's first and only. Ed was opening himself up for any number of interested insects who relied on nectar to survive, while Earl was slurping the nectar of any number of flowers, meanwhile collecting and depositing pollen to contribute to her partners' reproductive cycles. Though this kind of partner-sharing was performed with both duty and
respect, neither of them had any special feelings for their partners.

Earl was a wasp. She inhabited a nest made of wood pulp that bulged obscenely from the end of a hollowed-out log. Earl was a worker wasp. Cordial and friendly to her fellow workers, she bzzzzed as she worked, chewing wood into pulp and dutifully facilitating the expansion of the nest. Earl's bzzz expressed the appropriate contentment towards and resignation to her role in the wasp community, which required also that she defend the nest and provide nourishment to its larvae by paralyzing insects and tearing them apart to transport back to her wards.

Earl, a worker, could only ever be leaving to feed and find nourishment for the larvae
.

While Earl had spent many days and nights certain that her life and role were decent and worthwhile, increasingly she had been beginning to doubt this. Having again and again watched the male drones around her leave the nest forever to mate with ceremony and adventure, Earl was beginning to recognize the limits of her own life and role.
Earl, a worker, could only ever be leaving to feed and find nourishment for the larvae. She was always having to be returning to chew more wood into pulp. She would be leaving and returning and leaving and returning always and always until her death.

One day Earl was off on a fly, venturing farther from her nest than usual. She flew and she flew, absorbedly contemplating her fixed place in the wasp community and in the ecosystem at large. When she looked into the future, all she could see was work, and small talk, and sameness, until she died when the weather turned. Pah, Earl was spitting in helplessness and disgust, her mouth still gummy with wood pulp, when a great and impossible yearning came upon her. She had caught the whiff of nectar rushing towards her in the wind.

Past the anthills and past their ants and past the sewers and their mosquitoes and past the azaleas and dandelions, Earl feverishly followed this scent to its origin in a decadent orchid whose showy petals and pert sepals fluttered invitingly in the breeze.

Earl stopped short. Earl being intimidated and Earl feeling suddenly and uncharacteristically shy but Earl fervently desiring this nectar, Earl hid on a bush leaf to think.

*

Ed was an orchid. His roots kept him close to the earth. Uncommonly isolated by a fence of stony shrubs, Ed had only grass, and dirt, and earthworms to keep him regular company; the occasional lost ant. With the exception of Anyx the Butterfly, Ed's one long-term partner who would check in on him now and again, most of Ed's winged
visitors came upon him by accident, attracted by a whiff of his scent or simply taking the long route back to their homes. Ed's visitors, infrequent though they were, brought him any important news of his community, so that if Ed may have been lonely, Ed may not have understood that he was lonely. Ed was content with his meager and easy slice of perennial life, and in an effort to occupy himself kept up a pronounced interest in understanding weather patterns.

And when Earl landed on Ed's sticky labellum she immediately began thrusting into it
.

Ed having heard Earl's bzzzz from the east had turned to face the incoming insect. He hadn't had a visitor all day; his nectar felt swollen in his spur. He rushed to straighten his stalk and fluff up his petals, thereby releasing another whiff into the air.

Earl on his leaf breathing this new scent swiftly sprang forward with lust. Ed regarded his guest curiously. At the sight of Earl's firm body and large and penetrating multiple eyes, Ed's stamen trembled. And when Earl landed on Ed's sticky labellum she found herself so
overwhelmed by Ed's scent and shape she immediately began thrusting into it. Although Ed might typically have felt violated by such an act without introductions, this wasp felt good and right on his labellum.