The suitcase handle pulls up halfway and jams. Father looks at it like he can see down into wherever it’s stuck and lurches into a moment of pointless jostling. Quinn and mother watch him hand-wrestle the object with a vacant frown until he stops abruptly and plants his fists on his hips. One hand darts up to push his glasses back to the top of his nose and then goes back to his side. Chase watches them all from the middle of the stairway. Waiting. Watching them stall in the open doorway as if there’s something more to do before walking out.
“Okay, then,” father says to the floor.
Quinn looks at mother who looks at father who’s looking at no one. Chase glances at her sister’s middle. She’s just beginning to show. She looks back at Chase and they exchange a barely perceptible nod.
“Keep both bolts locked,” he tells her for the Nth time. “We’ll be home by Thursday.”
He means to say he and mother will be home but Quinn is about to disappear from everything but the family photographs. He pulls a jangle of keys from his pocket and carefully peels through them one by one, as if the one for the car’s been hidden.
Chase is seventeen but she understands how father’s keys are more easily organized than the arcane triad of females surrounding him. His lips purse while his frown deepens. He’s thinking of something right to say. But he’s always right since everything he says comes from The Bible or straight from the histrionic evangelist he watches on television, after whom his glasses and haircut are taken.
“Someday you’ll understand,” he tells both sisters without looking at either.
He finally looks up at Chase. Her lips curl into a thin smile and her eyes narrow, drift toward her sister and back to father. He gives her a look that’s supposed to mean everything he’s not saying.
Quinn suddenly elbows through the space between mother and father, takes the steps down to the curb and slams the car door getting in. Chase can’t see her now but the sound of the door closing punctuates the moment into oblivion. Mother follows in head-bowed silence. Father hesitates as if the moment still exists but then he grabs the suitcase by its half-extended handle and wheels into the doorway, stopping, turning his head halfway.
“Thursday. Doors bolted.”
“I’ll be okay. Promise.”
“I’m counting on you, Chase.” His voice leans into counting like an animal being let out of a cage.
“I love you too, Daddy.”
He steps down and closes the door like he’s shutting the sunlight into a box. There’s a brief jangle of keys while he locks the bolts from outside. Chase waits for the sound of the car starting and pulling away, turns on bare feet and pads upstairs, then down the hall to her room.
In the full-length mirror on the inside of her closet door stands a girl in a blue summer dress with vertical rows of tiny, white diamonds. The dress is shapeless, but the girl is not. She runs through the small repertoire of masks she wears for the people in her day to day. When a friend has good news. When father praises her exemplary grades. The exaggerated way she rolls her eyes when someone tells a joke that isn’t funny but she wants them to know they’re still loved. She tries to recreate the one she put on that day the family sat down for father’s decision on Quinn, but there’s no memory of it coded into the delicate muscles of her face.
They’re all just white noise. She lowers her head and looks at the mirror through a jet-black curtain of hair. Her fingers flip the buttons down the front of her dress until it falls off with a shrug. There’s a slight tremor in her breasts with the gesture. Hands take that slow ride up from her hips to cup them. Fingers sink into the yielding warmth of her flesh. She squeezes herself too hard and too long and when she pulls her hands away there’s a white afterimage of two claws holding her breasts. The prints slowly fade.
Her pussy is shorn smooth as a blood peach and her palm now glides over the pouting surface. She tries to think of anything else in the world that tapers and dips the same way but there is nothing nothing nothing like this or her or anyone. She bends her knees in a half curtsey and forks her slender fingers over the delicate crease between her thighs and peels herself slightly open. She studies herself. All crimson, pink and cinnamon. The face of another girl is looking back at her through her own eyes.
“This is what I am,” she whispers as if the house were full of father’s spies. “I’m that shower of sparks at the fringe of a starburst.”
She turns and walks out, back to the stairs, padding down to the door where she twists each deadbolt open. Sitting on the bottom step she sets her feet as far apart as she can and leans against the uncomfortable edges of the stairs, digging into her back as she lays her finger against her slit and rakes her lips until they moisten and swell. When it’s no longer enough she pushes her finger inside, curling and pumping until her spine arches to the jolts of desire inside her. In the silence of the house, the slicking sound of the pull and drag of her finger is immense. Honey pours out of her body over her fingers and trickles down her starbud.
She wants to cry out but she can’t. Anyone could walk up the steps and throw open the door. Anyone who knows her name or saw her pass by and caught her scent in some moment she never noticed. Anyone with terrifying love in their ravenous heart.
