Lips Touch: Three Times

Lips
Touch: Three Times

Laini Taylor

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Soul,
meets soul on lovers

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Prometheus Unbound

For Christina Rossetti, the British Raj, and Zarathustra, and for
Jim, who pesters gently.

GOBLIN FRUIT

There is a certain kind of girl the goblins crave. You could walk
across a high school campus and point them out: not her, not her,
her.
The
pert, lovely ones with butterfly tattoos in secret places, sitting on their
boyfriends' laps? No, not them. The girls
watching
the lovely ones
sitting on their boyfriends' laps? Yes. Them.

The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their
yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a
soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up
as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls.

Like Kizzy.

One Fierce with Wanting

Kizzy's family lived in the weird house outside of town with all
the anvils in the yard and the tick-ridden billy goat that rammed the fence
whenever anyone walked past. The mailman wouldn't come up to the door, which
worked out fine, since no one ever wrote to them. They didn't even get credit
card offers and junk mail like normal people did. Kizzy's family wasn't normal.

They had no TV but knew hundreds of songs -- all of them in a
language that Kizzy's teachers had never even heard of -- and they sat on
rickety chairs in the yard and sang them together, their voices as plaintive as
wolves', howling at the moon. There were a lot of hairy, blue-eyed uncles
strumming old, beautiful guitars, and stout aunts who dried flowers to smoke in
their pipes. Cousins were numerous. Small and swift, they were always aswirl in
the women's skirts or dodging the goat like wee shrill matadors. Kizzy's mother
wore a kerchief like she was some peasant in a foreign film, and her father had
lost two fingers to a wolf back in the Old Country. He'd killed it to get his
fingers back and he kept the little bones in a pouch around his neck, along
with the teeth of the very same wolf who'd swallowed them.

15

The women of the family were in charge of the garden, and the men
hunted whatever was in season (or wasn't). They did things in their scattered,
crooked sheds that most suburban kids would only ever see in a documentary, or
perhaps on a church mission to a third-world country -- things involving axes
and offal and an intimate understanding of how to turn an
animal
into a
meal.

Kizzy hated it all, and she kind of hated herself too, by
association. She hated mirrors, hated her ankles, hated her hair. She wanted to
climb out of her life as if it were a seashell she could abandon on a shore and
walk away from, barefoot. No one else on the whole landmass of North America,
she was sure, had such a stupid life.

Besides the anvils and the goat, there were plenty of no-name cats
in the yard, always slinking and slipping along the edges of things, and there
were chickens, a peacock that screamed
"rape!"
(as peacocks
do), and some cars on blocks. Ghosts came from miles around to whisper and mope
and feed, and sometimes strangers passed through in big, battered cars filled
with all the things they owned and stayed a few days, playing accordions,
swigging moonshine, and singing ballads whose words had never known paper but
lived only on the rasping edge of their own voices. Kizzy liked the ghosts but
not the strangers, because her father made her give up her room for them and
they always left it smelling like feet.

She was sixteen, smart but unenthusiastic, a junior at a public
high school she referred to as Saint Pock Mark's Finishing School for
Cannibals.

Saint Pock Mark was her nickname for the acne-scarred principal
who used any pretext to talk about his time among the cannibals as a missionary
in Borneo, where as a younger man he had suffered

16

parasites and bodily mildew in the service of the Lord. His thin
lips got even thinner whenever Kizzy was brought to his office for skipping
school, and she took a wicked pleasure in inventing imaginary religious
holidays to explain her absences. She knew he'd sooner grit his teeth and
accept her stories than call her parents, who yelled on the phone as if it were
a futuristic device, and whose loud exclamations in their own language Kizzy
had half convinced him were gypsy curses.

Even more than most teenagers, Kizzy hated to be seen in public
with any member of her family, and she chose to walk to school even in the
sleet or the rare skimpy snows. Freezing was preferable to the rusting
junk-heap cars and belly-scratching uncles. She was deeply susceptible to
mortification: easy to embarrass though hard to disgust. At home she did
unsavory chores that ought to have gone extinct with the old days, like
rendering lard and chopping the heads off chickens.

She drank too much coffee, smoked, had a thrilling singing voice
when she could be persuaded to use it, and was saddled with a terrible nickname
at school that she feared would follow her through life. She had two friends:
Evie, who was fat, and Cactus, who was sarcastic and whose name wasn't really
Cactus, but Mary.

"Shut up, Kizzy. You have
not
chopped the head off a swan,"
Evie declared as the girls walked home from school on a Friday, smoking.

"Um.
Yes.
I have," Kizzy replied. "We needed
one of its wings to put in my nana's coffin." "Uh! Guh!
Horrible!"
"Please. That swan was a total bastard." "But you cut off
its head? That's totally cruel."

17

"Cruel? I cut off chickens' heads all the time. It's not
cruel. It's, like,
food,
Evie. You do know food isn't born wrapped in
plastic, right?"

"You
ate
it? I am so telling Mick Crespain you're a
swan-eater."

"I didn't eat it! And I'm sure you'd walk up to Mick Crespain
and start telling him about my eating habits. He'd be like,
Um, who are
you?."

"No, he'd be like,
Um, what's a (tizzy?"

"He knows my name! I sit right behind him in Trig. I've
totally memorized the back of his neck. I could pick him out of a neck
lineup."

Cactus had been silently exhaling long plumes of smoke but she
interrupted now and said, "Hell with Crespain's neck. What I want to know
is, why would you put a swan's wing in your grandmother's coffin?"

Kizzy replied as if the answer was obvious. "So her soul
could fly.
Duh."

Cactus laughed and choked on smoke. "So what'd you do with
the other wing?"

"We're saving it for whoever dies next," said Kizzy,
laughing too. "Swan wings don't grow on trees, you know. Or," she
added, with a glance at Evie, "maybe you
don't
know."

"Maybe I don't
care!'

Cactus was still coughing. She managed to say, "God, Kizzy.
If I had your freak-ass family I'd totally get an eye patch and write pathetic
books about my childhood and go on
Oprah
to tell about how I had to
behead a swan so I could put its wing in my grandmother's coffin."

"So her soul could fly," added Evie.

18

"Obviously."

"Shut up!" Kizzy said, swatting at them halfheartedly
with her fists. "Cactus, you can
have
my family. Take them all.
Just give me your tiny little mother with her tiny little haircut and your
snoring-ass dad on the couch, and nothing to behead ever again. I bequeath you
my axe."

"Thank you. I accept your offer of weaponry," Cactus
said formally. "I doubt I could kill a swan, though. Even a big bastard
one. I just don't have your rage, Kiz."

"Believe me, if you had my family, you'd have my rage. You
know what my dad did last night? He was cleaning an elk carcass in the yard and
he came in and stuck his big bloody hand right in my popcorn bowl!"

Evie and Cactus both shrieked in disgust. "Okay, I take it
back," Cactus said with a grimace. "You can keep your family."

"What, over a little bloody popcorn?" asked Kizzy.
Shaking her head, she muttered,
"Wuss."

The girls parted ways at the edge of the normal houses and Kizzy
kept walking into the straggling edge of the countryside, past a cemetery, a
water tower, and a Christmas tree farm with a little trailer near the road,
where a fat dog lying on the porch picked up his head and belched as she
passed. A gutsy little bird chased a crow out of a tree, and a squirrel
miscalculated his leap and fell stunned into a pile of rotting leaves. It was
autumn. The sky was white and the trees black. Kizzy saw herself in a puddle
and looked away.

The goblins didn't look away. Their mouths filled up with saliva
as they watched her. There was scant cover for them in the leafless hawthorns
along the main road, and Kizzy should have seen them. Of all the girls in this
unremarkable town, she should have been the

19

one they couldn't get, the one who knew better. She had Old World
blood, after all. Her family
believed in things:
in vampires and the
evil eye, in witch soldiers and curses and even talking foxes. They believed
that black roosters are the devil in costume and that fruit grown out of season
should never be trusted or tasted. And of course they believed in goblins.

They'd have said there was no "believing" involved. They
knew,
because Kizzy's grandmother had saved her sister from them once in
the Old Country and lived to tell. She'd never tired of telling the story, how
the goblins had tried to force her mouth open and cram in. their unnatural
fruit, how she'd kept her jaw clamped tight against them.

How swollen her lips had been after.

"As bruised as windfall plums! I could smell that sweet
nectar all over my skin but I never tasted it," she had told Kizzy many
times. "You never want to taste their fruit, Sunshine."

"It's not like there are goblins
here,
Nana,"
Kizzy had replied one time, bored of the story, and bored of this town with its
soulless mall and soccer fields, its houses all alike as cookies in a bakery
box. "Goblins probably get to live in Prague and Barcelona where they
have, like, coffeehouses and absinthe and ..." She trailed off, groping
through her daydreams for the many coveted things to be had in other cities, in
other people's better lives. "Blind street musicians" was what she
came up with. "And mean little nuns carrying long bread under their arms.
And cathedrals with gargoyles. And catacombs."

"You know so much?" her grandmother had chuffed at her.
"Goblins living in Prague? Silly girl! Goblins live in Hell! I need to
tell you that? They only come
here
to hunt."

20

If Kizzy's grandmother were alive, she would have seen the goblins
crouched behind the trees. She would have heard the
smack
and
gluck
of
their juicy mouths and kept Kizzy safe. But she wasn't alive. She had gone into
the unknowable last summer. Besides the swan's wing, they'd buried her with
other things she'd need: her pockets full of almonds to eat, a compass for
finding her path, and coins for bribes along the way -- silver coins, minted in
one of the sheds and inscribed with runes. And of course, the dainty stiletto
blade she'd always carried in her pocket -- that went into her coffin too.

When Kizzy was a little girl, she had asked once if she could have
that knife when her grandmother died, and her grandmother had answered,
"Sunshine, I'll need it where I'm going. Get your own damn knife."

Kizzy knew other families didn't bury their grandmothers with
knives and dried-out swan wings, and she suspected other grandmothers didn't
slip out of their graves to dance deasil round the living either -- that meant
circling clockwise and it was powerful magic, especially when the dead did it.
Kizzy had felt her grandmother's ghost go thrice around her at the graveside as
her father and uncles shoveled dirt clods onto her coffin. She'd been glad to
know her soul wasn't down there where the rain of dirt must have sounded like thunder.
The knife was, though; she'd seen her father put it in and she'd mourned it.
She had never stopped coveting it with its sweet mother-of-pearl handle, and
her grandmother must have known because on her deathbed she'd motioned Kizzy
close and whispered, "Remember my knife, Sunshine?"

Kizzy had thought she was going to give it to her and she'd
nodded, smiling. But the old lady had whispered, "Don't you dare steal it
out of my coffin," and then she'd died.

21

Sometimes Kizzy imagined her grandmother knife-fighting her way
down the long tunnel of death, but mostly her daydreams were of a very
different nature. She daydreamed of slow-dancing with Mick Crespain and of
sitting on his lap at lunch while he hugged
her
around the waist instead
of Sarah Ferris, his knuckles resting lightly against the underside of
her
breasts
instead of Sarah's. She daydreamed about having slim ankles like Jenny Glass
instead of peasant ankles like the fetlocks of a draft horse. About smooth hair
instead of coarse hair, sleek hips instead of belly dancer's hips. About a
tinkling laugh, and a butterfly tattoo, and a boy who would tuck his hand into
her back jeans pocket while they walked, and press her up against a fence to
suck her lower lip like a globe of fruit.