anonymous
11-01-2007, 03:13 PM
Title: North London in Winter
Celebrity: Anna Faris
By: Quiet Storm
Disclaimer: This story is not entirely true, nor do I wish that it was.
Sitting in her apartment late one winter's afternoon, Anna gloomily stared out at cold, desolate street. When she was younger, twelve or thirteen, she had loved it when the snow fell; it obliterated difference, and it made everyone feel cold all the same. Now older, the girl she was separated and placed at near distance from the girl she was, she hated it's garish glare, the way it blanketed the streets, the way it made her shiver. Yet despite the unpleasant feeling the weather gave her, she perversely felt compelled to push her face closer to the window, right against the glass, feeling the cold outside transmitted through her window, and into her; from outside to the inside…The snow continued to swirl and drive, making the world look to her as if it had been filled with TV static. She clutched her arms to her chest, tugged at her sleeves girlishly, and stared for thirty seconds or more into the empty street, imagining everywhere she saw ghosts. Then she turned, shivered self consciously, and decided to make herself a hot drink. Behind her, the street seemed to darken slightly, as the spinning chaos of the snow storm intensified, and was no longer empty.
I called Anna from the office and told her I would be late. Despite the heated row we had only three days previously, Anna sounded distant, and unconcerned as I apologised again. Since Anna's acting career had stuttered to a halt, things had changed. I knew she resented staying in all day looking after our 18 month year old son, I knew she resented the hours I worked, but most of all she must have resented the way that the glittering world of celebrity that had once seemed hers had just slipped away. One day you are invited to every party, everywhere you go you see famous people, designers are begging you to wear their clothes, people walk up to you with awe in their eyes and ask you to sign pieces of paper as if just to touch something you once touched is a privilege… and then, the very next day, you're 28, you've got a kid and you're working part time three afternoon's a week at a the office of a vanity publisher and you're married to a dour and reliable management accountant. Sometimes I feared that I was losing her, that I could not hold on to her. The way she made me feel… like every house in every street is filled with something great and terrible that I cannot quite grasp; the way I used to feel when I was a child and stared out at the grey stormy sea… I never know what to say anymore; or perhaps I never really did, and only Anna could make me realise.
Softly, I replaced the telephone in its cradle, turned my eyes back to the spreadsheet that was hurting my eyes, and felt like I wanted to cry.
***
Annoyed, but determined not to show it after the last row, she turned the dinner down, thinking that it would be ruined anyway, and there was no point, and shiftlessly wandered around the room looking for something to do, to kill the hours until she could go to bed and world would stop again for a little while. Behind her, the night fell silently. The night painlessly draped itself over North London with infinite coldness and indifference. And a great and omniscient eye pans from east to west, right across the city. What can we see?
There's an old man bundled into a Oxfam coat and wearing a cloth cap, limping out of the twenty four hour grocers; the carrier bag at his side straining against the weight of the half sized tins of baked beans and spaghetti bolognese, muttering things to himself that he can't hear. He elaborately edges passed a group of teenagers, thirteen or fourteen year olds, who are clustered around a smashed up telephone box: on his way back to his lonely flat and the evening TV he knows by heart. The group of youths, the boys baseball capped and poised, halfway between men and the children they were last year, the pockets of their oversized and multi-sloganed bomber jackets stuffed with boiled sweets and cans of Pepsi Max; the girls standing close together, and all wearing coordinated tight white trousers and tracksuit tops. They barely look up at the elderly man as they continue passing round a lipstick stained Superking Menthol. And all of them keep getting this feeling that they can't understand, like something important is missing from their lives, they all feel ineffable. We all wanted what they want, and none of us ever got there: so we still keep wanting what they want, all our lives.
A rugged blonde tourist walks straight passed them - almost straight through them - not even looking. He's dressed in sturdy walking boots and a forest green sweater, and he shoulders a valuable and well used rucksack; smiling at the air and striding forward confidently, very badly lost but not letting on. The lack of responsibility or fear in his piercingly clear blue eyes making us hate him.
Two black kids are racing across a patch of burnt grass behind the grocers, towards an ugly tower block, called in by the darkness no doubt - the shorter of them clutching a scuffed basketball (stolen one afternoon three months ago from the Phys Ed storage room) tightly to his thin chest.
There's so much meaning hiding behind the mess and confusion. And so much going on that ultimately doesn't matter: is just background and colour and context. At any given moment, in any given place, you can see a given number of people - all with their very real pain and longing and fear - and none of them matter at all. It's bound to give you wrong impressions and exaggerated ideas about your own worth.
***
I can see a slight, dark haired girl: the smooth and beatific proportions of her face perhaps not quite conventionally beautiful, but way beyond pretty; she doesn't look day over twenty one, but she is almost thirty. She is sat at the computer table, he eyes squinting girlishly with concentration. Her navy blue skirt looks like school uniform and she's wearing a simple black top. Her dark hair is tied back in a tight pony tail, and her finger nails are painted sky blue. He noticed before he went to work, but she felt that he wasn't really looking. But she didn't blame him; sometimes she lost her temper with him, especially about the long hours he worked, but mostly she was sure it was more her fault than his, but was not sure why, what she had done, how the person she was had started going wrong, what she should do…
She kept a diary which she updated every single night - at least two sides of A4 - ever since she was 14; in which she would not only chronicle her day and it's small and pointless success's and failures, and also her own small town hopes and doubts, but also the troubles and jubilations of other people who she always felt that she didn't really know. When she was twenty it had been full of life, film premiers, money, fame, happiness, success. Now, she still maintained the same regime, still made the same in depth entries, but sometimes felt herself moved close to tears as she committed to paper her shopping lists, tales of her elderly aunts illnesses, good programmes she had seen on TV, this had become her life…
Sad songs and long books without proper endings sometimes made her want to cry too. She could juggle four balls, and could do simple conjuring tricks like make playing cards disappear up her sleeve. When she was very small she had an unaccountable fear that something would swoop down from the night sky and carry her away at a terrible speed. She occasionally cried in her sleep but could not remember why in the mornings. She had recurring dreams about tidal waves and tornado's which terrified her. Every year she had won the school tennis championship, even though she didn't want to. The competitiveness of sport always unsettled her, but she could never think of any way of losing without making it obvious. When she was a little girl she had feared the power of electricity. Occasionally, she lay awake all night, unable to sleep, unable even to think; other than in the jump-start language of the near hysteria of insomnia; but the next day the world was always how it should be once again. The smallness and simplicity of her thoughts sometimes embarrassed her into silence. When she ate, she always ate her greens first, and saved the part of the meal she liked last, and was consequently often too full by the time it came its turn to be eaten.
She folds her legs underneath her as she sits on the old office chair her husband stole from his work, or "repatriated" as he said, because he had been something of a communist while at university. Her efficient lungs empty and expand. Her healthy heart pumps the oxygenised, life giving, blood through her body. Her brain hums smartly with the criss cross of purpose and activity. A machine of infinite complexity is contained in her; and she knows none of this: her solemn face is broken into a wide smile as the cartoon dog bounces the cloaked villain on to the floor. As she flicks onto a different web page, she in fact feels like she is nothing. Not that she is worth nothing, because despite the depression and emptiness she sometimes felt she was too strong mentally to really sink into depression. She felt, sometimes, as if she simply was not real at all; that she was a ghost, that she was someone else's idea, a cartoon strip like the one she was watching on the cartoon network web site, but no one had coloured her in.
Unwatched. Who sees her here? Who blasts her unsteady, fickle path clear of obstacles and harm? Sitting in the half dusk, the sparkling light of the monitor reflected in her clear blue eyes, she shines. She shines. And still outside it snows and grows dark.
***
Meanwhile, in my office, I was trying to concentrate on completing my part of the quarterly accounts. As I endlessly cut and pasted, shifted columns, imputed data from one place to another, my mind wandering to my wife. I thought of her body, of the last time me made love, I felt my penis become erect as I imagined myself tracing my finger tips across her upturned wrists, up her arms, and to her small, firm breasts. The way she always kissed me, when me made love, pushing her whole body up in to me, standing shorter than me, letting me push her hands behind her back in a mock hold, and the way she would almost try to climb up my body with the slinky movements of her lithe body. I imagined myself sliding my finger into her panties, pulling the elastic out and letting it snap back, oh, she would give a little cry, she liked that, I know she liked that…
My wife, I knew, was not just beautiful in my own mind because I loved her, she was a famous actress, desired by many men. She had not been in a Hollywood film for three years, but she still had an internet fan club, and was still sometimes recognised in town. She had got back to her weight before she was pregnant within six months of giving birth to our son, our sorry, unloved son: who had every advantage of a child of his class, who was well fed and clothes and protected, but also who was never wanted, who was nobody's favourite, who I knew both me and Anna felt alienated from and uncertain of. He was neither spoiled nor neglected, neither happy nor brattish. Although we both felt sentimental about him, I don't think either of his parents loved him, what sort of a person was he? I asked myself, felt guilty that I had no idea… my mind was wandering, but I still felt my erect penis pushing against the material of my pants, feeling a sudden, awful and unspecific flash of shame, I turned my attention back to my work.
But I could not concentrate, soon again I was thinking of my wife, but sadder thoughts this time. All alone in the house I knew she would be. Waiting for me, not because of who I am but because she had no one else to wait for. I wished I could protect her from the things life had done to her, to protect her from being lifted (relatively high) and then allowed to drift back down like a dead leaf in the Fall.
It hurt my heart so much to think of her alone - small and unprotected - huddled into the corner of the big seat before the monitor, as I knew she would be, surfing the net, hanging out in chat rooms, reading reviews of her old films perhaps. I felt myself ache all over with the need to protect her, to make her safe forever, but far worse than this impotent, shameful longing, I know exactly what is going to happen to her; and I can't stop it. Because it happens to everyone, and no one can stop it. It was Eight now, and I was finished for the night, my head now a traffic jam or a migraine, my temples congested, my eyes a road rage of ache. I grunted as I pulled myself up, and I wanted to be at home with my wife, I felt again all these emotions and feelings that I could never put into words, that I could never tell her, but felt that if I could just hold her, just be close to her, my love must make itself plain, even a methodical and uncertain soul as mine could love.
***
As the day becomes night, the world gradually changes: becomes something implacably and unalterably different. A harsh yellow spotlight, cutting across barbed wire and barren fields with a wide sweep of all seeing, all knowing, ignorance. A fat old Labrador, his useless cataract eyes wide and pleading, baying thinly at the hungry moon. An empty house, silent and rotting, left to the silent ghosts of forgotten memory and outdated newspapers. A pretty dark haired girl sitting cross-legged on the warm settee while it rains outside, still in her school blouse, humming along with the end ******s of a Disney film; fatally unaware of all the things that want to make her cry and squirm. The ruins of an old church; damp, silent, musty, horrible. A dark wood - tightly packed Silver Birches, the rustle of a hidden animal, the ceaseless crickets, the damp, expectant air - this pure, uncontaminated, terrifying place. This elemental dusk; this ungovernable dark; this bird-stained dawn. What does it all mean? All these things. All these things that come out at night.
I glanced outside, as I saved another spreadsheet, and noticed the snow was turning to rain, and was turning that snow that had already fallen to slush, melting away the shining white carpet that had nestled on the ground all day.
Some people really do wonder at the stars; sit there staring into the sky and feeling tiny and unimportant: but if you compare the stars to what surrounds them, you realise how little they really amount to. For every pin prick of light, there's a boundless infinity of nothingness, that doesn't care how brightly they burn, and will be there long after they've all died, and there's nothing and no one left to remember how beautiful they were.
Thirteen years previously, it was also raining. A boy, already fat and strong looking at fourteen and a half, is at his desk. Sitting by his window - his barely started English 'O' Level coursework cast aside - he glares at a passing women, who is laden uncomfortably with heavy shopping bags, with adolescent force. He glances behind him at his brightly lit room; its familiar order and construction; its Arsenal Football Club posters, its books and records, its light green walls, its testimony of a life.
He had always felt that darkness - twilight, gloom, rain, thunderclouds - was somehow superior to its opposite. It wasn't nicer, or even better - it wasn't somewhere he would rather be - it just seemed more real; more appropriate: more suited to the world of dangerous and irretrievable possibilities that he saw. To him, things looked closer to their real nature in the semi dark. And in the pitch black, when strange forms and frightening shapes seemed to dance or oscillate just beyond the range of his vision
Also, he sensed that he was somehow tied to the darkness by his nature, by his fate, by the strange ideas about karma and predestination that festered in his mind - and which seemed to him to be working backwards and forwards at the same time and thus not really moving at all, by his crippling inability to get any sleep.
He had studied his battered hands: which are already scarred and roughened by too few years filled with fights and conflict and neglect and sickness. His eyes narrow as he mechanically concentrates his vision: he sees dark hairs and freckles blending into patterns that are infinitely random; reddened and embarrassed knuckles; white flecked and unhealthily bitten down nails. On his left hand he sees an almost faded telephone number, written in a round, childish hand that is not his own. Looking harder still, he turns his palms upwards, plots his future: see things that are not yet there until his vision becomes a dizzying blur of headache and confusion.
Because the day was the time for romance and comedy; drama and interaction. For the struggle and adversity and strength of life and love. For the endless soap opera to play itself out time and time again; angry and funny, melancholy and proud, bland and defiant - and above all else - ceaseless. For life. Which was sometimes mad, sometimes terrible, but always contained by its own limits. And night . . . And the night . . .
And the night is tragedy. Loss; sadness; closure; pain; regret; dislocation; emptiness; longing; harm. Some people are frightened of the dark. It makes them quicken their stride and lower their eyes. Some of us don't like the dark. But when we nervously search the dark our childhood rooms for a terrible set on monster eyes, or when, as adults, we warily scan the forbidding streets for signs of danger, we are most times looking for something that is no longer there, and what is really there is worse.
Listen to me: when I was fourteen I killed my sister. Yes, Yes, I really did. There are many things I must tell you about myself.
***
Bored, and feeling worn out despite having done nothing all day, Anna typed in her own name into a search engine, and unconsciously mentally flexed her mind as she waited to see how many hits she would get. She found a site called www.c-s-s-a.com which she had seen before. On it, someone had written several stories about her, all of them the same, all of them full of violence and brutality directed not at her but at people in her presence. The stories made her feel strange and sad, they did not make sense, but at least somebody somewhere still remembered her when she was somebody else entirely.
As, 15 miles away, I got into my car, and wearily flicked on the radio to catch the back end of the news, Anna self consciously pushed her hand up her top and pulled her bra aside. She tweaked her nipple, squeezed it, hard enough to hurt a little, but she did not stop. She squirmed a little on her seat as she saw there was a new story about her, and clicked on it, began to twist her nipple uncomfortably as she began to read, seeing her own name as the protagonist of someone else's internal fantasy. Blushing a little despite being alone, she hitched up her skirt and rubbed her finger delicately over the surface of her panties, tracing out the outline of her sex.
Even at this time of night, the traffic was murder. The radio announced that there had been a violent coup in a small African republic, the former ruler had been executed, along with his wife and twelve year old twin sons. The death toll had in fact reached about 600 they estimated. A minor industrial accident in the Ukraine had caused severe damage to the local environment, experts claimed, the forecast for the weekend was a bleak, and me may expect more snow. I pulled out of the carpark, and began to drive through the slushy streets, automatically, as if pulled along rails, or drawn by a great magnetic force.
Anna read that in the story, she was raped and beaten, only for hero, the writer, to rescue her with a spectacularly violent show of gun play. Then, rather than in fact being her saviour, in the story he himself then threw her down and violated her again. Anna let out little gasps as her hand slid inside her panties and began to slide in and out of her vagina, with her thumb she massaged her clitoris, and awkwardly scrolled left handed through the text. Finally, reaching the point where she no longer needed the story at all, when she had gained her own momentum, she arched her head back, and busily dipped two fingers in and out of her opening while, perversely, forcing two fingers of her other hand in and out of her own mouth. Her hair, which she had let down, spilled messily around her head as her eyes fluttered and she became consumed with herself, sucking and gobbling at her own hand while at the same time fingering herself hard and passionately.
And I, summer born and summer loving, ground slowly through the winter night, edging through the traffic in the town. The news wrapped up with a report of a 15 year old girl who had been missing for three days, but was now found, dead. She had been carefully dressed in clothes that were not her own and clumsily made up to look like a hooker, and they had found that over 10 pounds of soil had been forced into her anus, mouth, and vagina, cramming the cavities of her body with filth. The police believed tests on the PH level of the soil could provide a vital clue. She was survived by a mother, father, and two younger sisters.
Eyes firmly closed, Anna orgasmed initially, but did not relent, merely shifted the focus of her busy hand to her clit again - she would test herself this way, see how long she could bare to continue… her head helplessly nodding, her legs cramped and aching, she came again, and again, then finally allowed herself to stop. Her hair a mess, her make up run, she looked maddeningly erotic. Carefully, shakily, she picked herself up, logged out of the site. She felt as she always felt right after… a little guilty but mostly ridiculous. The story, of course, was horrible, and perverted in its way. It was not the words themselves that drove Anna on, they were, as one would expect clumsy and tactless, it was merely the fact of the story itself, her own existence in someone else's mind, however shiftless and pathetic, however pointless or poor the story seemed, it was to Anna a kind of power nevertheless.
She hurried to wash up and fix herself up, knowing her husband would be home soon, tired and in ill temper no doubt… How could she ever know that the man who wrote the stories was not a stranger at all, but a geeky but handsome 25 year old accounts junior who worked for her husband, and had had a crush on Anna since meeting her at a works Christmas do, and recognising her from Scary Movie, a hit movie in its day, and now just old enough to become kitsch and cool. Of course, such knowledge would have destroyed the tenuous spell and complicated web of self contradiction that allowed Anna to enjoy the stories, and she would have seen them then for what they were - childish and offensive wet dreams, that were not about her at all, only him… hers just a name at random, a girl in a photograph.
***
That night we went to bed early, after watching TV for a couple of hours. Dinner was spoiled, and although Anna said it was no big deal I felt guilty, especially after we had rowed about my late hours only this week. I ordered pizza for us to share, and sitting down to eat with the TV on, I finally felt the two of us relax. I checked on my son once, but did not let him spoil the evening as he sometimes could, with his helplessly, with his being there. He was up, playing clumsily with some doll or other, I do not know if it is bad or not, if he should sleep or not, I do not really care. I patted him on the head and left him to his own devises in his playpen. Downstairs, I made fun of all the programmes on TV, and Anna giggled and snuggled against me. In moments like this I felt so close to her. That my doubts and daytime fears were groundless. It is the night, I thought to myself, it is the night that drives us together - but here like this, we fit into each other perfectly. I felt a rush of affection for her, as we laughed easily, and I slid my arm around her waist and felt her stomach muscles flex as she laughed at my mocking of Buffy The Vampire's latest exploits. My wife; this girl, who like the girl in the REM song, always said her name on the phone, like I wouldn't know it was her… I laughed along as we bantered, pulled her close to me, felt her lean into my body, I smelled her clean hair, felt her closeness, making me feel whole. She flirtatiously punched my leg as I made a comment about Sarah Michelle Gellar's ass, I felt so in love, so together.
***
I knew that night that I was to get lucky, as soon as Anna came out of the bathroom wearing her sexy silk nightdress. I felt myself harden immediately as she bit her lip and rubbed her hand across her belly and towards her breasts. She giggled nervously, but then fixed my eyes seriously and began to do a little strip tease. She gyrated her hips and slinked out of her night dress, pouting and licking her lips all the while. Laying back, I was, as ever, amazed at her beauty, her slim sexy body, her long lithe legs, her tight breasts, I wanted to take it all in at once, to touch her everywhere all at once, to possess her, I wanted in these moments to actually BE her. Playing along, but not really having to make myself, I jumped out of the bed, nude… well aware that as beautiful as my wife was, I was plain. Tall but thirty lbs heavy, with a round, intelligent but fleshy face, my light brown skin smooth and largely hairless, my appearance pleasant and unstriking, just like any of the other guys in suits you pass in the street or talk to on the phone from your office about things neither of you really care for every day - but right now this did not matter. Anna, and when I thought about this sometimes, it did me no good to remember she WAS a talented actress - always could make me feel desired, handsome, manly. Her own girlishness and vulnerability, affect as it was, making me feel conversely macho and strong.
I pretended to pant like a dog, and ran at her, snatched her in my arms and lifted her up, and carefully but roughly dumped her on the bed. "Yeah!" "Yeah!" "Thass what Im talking bout girl! Yeah!" I cried, ghetto style, because I knew secretly Anna was excited by that. My thoughts were only of her as I landed on top of her, caught her as she laughed and coquettishly tried to roll away, and pinning her unresisting arms above her head and kissed the line of her collar bone.
But listen, yes, there are things I must tell you about me. It is important that you understand. Yes, I killed my sister when I was fourteen. I did not mean to do it, and I have always, all my life since wished more than anything else in the world that I did not do it, but I did, I really did.
***
Her name was Emilie, named with the French spelling for no reason other than my father's pretentiousness. She was a year older than me, and when I was younger, she was my only friend. There is so much I could tell you, of our adventures, of our friendship, of our fights, but I have neither the inclination nor the time. We were close, closer than a brother and sister normally were, but nothing ever happened until the last time, I swear to you. There were nights when I could not sleep, when I would sit up in her room till 3 or 4 AM, while she explained to me her theories of the world, read to me her depressing poetry, or from the left wing books she was always reading. I grew up thinking she was the most intelligent person I could ever know, that she was the font of all knowledge almost, the orthodoxy of my world view. In my way, I worshipped her. I listened to the music she liked, and liked it because she did. I believed things because she did, and because I believed them correct or else Em would not believe in them.
I followed her wherever she went whenever I could, I listened to her advice in all things, she helped me with my school work, we would sit in the garden together in the summer and she would tell me what things were made of, why an aeroplane would not just drop out of the sky if you turned the engine off, why cats were not like dogs, why we were rich and other's were poor. In the winter, or when it rained, we would sit in the old conservatory at the back of our house - nothing more than a brick outline and a corrugated plastic roof held up by a few wooden beams, where the washer and dryer sat, and which was our place. A world that did not belong to our parents - my urbane father with his silly beard and pretensions of being upper class and radical, her tart-with-a-heart mother, pretty and who looked 15 years younger than she was.
There, we would sit on the huddled opposite each other on floor in the far corner that was closest to the kitchen and the pathetic and overgrown herb patch; when it was cold next, to an old convection heater that we had got somehow after our mothers parents both died, in a cancer scare inspired (correct and fatal within six months anyway, for him) suicide pact. On those days, we would play games. Chess, which my sister would nearly always win, although not so much better than me she could get away with letting me win, which I am not sure she would have done anyway, I was never her intellectual equal. Monopoly, which I would win more times than I lost. I don't know why, and it is strange to think I should even tell you, but the less skill or intellect a game would require, I was far more likely to win. By which I mean not only that my sister would win chess games every time because she was cleverer than me, but that games of pure chance or luck, I would win far more frequently, as if once she had not the use of the advantage of her superior intelligence, some kind of force majeure of my personality would take overwhelm her.
And on those rainy and cold days (when we not at school, or I was not playing football, or on my computer with a friend from my class, I hardly remember those times) Emilie would tell me stories of ghosts and spirits, which she believed in passionately. Perhaps nothing would ever have gone wrong, perhaps we would have grown up comfortably and me dependant on her, until she outgrew needed me as an audience, or I outgrew needing her to tell me what to do and think, if not for one fateful day. On that day, when I was 13 and a quarter, a boy a year older than my sister tripped her in the corridor and made her fall and graze her knee. I hit him and broke his nose and made him cry, and then, perhaps because this left me unsatisfied, I hit the nearest of his friends as well. I was suspended for 3 days, my mother was frantic, but my father vaguely approved as he saw it as an act of rebellion against the bourgeois superstructure. My sister was not bullied again, and from that day she looked at me differently and I, taking my lead from her, looked at her in a different way too. Ultimately, this new, partial and unequal equality in our relationship was to prove terrible, fatal.
***
I kissed Anna's collar bone, up to her neck again, over and over, becoming lost in the task, I kept her wrists pinned together above her head with one hand, while the other, lead by instinct more that intent, slowly crept up her rib cage and to her breast, which I held, fondled, tried to contain in one of my fat and graceless paws, but could not quite. My lips found their way further up, I twisted her face away from mine and kissed her hairline, at the back of her neck, all the way across to her ear, kissing passionately, wanting to eat her all up almost. I kissed her lips, her cheek, the hollow of her neck, her throat, I stuck my tongue in her ear (because when I was younger, the boys at school told me that girls loved this. I kissed her hair, again and again, all the while holding her as my captive, her wrists held high above her head on our king size bed by my strong forearm and powerful grip, my other hand grappling and fondling first one breast then the other. Finally I realised her hands, but she did not bring her hands down to defend herself, she reached up and grabbed the headboard to stretch herself and leave her body even more vulnerable to me than before. I went lower, sliding myself down her body, kissing whatever part of her was available at the time, her collar bone again, her left breast, her flat stomach, I settled when I felt my chest pushing against her sex, my broad and pock marked shoulders set against her spread legs, and my face level with her belly. I stuck my tongue into her belly button and began to frantically French kiss her there, performing an imitation of oral sex while she squirmed desperately and moaned and whimpered but never asked me to stop.
I felt my erection become more and more firm as Anna became lost in the pleasure of what I was doing, I felt so alive, I felt so good and strong and great. I kept kissing and forcing my tongue really hard into the hollow of her belly button until her moaning and soft cries told me she could take no more… than I kissed even harder for another three of four minutes before releasing her. She wore sky blue eye shadow to match the colour she had painted her nails this morning, she looked more beautiful than anything I had ever seen or imagined, her mascara was smeared and her lips parted and her hair all messed up. I gripped her ribs, span her around and dumped her face down, and started to slowly drive myself in and out of her sex from behind. I felt the excitement in me swell, I knew I was going to cum soon and had to fight the urge to speed up my rhythm, Anna was gasping and crying out quite loud now, I felt my nuts tighten, and my dick start to feel like it was buzzing, fizzing, effervescent … so I pulled out, felt Anna sag and moan as I let her back down at the last minute as I did myself. I pushed most of my weight down on her shoulders to keep her pinned face down on the bed and French kissed her back and neck some more, I pulled her hair up and kissed her hairline again, I pushed her right down and the side of her face right into the bed, and gave her a love bite, really hard on the side of her neck. She whimpered and moaned, as all the while my weight was pushing down mostly on her hips and stopping her from grinding them into the bed to keep the stimulation going. I kissed her again and again on the spot where I gave her a love bite, forcing my tongue right into the slightly bruised flesh, and making her gasps and moans take a higher pitch. When I was sure that the immediate danger had passed, I repositioned myself slightly, and placed my penis against my wife's Anus. Slowly, carefully, wanting it to hurt but not to hurt I penetrated her there, forced all of my length inside of her. Anna gasped and sucked her breath in, but did not ask me to stop. Just as carefully, I withdrew, and then surged my penis back into her sex hard and fast, this time making love to her with real abandon and lifting my pelvis from hers, so that each thrust rubbed her front against the bed and further stimulated her. With one hand I supported most of my weight, with the other I felt Anna's breast, then pushed it up into her mouth and made me suck my fingers, then rubbed the wet, saliva soaked fingers back over her rock hard nipples and her tight breasts, and so on, over and over.
This time, I kept myself down and Anna got to the point of no return first, it was really hard to stop myself pounding her, and then me over the finishing line and beyond; but I did. I withdrew, forced my weight back on her again to push her flat against the bed, and placed my cock against her anus. Anna whined and in my mind I saw tears prickling in here eyes that were hidden from me. But she didn't ask me to stop, I knew she didn't want me to, and neither did I. I slowly penetrated her asshole the whole time crushing my weight against her, feeling her so close to me, feeling every spasm and twitch of her body as it fought to accept this invasion. I took my hand and placed it on the side of her head and pushed her face hard into the bed, my other hand gripped and squeezed her hip, but not painfully. After I had brought her down, I pulled myself up and put my hand back on her breast and started to penetrate her vagina again.
***
After I beat up the bully who had tripper her, my relationship with my sister, if not inverse, at least became very different. She no longer saw me as her pet, as the younger and lighter skinned of the two of us kid who followed her and needed her. Within a week, I was teaching her to play tennis, and we were playing cricket outside, her hopeless, but eager to try, and chess was forgotten. Of course, I took great pride in my physical prowess, which my sister, who I still adored and worshipped, seemed to admire so much. I could fix her bike, I could climb trees, I even built us a den at the bottom of our garden out of old packing crates, which our father had brought home from work and dumped in the garden because he had no real use for them, and had only taken them to prove he could. I built it under a rowan tree, and against the side of a thick laurel hedge, sheltered at 3 and a half directions from the elements by the tree and hedge, and the 8 foot brick wall between our three acres and our next door neighbours two. It felt like a fort, the one opening easily faced up and defended by the occupier. Oh, it sounds silly now I'm sure, I am sure it sounds silly to you, but to think of it, to think of our den, its construction, the fresh summer grass that July, the concrete path which ran the length of our garden which my father had clumsily but effectively laid through the grass 6 years previously, the year we moved there… it makes me felt how I cant describe.
The den was small, room for a picnic box which my mother would prepare for us, a few fans of cola, and one and a half people. At 13 I was already 11 and a half stone and 5 10 tall, so I would sit at the back, my back against the wall, and Emilie would sit against me, on my lap, resting her weight against mine. We even had a special place to hide our cigarettes, Emilie smoked and I tried to because she did, although I never enjoyed it. I don't know, perhaps it all started to go wrong right there…
Let me tell you about my sister. She was tall, not as tall as me, but tall. She took after my mother, who was beautiful, more in looks, while I looked like my father, tall awkward and strong. My mother was a slight women, and black, born in Barbados and emigrated with her father in 1956, but my sister was slimmer and almost darker than our mother, she wore her hair in French braids a long, long time before it was the fashion, people picked on her at school because we were the only dark skinned kids there, but they never picked on me, and after I beat up two of the boys from the fourth year because they bullied her, no one bullied her either. My father was white, and both very tall and grossly overweight; 6 6 and 300 lbs, and yet he was a gentle personality, who went bald before he was 35 but grew a ridiculous inverse goatee (shaving the area were a goatee would grow and leaving what should be the outline unshaved). He was the son of a manic depressive master carpenter, and he had won a scholarship to Oxford University, and had ever since then been trying to forget his class. My father's father, I learned much later, was a murderer, but he was never caught. He killed 4 men, two in the war who he had to live with and could not stand to, and two after. I was 25 when my Dad told me, but his reasoning, desperate as it was, that as my grandfather had lived till 77 before dying of lung cancer, it was only one murder every 20 years, which was not so bad when looked at it that way, or at least not so evil, had a certain perverse logic. My grandfather was a pathologically shy man who would leave his house and sit in the shed whenever my grandmother invited company, and possessed of a terrible temper. My father was the opposite, intelligent (no doubt the genetic source or spawn of my sisters intellect). Outgoing, arrogant and with an affected foppishness that irritated me incalculably when I was younger and made me love him when I was over 21…
My sister may have inherited his brains, but I got his brawn, and although I am only 6 3 to his 6 6, and 240 lbs to his 300, I look the image of him, other than my muddy skin and dark eyes. I shaved my head since I was 18 and let my beard grow, never questioning what it meant until Anna saw a picture of my dad at 35 and said how alike me looked…
Now… I have wasted too much time already trying to excuse myself, I will tell you how I killed my sister. I don't want to, but I must, I must, I owe you that at least. I was 14. She was 15, her 16th birthday only 49 days away. It was the summer of course, for I - as I have already told you, was summer born and summer loving, Em a child of the winter. It was late August, a hot day, and we sat outside shielding ourselves from the sun behind the great laurel hedge that grew 15 feet tall at the left side of her garden, where I would frequently have to search for tennis balls I had driven there when playing garden cricket with my father, a sport he was both hopelessly attracted to and hopeless at. At the corner of the hedge, there was a weaker tree, which we used to lean against because it was out of sight of the big kitchen window. Incidentally and meaninglessly, the same window that my sister, then 11 years old, and father both claimed they had seen a UFO out of one February night, and that neither me nor my mother believed them, even as much as we wanted to. We sat hidden from site, and then the worst thing happened. My sister asked me to put sun tan lotion on her back and I did, and I kept spreading it, up and down her arms, I would start at her wrists, and rub all the way up to her arm pit, and then all the way down again, over and over. I pulled up her baggy tee shirt and rubbed the lotion on her skinny stomach. I pulled her baggy tee shit off without thinking what I was doing, and my sister, too skinny, too sad, sat cross-legged before me and smiled lightly. I kissed her, she smelled of coconut sun tan lotion, she tasted of it. I kissed her mouth, my hand found her rib cage and settled there, we kissed and kissed : all afternoon we kissed, nothing else, I swear nothing else, but we did this, yes, we really did. We kissed and kissed and kissed. Her body felt like it was meting into my own.
And six weeks later she killed her self. Emilie was not stupid girl, I believe she knew what she was doing… she wanted to die, so she did not slit her wrists, or take *****, or jump in the river like people who want only attention and slip away almost by accident… she went out down the pub - she was 15, my father approved, in his liberal way. School had just started again. She stepped in front of a train at the last minute. She was selfish, and no idiot, she knew what to do. She staggered down to the rail line, drunk as hell or so we were told later, and jumped in front of the London to Norwich intercity 22 15, when there was no chance for the driver to stop. She was of course, killed instantly, wiped out; there was in fact very little of her for my parents to bury; the part of her I committed to the ground was unharmed however, it was inside of me.
I knew she did it for me, because of me. We never really talked again before she died. A few awkward conversations but it was not the same. I killed her, do you see? She was the clever one of course, but she was always messed up and I just pretended to be, maybe still do pretend to be, to try and be like her. I was never like her, she was not like me.
So you see, you understand… I killed her. I worshipped her at the time, but looking I see, she never ate enough, she braider her hair tight, she only ever saw the bad side of things… She was the weak one, but I could not protect her, I drove her over the edge instead, because I was too weak to resist. When I say I killed her, I fear you will think I am being childish, self serving, feeding my own depression… this is not true… I kissed her on purpose, I kissed her and I killed her, it was me, it was me that was the straw the broke her, I killed her, I killed her, killed her. All my life I wished for anything to change this, but I cannot. In my heart, I remember the feel of her slender shoulder in my hand, I remember the taste of her, the texture of her wavy, silly hair, the feel of her body against my own. I killed her, I killed her, oh God, I really did kill her, she is dead and no one in the whole world understands…
***
I fucked Anna with pure abandon now, driving myself and twisting myself up into her busy from the back. I sensed she was about to cum, and knew I was about to, so pulled again, and violated her anus yet again, pushed my penis inside of her, ever so slowly and carefully again, and withdrew equally carefully. After this invasion I felt Anna relax, so I decided to violate her again, she whimpered harder than ever and started to cry little, with frustration rather than pain, when I gradually, stage by stage, pushed my cock right inside her ass and out again. Next, I flipped her onto her back, and held her arms outstretched, so that she was held cruciform against the bed and started to really fuck her pussy, she was on the edge already, and I was not far behind, I drove myself up into her while she was pinned as hard as I could, I made her come once, then twice… as my last act I twisted her round, pushed her hard into the bed and roughly penetrated her ass, I was close anyway, and came up inside her ass after two or three thrusts. I ejaculated, felt myself completed by her. She gasped at every thrust as I hit that three or four times after I'd cum. Anna gasped her breath in and tried to calm, but I did not let her off lightly. She had cum twice, but I kept teasing her, I slipped my hand underneath her, laid on top of her with my weight to deny her movement and finger fucked her, hard. She made noises half way between crying and crying out, but was trying to hold it all in because after all our son was sleeping two rooms away…
She was all whacked out, but I fingered her to torment her for seven or eight minutes, I realised she was not able to come again, so I gave her another three minutes of whimpering and hopelessly trying to pull her vulnerable sex out of the way before I stopped. She had tears in my eyes that made me feel terrible, but she kissed me and kissed me, holding her body close to my own until I felt better. I wrapped my big arm around her slender frame and she fell asleep against me, I was awake for hours, but finally dropped off myself, exhausted, having cum and made her cum 3 or 4 times… Maybe it was the success of her old life that demanded such a grandstand show from me to make her truly happy.
***
Anna, my movie star, my love, my super star… yes I love you, I never loved anyone else, but I love you. I hugged her close to me while she slept, feeling an intense need to protect her after the passion of our love making…
I want to tell you of our house, the house I had when I was younger and my sister was alive… the house was big, but it was not ours…. The garden was three acres, mostly a wide lawn, which was shielded at two sides with thick laurel hedge. From the front you could see the back, a wide green spread of lawn. Toys and rubbish defining our part from the whole… the way the rowan tree at the top of the garden bent towards us, the row of fast growing pines my father planted in the early 90's, the sand pit he built out of concrete blocks and me and Em were both scared to use because we had seen a grass snake in there, the old Anderson shelter that was still standing… oh, how could I describe this to you?
This garden, this piece of landscape, these bushes, these outgrown toys, this uncut grass, this lone apple tree, this old and rusting Anderson shelter… this was my life, this was my life! In that wide stretch of grass, that simple construction of branch and stolen packing crates that I still see standing when I walk passed our old house. My whole life is contained, defined and decided before I was even grown up. It hurts my heart so much to think of it. Oh, Emilie, Emilie… I'm so sorry, so very sorry, you could have been ok, you could of gone on take your rightful place in the world, a minor celebrity with wealth and a small fame, something academic perhaps… if not for having a brother like me. I know that I killed you when I kissed you, of course I am sorry, so sorry, but what can that mean, what can that do? Even now, I write your name on my hand, but your dead, what can it mean?
How ironic, that my sister, with all the talent, all the brains should prove to be nothing, and I would be the one to succeed. Not only am I in a good job now and will probably be financial director her in 5 years time, I achieved a real fame the easy way, I married a girl on TV.
I picture the garden right now… can you understand? Can you feel what I feel? The smell of the grass, the smell of coconut sun tan lotion that bewitched me that lazy afternoon when we kissed and kissed and I felt so strong. Oh, God, Oh God…
***
After fucking her completely, fucking her in the ass and pussy in turn till she dissolved into me, I rested. After I was sure she was asleep, I placed my hand in Anna's (dyed black) hair and ran my fingers through it, up and down… I kissed her hair again, it smelled of soap. I wrapped my arm more tightly around her and pulled her closer to me. I felt her body next to mine, snug, belonging… I felt bad for all the bad thoughts I had, my wife Anna, surely was the girl for me. Everything I ever did wrong I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Slowly I fell asleep too, and cuddled my wife as I did so. I never meant to do any of things I did wrong, and if they have fucked me up forever, I did my best to get better, I did my best.
What is the difference between the day and night? What is the meaning of these strange epiphanies I sense but do not understand about the night, the dark, its special meaning to me? I just don't know anymore. In my mind, I visualized myself walking through the night, all the way through the night, south east of here, toward the sea… into the sea, into the sea… Oh God, I never meant for this, but Anna I love you, really I do.
Celebrity: Anna Faris
By: Quiet Storm
Disclaimer: This story is not entirely true, nor do I wish that it was.
Sitting in her apartment late one winter's afternoon, Anna gloomily stared out at cold, desolate street. When she was younger, twelve or thirteen, she had loved it when the snow fell; it obliterated difference, and it made everyone feel cold all the same. Now older, the girl she was separated and placed at near distance from the girl she was, she hated it's garish glare, the way it blanketed the streets, the way it made her shiver. Yet despite the unpleasant feeling the weather gave her, she perversely felt compelled to push her face closer to the window, right against the glass, feeling the cold outside transmitted through her window, and into her; from outside to the inside…The snow continued to swirl and drive, making the world look to her as if it had been filled with TV static. She clutched her arms to her chest, tugged at her sleeves girlishly, and stared for thirty seconds or more into the empty street, imagining everywhere she saw ghosts. Then she turned, shivered self consciously, and decided to make herself a hot drink. Behind her, the street seemed to darken slightly, as the spinning chaos of the snow storm intensified, and was no longer empty.
I called Anna from the office and told her I would be late. Despite the heated row we had only three days previously, Anna sounded distant, and unconcerned as I apologised again. Since Anna's acting career had stuttered to a halt, things had changed. I knew she resented staying in all day looking after our 18 month year old son, I knew she resented the hours I worked, but most of all she must have resented the way that the glittering world of celebrity that had once seemed hers had just slipped away. One day you are invited to every party, everywhere you go you see famous people, designers are begging you to wear their clothes, people walk up to you with awe in their eyes and ask you to sign pieces of paper as if just to touch something you once touched is a privilege… and then, the very next day, you're 28, you've got a kid and you're working part time three afternoon's a week at a the office of a vanity publisher and you're married to a dour and reliable management accountant. Sometimes I feared that I was losing her, that I could not hold on to her. The way she made me feel… like every house in every street is filled with something great and terrible that I cannot quite grasp; the way I used to feel when I was a child and stared out at the grey stormy sea… I never know what to say anymore; or perhaps I never really did, and only Anna could make me realise.
Softly, I replaced the telephone in its cradle, turned my eyes back to the spreadsheet that was hurting my eyes, and felt like I wanted to cry.
***
Annoyed, but determined not to show it after the last row, she turned the dinner down, thinking that it would be ruined anyway, and there was no point, and shiftlessly wandered around the room looking for something to do, to kill the hours until she could go to bed and world would stop again for a little while. Behind her, the night fell silently. The night painlessly draped itself over North London with infinite coldness and indifference. And a great and omniscient eye pans from east to west, right across the city. What can we see?
There's an old man bundled into a Oxfam coat and wearing a cloth cap, limping out of the twenty four hour grocers; the carrier bag at his side straining against the weight of the half sized tins of baked beans and spaghetti bolognese, muttering things to himself that he can't hear. He elaborately edges passed a group of teenagers, thirteen or fourteen year olds, who are clustered around a smashed up telephone box: on his way back to his lonely flat and the evening TV he knows by heart. The group of youths, the boys baseball capped and poised, halfway between men and the children they were last year, the pockets of their oversized and multi-sloganed bomber jackets stuffed with boiled sweets and cans of Pepsi Max; the girls standing close together, and all wearing coordinated tight white trousers and tracksuit tops. They barely look up at the elderly man as they continue passing round a lipstick stained Superking Menthol. And all of them keep getting this feeling that they can't understand, like something important is missing from their lives, they all feel ineffable. We all wanted what they want, and none of us ever got there: so we still keep wanting what they want, all our lives.
A rugged blonde tourist walks straight passed them - almost straight through them - not even looking. He's dressed in sturdy walking boots and a forest green sweater, and he shoulders a valuable and well used rucksack; smiling at the air and striding forward confidently, very badly lost but not letting on. The lack of responsibility or fear in his piercingly clear blue eyes making us hate him.
Two black kids are racing across a patch of burnt grass behind the grocers, towards an ugly tower block, called in by the darkness no doubt - the shorter of them clutching a scuffed basketball (stolen one afternoon three months ago from the Phys Ed storage room) tightly to his thin chest.
There's so much meaning hiding behind the mess and confusion. And so much going on that ultimately doesn't matter: is just background and colour and context. At any given moment, in any given place, you can see a given number of people - all with their very real pain and longing and fear - and none of them matter at all. It's bound to give you wrong impressions and exaggerated ideas about your own worth.
***
I can see a slight, dark haired girl: the smooth and beatific proportions of her face perhaps not quite conventionally beautiful, but way beyond pretty; she doesn't look day over twenty one, but she is almost thirty. She is sat at the computer table, he eyes squinting girlishly with concentration. Her navy blue skirt looks like school uniform and she's wearing a simple black top. Her dark hair is tied back in a tight pony tail, and her finger nails are painted sky blue. He noticed before he went to work, but she felt that he wasn't really looking. But she didn't blame him; sometimes she lost her temper with him, especially about the long hours he worked, but mostly she was sure it was more her fault than his, but was not sure why, what she had done, how the person she was had started going wrong, what she should do…
She kept a diary which she updated every single night - at least two sides of A4 - ever since she was 14; in which she would not only chronicle her day and it's small and pointless success's and failures, and also her own small town hopes and doubts, but also the troubles and jubilations of other people who she always felt that she didn't really know. When she was twenty it had been full of life, film premiers, money, fame, happiness, success. Now, she still maintained the same regime, still made the same in depth entries, but sometimes felt herself moved close to tears as she committed to paper her shopping lists, tales of her elderly aunts illnesses, good programmes she had seen on TV, this had become her life…
Sad songs and long books without proper endings sometimes made her want to cry too. She could juggle four balls, and could do simple conjuring tricks like make playing cards disappear up her sleeve. When she was very small she had an unaccountable fear that something would swoop down from the night sky and carry her away at a terrible speed. She occasionally cried in her sleep but could not remember why in the mornings. She had recurring dreams about tidal waves and tornado's which terrified her. Every year she had won the school tennis championship, even though she didn't want to. The competitiveness of sport always unsettled her, but she could never think of any way of losing without making it obvious. When she was a little girl she had feared the power of electricity. Occasionally, she lay awake all night, unable to sleep, unable even to think; other than in the jump-start language of the near hysteria of insomnia; but the next day the world was always how it should be once again. The smallness and simplicity of her thoughts sometimes embarrassed her into silence. When she ate, she always ate her greens first, and saved the part of the meal she liked last, and was consequently often too full by the time it came its turn to be eaten.
She folds her legs underneath her as she sits on the old office chair her husband stole from his work, or "repatriated" as he said, because he had been something of a communist while at university. Her efficient lungs empty and expand. Her healthy heart pumps the oxygenised, life giving, blood through her body. Her brain hums smartly with the criss cross of purpose and activity. A machine of infinite complexity is contained in her; and she knows none of this: her solemn face is broken into a wide smile as the cartoon dog bounces the cloaked villain on to the floor. As she flicks onto a different web page, she in fact feels like she is nothing. Not that she is worth nothing, because despite the depression and emptiness she sometimes felt she was too strong mentally to really sink into depression. She felt, sometimes, as if she simply was not real at all; that she was a ghost, that she was someone else's idea, a cartoon strip like the one she was watching on the cartoon network web site, but no one had coloured her in.
Unwatched. Who sees her here? Who blasts her unsteady, fickle path clear of obstacles and harm? Sitting in the half dusk, the sparkling light of the monitor reflected in her clear blue eyes, she shines. She shines. And still outside it snows and grows dark.
***
Meanwhile, in my office, I was trying to concentrate on completing my part of the quarterly accounts. As I endlessly cut and pasted, shifted columns, imputed data from one place to another, my mind wandering to my wife. I thought of her body, of the last time me made love, I felt my penis become erect as I imagined myself tracing my finger tips across her upturned wrists, up her arms, and to her small, firm breasts. The way she always kissed me, when me made love, pushing her whole body up in to me, standing shorter than me, letting me push her hands behind her back in a mock hold, and the way she would almost try to climb up my body with the slinky movements of her lithe body. I imagined myself sliding my finger into her panties, pulling the elastic out and letting it snap back, oh, she would give a little cry, she liked that, I know she liked that…
My wife, I knew, was not just beautiful in my own mind because I loved her, she was a famous actress, desired by many men. She had not been in a Hollywood film for three years, but she still had an internet fan club, and was still sometimes recognised in town. She had got back to her weight before she was pregnant within six months of giving birth to our son, our sorry, unloved son: who had every advantage of a child of his class, who was well fed and clothes and protected, but also who was never wanted, who was nobody's favourite, who I knew both me and Anna felt alienated from and uncertain of. He was neither spoiled nor neglected, neither happy nor brattish. Although we both felt sentimental about him, I don't think either of his parents loved him, what sort of a person was he? I asked myself, felt guilty that I had no idea… my mind was wandering, but I still felt my erect penis pushing against the material of my pants, feeling a sudden, awful and unspecific flash of shame, I turned my attention back to my work.
But I could not concentrate, soon again I was thinking of my wife, but sadder thoughts this time. All alone in the house I knew she would be. Waiting for me, not because of who I am but because she had no one else to wait for. I wished I could protect her from the things life had done to her, to protect her from being lifted (relatively high) and then allowed to drift back down like a dead leaf in the Fall.
It hurt my heart so much to think of her alone - small and unprotected - huddled into the corner of the big seat before the monitor, as I knew she would be, surfing the net, hanging out in chat rooms, reading reviews of her old films perhaps. I felt myself ache all over with the need to protect her, to make her safe forever, but far worse than this impotent, shameful longing, I know exactly what is going to happen to her; and I can't stop it. Because it happens to everyone, and no one can stop it. It was Eight now, and I was finished for the night, my head now a traffic jam or a migraine, my temples congested, my eyes a road rage of ache. I grunted as I pulled myself up, and I wanted to be at home with my wife, I felt again all these emotions and feelings that I could never put into words, that I could never tell her, but felt that if I could just hold her, just be close to her, my love must make itself plain, even a methodical and uncertain soul as mine could love.
***
As the day becomes night, the world gradually changes: becomes something implacably and unalterably different. A harsh yellow spotlight, cutting across barbed wire and barren fields with a wide sweep of all seeing, all knowing, ignorance. A fat old Labrador, his useless cataract eyes wide and pleading, baying thinly at the hungry moon. An empty house, silent and rotting, left to the silent ghosts of forgotten memory and outdated newspapers. A pretty dark haired girl sitting cross-legged on the warm settee while it rains outside, still in her school blouse, humming along with the end ******s of a Disney film; fatally unaware of all the things that want to make her cry and squirm. The ruins of an old church; damp, silent, musty, horrible. A dark wood - tightly packed Silver Birches, the rustle of a hidden animal, the ceaseless crickets, the damp, expectant air - this pure, uncontaminated, terrifying place. This elemental dusk; this ungovernable dark; this bird-stained dawn. What does it all mean? All these things. All these things that come out at night.
I glanced outside, as I saved another spreadsheet, and noticed the snow was turning to rain, and was turning that snow that had already fallen to slush, melting away the shining white carpet that had nestled on the ground all day.
Some people really do wonder at the stars; sit there staring into the sky and feeling tiny and unimportant: but if you compare the stars to what surrounds them, you realise how little they really amount to. For every pin prick of light, there's a boundless infinity of nothingness, that doesn't care how brightly they burn, and will be there long after they've all died, and there's nothing and no one left to remember how beautiful they were.
Thirteen years previously, it was also raining. A boy, already fat and strong looking at fourteen and a half, is at his desk. Sitting by his window - his barely started English 'O' Level coursework cast aside - he glares at a passing women, who is laden uncomfortably with heavy shopping bags, with adolescent force. He glances behind him at his brightly lit room; its familiar order and construction; its Arsenal Football Club posters, its books and records, its light green walls, its testimony of a life.
He had always felt that darkness - twilight, gloom, rain, thunderclouds - was somehow superior to its opposite. It wasn't nicer, or even better - it wasn't somewhere he would rather be - it just seemed more real; more appropriate: more suited to the world of dangerous and irretrievable possibilities that he saw. To him, things looked closer to their real nature in the semi dark. And in the pitch black, when strange forms and frightening shapes seemed to dance or oscillate just beyond the range of his vision
Also, he sensed that he was somehow tied to the darkness by his nature, by his fate, by the strange ideas about karma and predestination that festered in his mind - and which seemed to him to be working backwards and forwards at the same time and thus not really moving at all, by his crippling inability to get any sleep.
He had studied his battered hands: which are already scarred and roughened by too few years filled with fights and conflict and neglect and sickness. His eyes narrow as he mechanically concentrates his vision: he sees dark hairs and freckles blending into patterns that are infinitely random; reddened and embarrassed knuckles; white flecked and unhealthily bitten down nails. On his left hand he sees an almost faded telephone number, written in a round, childish hand that is not his own. Looking harder still, he turns his palms upwards, plots his future: see things that are not yet there until his vision becomes a dizzying blur of headache and confusion.
Because the day was the time for romance and comedy; drama and interaction. For the struggle and adversity and strength of life and love. For the endless soap opera to play itself out time and time again; angry and funny, melancholy and proud, bland and defiant - and above all else - ceaseless. For life. Which was sometimes mad, sometimes terrible, but always contained by its own limits. And night . . . And the night . . .
And the night is tragedy. Loss; sadness; closure; pain; regret; dislocation; emptiness; longing; harm. Some people are frightened of the dark. It makes them quicken their stride and lower their eyes. Some of us don't like the dark. But when we nervously search the dark our childhood rooms for a terrible set on monster eyes, or when, as adults, we warily scan the forbidding streets for signs of danger, we are most times looking for something that is no longer there, and what is really there is worse.
Listen to me: when I was fourteen I killed my sister. Yes, Yes, I really did. There are many things I must tell you about myself.
***
Bored, and feeling worn out despite having done nothing all day, Anna typed in her own name into a search engine, and unconsciously mentally flexed her mind as she waited to see how many hits she would get. She found a site called www.c-s-s-a.com which she had seen before. On it, someone had written several stories about her, all of them the same, all of them full of violence and brutality directed not at her but at people in her presence. The stories made her feel strange and sad, they did not make sense, but at least somebody somewhere still remembered her when she was somebody else entirely.
As, 15 miles away, I got into my car, and wearily flicked on the radio to catch the back end of the news, Anna self consciously pushed her hand up her top and pulled her bra aside. She tweaked her nipple, squeezed it, hard enough to hurt a little, but she did not stop. She squirmed a little on her seat as she saw there was a new story about her, and clicked on it, began to twist her nipple uncomfortably as she began to read, seeing her own name as the protagonist of someone else's internal fantasy. Blushing a little despite being alone, she hitched up her skirt and rubbed her finger delicately over the surface of her panties, tracing out the outline of her sex.
Even at this time of night, the traffic was murder. The radio announced that there had been a violent coup in a small African republic, the former ruler had been executed, along with his wife and twelve year old twin sons. The death toll had in fact reached about 600 they estimated. A minor industrial accident in the Ukraine had caused severe damage to the local environment, experts claimed, the forecast for the weekend was a bleak, and me may expect more snow. I pulled out of the carpark, and began to drive through the slushy streets, automatically, as if pulled along rails, or drawn by a great magnetic force.
Anna read that in the story, she was raped and beaten, only for hero, the writer, to rescue her with a spectacularly violent show of gun play. Then, rather than in fact being her saviour, in the story he himself then threw her down and violated her again. Anna let out little gasps as her hand slid inside her panties and began to slide in and out of her vagina, with her thumb she massaged her clitoris, and awkwardly scrolled left handed through the text. Finally, reaching the point where she no longer needed the story at all, when she had gained her own momentum, she arched her head back, and busily dipped two fingers in and out of her opening while, perversely, forcing two fingers of her other hand in and out of her own mouth. Her hair, which she had let down, spilled messily around her head as her eyes fluttered and she became consumed with herself, sucking and gobbling at her own hand while at the same time fingering herself hard and passionately.
And I, summer born and summer loving, ground slowly through the winter night, edging through the traffic in the town. The news wrapped up with a report of a 15 year old girl who had been missing for three days, but was now found, dead. She had been carefully dressed in clothes that were not her own and clumsily made up to look like a hooker, and they had found that over 10 pounds of soil had been forced into her anus, mouth, and vagina, cramming the cavities of her body with filth. The police believed tests on the PH level of the soil could provide a vital clue. She was survived by a mother, father, and two younger sisters.
Eyes firmly closed, Anna orgasmed initially, but did not relent, merely shifted the focus of her busy hand to her clit again - she would test herself this way, see how long she could bare to continue… her head helplessly nodding, her legs cramped and aching, she came again, and again, then finally allowed herself to stop. Her hair a mess, her make up run, she looked maddeningly erotic. Carefully, shakily, she picked herself up, logged out of the site. She felt as she always felt right after… a little guilty but mostly ridiculous. The story, of course, was horrible, and perverted in its way. It was not the words themselves that drove Anna on, they were, as one would expect clumsy and tactless, it was merely the fact of the story itself, her own existence in someone else's mind, however shiftless and pathetic, however pointless or poor the story seemed, it was to Anna a kind of power nevertheless.
She hurried to wash up and fix herself up, knowing her husband would be home soon, tired and in ill temper no doubt… How could she ever know that the man who wrote the stories was not a stranger at all, but a geeky but handsome 25 year old accounts junior who worked for her husband, and had had a crush on Anna since meeting her at a works Christmas do, and recognising her from Scary Movie, a hit movie in its day, and now just old enough to become kitsch and cool. Of course, such knowledge would have destroyed the tenuous spell and complicated web of self contradiction that allowed Anna to enjoy the stories, and she would have seen them then for what they were - childish and offensive wet dreams, that were not about her at all, only him… hers just a name at random, a girl in a photograph.
***
That night we went to bed early, after watching TV for a couple of hours. Dinner was spoiled, and although Anna said it was no big deal I felt guilty, especially after we had rowed about my late hours only this week. I ordered pizza for us to share, and sitting down to eat with the TV on, I finally felt the two of us relax. I checked on my son once, but did not let him spoil the evening as he sometimes could, with his helplessly, with his being there. He was up, playing clumsily with some doll or other, I do not know if it is bad or not, if he should sleep or not, I do not really care. I patted him on the head and left him to his own devises in his playpen. Downstairs, I made fun of all the programmes on TV, and Anna giggled and snuggled against me. In moments like this I felt so close to her. That my doubts and daytime fears were groundless. It is the night, I thought to myself, it is the night that drives us together - but here like this, we fit into each other perfectly. I felt a rush of affection for her, as we laughed easily, and I slid my arm around her waist and felt her stomach muscles flex as she laughed at my mocking of Buffy The Vampire's latest exploits. My wife; this girl, who like the girl in the REM song, always said her name on the phone, like I wouldn't know it was her… I laughed along as we bantered, pulled her close to me, felt her lean into my body, I smelled her clean hair, felt her closeness, making me feel whole. She flirtatiously punched my leg as I made a comment about Sarah Michelle Gellar's ass, I felt so in love, so together.
***
I knew that night that I was to get lucky, as soon as Anna came out of the bathroom wearing her sexy silk nightdress. I felt myself harden immediately as she bit her lip and rubbed her hand across her belly and towards her breasts. She giggled nervously, but then fixed my eyes seriously and began to do a little strip tease. She gyrated her hips and slinked out of her night dress, pouting and licking her lips all the while. Laying back, I was, as ever, amazed at her beauty, her slim sexy body, her long lithe legs, her tight breasts, I wanted to take it all in at once, to touch her everywhere all at once, to possess her, I wanted in these moments to actually BE her. Playing along, but not really having to make myself, I jumped out of the bed, nude… well aware that as beautiful as my wife was, I was plain. Tall but thirty lbs heavy, with a round, intelligent but fleshy face, my light brown skin smooth and largely hairless, my appearance pleasant and unstriking, just like any of the other guys in suits you pass in the street or talk to on the phone from your office about things neither of you really care for every day - but right now this did not matter. Anna, and when I thought about this sometimes, it did me no good to remember she WAS a talented actress - always could make me feel desired, handsome, manly. Her own girlishness and vulnerability, affect as it was, making me feel conversely macho and strong.
I pretended to pant like a dog, and ran at her, snatched her in my arms and lifted her up, and carefully but roughly dumped her on the bed. "Yeah!" "Yeah!" "Thass what Im talking bout girl! Yeah!" I cried, ghetto style, because I knew secretly Anna was excited by that. My thoughts were only of her as I landed on top of her, caught her as she laughed and coquettishly tried to roll away, and pinning her unresisting arms above her head and kissed the line of her collar bone.
But listen, yes, there are things I must tell you about me. It is important that you understand. Yes, I killed my sister when I was fourteen. I did not mean to do it, and I have always, all my life since wished more than anything else in the world that I did not do it, but I did, I really did.
***
Her name was Emilie, named with the French spelling for no reason other than my father's pretentiousness. She was a year older than me, and when I was younger, she was my only friend. There is so much I could tell you, of our adventures, of our friendship, of our fights, but I have neither the inclination nor the time. We were close, closer than a brother and sister normally were, but nothing ever happened until the last time, I swear to you. There were nights when I could not sleep, when I would sit up in her room till 3 or 4 AM, while she explained to me her theories of the world, read to me her depressing poetry, or from the left wing books she was always reading. I grew up thinking she was the most intelligent person I could ever know, that she was the font of all knowledge almost, the orthodoxy of my world view. In my way, I worshipped her. I listened to the music she liked, and liked it because she did. I believed things because she did, and because I believed them correct or else Em would not believe in them.
I followed her wherever she went whenever I could, I listened to her advice in all things, she helped me with my school work, we would sit in the garden together in the summer and she would tell me what things were made of, why an aeroplane would not just drop out of the sky if you turned the engine off, why cats were not like dogs, why we were rich and other's were poor. In the winter, or when it rained, we would sit in the old conservatory at the back of our house - nothing more than a brick outline and a corrugated plastic roof held up by a few wooden beams, where the washer and dryer sat, and which was our place. A world that did not belong to our parents - my urbane father with his silly beard and pretensions of being upper class and radical, her tart-with-a-heart mother, pretty and who looked 15 years younger than she was.
There, we would sit on the huddled opposite each other on floor in the far corner that was closest to the kitchen and the pathetic and overgrown herb patch; when it was cold next, to an old convection heater that we had got somehow after our mothers parents both died, in a cancer scare inspired (correct and fatal within six months anyway, for him) suicide pact. On those days, we would play games. Chess, which my sister would nearly always win, although not so much better than me she could get away with letting me win, which I am not sure she would have done anyway, I was never her intellectual equal. Monopoly, which I would win more times than I lost. I don't know why, and it is strange to think I should even tell you, but the less skill or intellect a game would require, I was far more likely to win. By which I mean not only that my sister would win chess games every time because she was cleverer than me, but that games of pure chance or luck, I would win far more frequently, as if once she had not the use of the advantage of her superior intelligence, some kind of force majeure of my personality would take overwhelm her.
And on those rainy and cold days (when we not at school, or I was not playing football, or on my computer with a friend from my class, I hardly remember those times) Emilie would tell me stories of ghosts and spirits, which she believed in passionately. Perhaps nothing would ever have gone wrong, perhaps we would have grown up comfortably and me dependant on her, until she outgrew needed me as an audience, or I outgrew needing her to tell me what to do and think, if not for one fateful day. On that day, when I was 13 and a quarter, a boy a year older than my sister tripped her in the corridor and made her fall and graze her knee. I hit him and broke his nose and made him cry, and then, perhaps because this left me unsatisfied, I hit the nearest of his friends as well. I was suspended for 3 days, my mother was frantic, but my father vaguely approved as he saw it as an act of rebellion against the bourgeois superstructure. My sister was not bullied again, and from that day she looked at me differently and I, taking my lead from her, looked at her in a different way too. Ultimately, this new, partial and unequal equality in our relationship was to prove terrible, fatal.
***
I kissed Anna's collar bone, up to her neck again, over and over, becoming lost in the task, I kept her wrists pinned together above her head with one hand, while the other, lead by instinct more that intent, slowly crept up her rib cage and to her breast, which I held, fondled, tried to contain in one of my fat and graceless paws, but could not quite. My lips found their way further up, I twisted her face away from mine and kissed her hairline, at the back of her neck, all the way across to her ear, kissing passionately, wanting to eat her all up almost. I kissed her lips, her cheek, the hollow of her neck, her throat, I stuck my tongue in her ear (because when I was younger, the boys at school told me that girls loved this. I kissed her hair, again and again, all the while holding her as my captive, her wrists held high above her head on our king size bed by my strong forearm and powerful grip, my other hand grappling and fondling first one breast then the other. Finally I realised her hands, but she did not bring her hands down to defend herself, she reached up and grabbed the headboard to stretch herself and leave her body even more vulnerable to me than before. I went lower, sliding myself down her body, kissing whatever part of her was available at the time, her collar bone again, her left breast, her flat stomach, I settled when I felt my chest pushing against her sex, my broad and pock marked shoulders set against her spread legs, and my face level with her belly. I stuck my tongue into her belly button and began to frantically French kiss her there, performing an imitation of oral sex while she squirmed desperately and moaned and whimpered but never asked me to stop.
I felt my erection become more and more firm as Anna became lost in the pleasure of what I was doing, I felt so alive, I felt so good and strong and great. I kept kissing and forcing my tongue really hard into the hollow of her belly button until her moaning and soft cries told me she could take no more… than I kissed even harder for another three of four minutes before releasing her. She wore sky blue eye shadow to match the colour she had painted her nails this morning, she looked more beautiful than anything I had ever seen or imagined, her mascara was smeared and her lips parted and her hair all messed up. I gripped her ribs, span her around and dumped her face down, and started to slowly drive myself in and out of her sex from behind. I felt the excitement in me swell, I knew I was going to cum soon and had to fight the urge to speed up my rhythm, Anna was gasping and crying out quite loud now, I felt my nuts tighten, and my dick start to feel like it was buzzing, fizzing, effervescent … so I pulled out, felt Anna sag and moan as I let her back down at the last minute as I did myself. I pushed most of my weight down on her shoulders to keep her pinned face down on the bed and French kissed her back and neck some more, I pulled her hair up and kissed her hairline again, I pushed her right down and the side of her face right into the bed, and gave her a love bite, really hard on the side of her neck. She whimpered and moaned, as all the while my weight was pushing down mostly on her hips and stopping her from grinding them into the bed to keep the stimulation going. I kissed her again and again on the spot where I gave her a love bite, forcing my tongue right into the slightly bruised flesh, and making her gasps and moans take a higher pitch. When I was sure that the immediate danger had passed, I repositioned myself slightly, and placed my penis against my wife's Anus. Slowly, carefully, wanting it to hurt but not to hurt I penetrated her there, forced all of my length inside of her. Anna gasped and sucked her breath in, but did not ask me to stop. Just as carefully, I withdrew, and then surged my penis back into her sex hard and fast, this time making love to her with real abandon and lifting my pelvis from hers, so that each thrust rubbed her front against the bed and further stimulated her. With one hand I supported most of my weight, with the other I felt Anna's breast, then pushed it up into her mouth and made me suck my fingers, then rubbed the wet, saliva soaked fingers back over her rock hard nipples and her tight breasts, and so on, over and over.
This time, I kept myself down and Anna got to the point of no return first, it was really hard to stop myself pounding her, and then me over the finishing line and beyond; but I did. I withdrew, forced my weight back on her again to push her flat against the bed, and placed my cock against her anus. Anna whined and in my mind I saw tears prickling in here eyes that were hidden from me. But she didn't ask me to stop, I knew she didn't want me to, and neither did I. I slowly penetrated her asshole the whole time crushing my weight against her, feeling her so close to me, feeling every spasm and twitch of her body as it fought to accept this invasion. I took my hand and placed it on the side of her head and pushed her face hard into the bed, my other hand gripped and squeezed her hip, but not painfully. After I had brought her down, I pulled myself up and put my hand back on her breast and started to penetrate her vagina again.
***
After I beat up the bully who had tripper her, my relationship with my sister, if not inverse, at least became very different. She no longer saw me as her pet, as the younger and lighter skinned of the two of us kid who followed her and needed her. Within a week, I was teaching her to play tennis, and we were playing cricket outside, her hopeless, but eager to try, and chess was forgotten. Of course, I took great pride in my physical prowess, which my sister, who I still adored and worshipped, seemed to admire so much. I could fix her bike, I could climb trees, I even built us a den at the bottom of our garden out of old packing crates, which our father had brought home from work and dumped in the garden because he had no real use for them, and had only taken them to prove he could. I built it under a rowan tree, and against the side of a thick laurel hedge, sheltered at 3 and a half directions from the elements by the tree and hedge, and the 8 foot brick wall between our three acres and our next door neighbours two. It felt like a fort, the one opening easily faced up and defended by the occupier. Oh, it sounds silly now I'm sure, I am sure it sounds silly to you, but to think of it, to think of our den, its construction, the fresh summer grass that July, the concrete path which ran the length of our garden which my father had clumsily but effectively laid through the grass 6 years previously, the year we moved there… it makes me felt how I cant describe.
The den was small, room for a picnic box which my mother would prepare for us, a few fans of cola, and one and a half people. At 13 I was already 11 and a half stone and 5 10 tall, so I would sit at the back, my back against the wall, and Emilie would sit against me, on my lap, resting her weight against mine. We even had a special place to hide our cigarettes, Emilie smoked and I tried to because she did, although I never enjoyed it. I don't know, perhaps it all started to go wrong right there…
Let me tell you about my sister. She was tall, not as tall as me, but tall. She took after my mother, who was beautiful, more in looks, while I looked like my father, tall awkward and strong. My mother was a slight women, and black, born in Barbados and emigrated with her father in 1956, but my sister was slimmer and almost darker than our mother, she wore her hair in French braids a long, long time before it was the fashion, people picked on her at school because we were the only dark skinned kids there, but they never picked on me, and after I beat up two of the boys from the fourth year because they bullied her, no one bullied her either. My father was white, and both very tall and grossly overweight; 6 6 and 300 lbs, and yet he was a gentle personality, who went bald before he was 35 but grew a ridiculous inverse goatee (shaving the area were a goatee would grow and leaving what should be the outline unshaved). He was the son of a manic depressive master carpenter, and he had won a scholarship to Oxford University, and had ever since then been trying to forget his class. My father's father, I learned much later, was a murderer, but he was never caught. He killed 4 men, two in the war who he had to live with and could not stand to, and two after. I was 25 when my Dad told me, but his reasoning, desperate as it was, that as my grandfather had lived till 77 before dying of lung cancer, it was only one murder every 20 years, which was not so bad when looked at it that way, or at least not so evil, had a certain perverse logic. My grandfather was a pathologically shy man who would leave his house and sit in the shed whenever my grandmother invited company, and possessed of a terrible temper. My father was the opposite, intelligent (no doubt the genetic source or spawn of my sisters intellect). Outgoing, arrogant and with an affected foppishness that irritated me incalculably when I was younger and made me love him when I was over 21…
My sister may have inherited his brains, but I got his brawn, and although I am only 6 3 to his 6 6, and 240 lbs to his 300, I look the image of him, other than my muddy skin and dark eyes. I shaved my head since I was 18 and let my beard grow, never questioning what it meant until Anna saw a picture of my dad at 35 and said how alike me looked…
Now… I have wasted too much time already trying to excuse myself, I will tell you how I killed my sister. I don't want to, but I must, I must, I owe you that at least. I was 14. She was 15, her 16th birthday only 49 days away. It was the summer of course, for I - as I have already told you, was summer born and summer loving, Em a child of the winter. It was late August, a hot day, and we sat outside shielding ourselves from the sun behind the great laurel hedge that grew 15 feet tall at the left side of her garden, where I would frequently have to search for tennis balls I had driven there when playing garden cricket with my father, a sport he was both hopelessly attracted to and hopeless at. At the corner of the hedge, there was a weaker tree, which we used to lean against because it was out of sight of the big kitchen window. Incidentally and meaninglessly, the same window that my sister, then 11 years old, and father both claimed they had seen a UFO out of one February night, and that neither me nor my mother believed them, even as much as we wanted to. We sat hidden from site, and then the worst thing happened. My sister asked me to put sun tan lotion on her back and I did, and I kept spreading it, up and down her arms, I would start at her wrists, and rub all the way up to her arm pit, and then all the way down again, over and over. I pulled up her baggy tee shirt and rubbed the lotion on her skinny stomach. I pulled her baggy tee shit off without thinking what I was doing, and my sister, too skinny, too sad, sat cross-legged before me and smiled lightly. I kissed her, she smelled of coconut sun tan lotion, she tasted of it. I kissed her mouth, my hand found her rib cage and settled there, we kissed and kissed : all afternoon we kissed, nothing else, I swear nothing else, but we did this, yes, we really did. We kissed and kissed and kissed. Her body felt like it was meting into my own.
And six weeks later she killed her self. Emilie was not stupid girl, I believe she knew what she was doing… she wanted to die, so she did not slit her wrists, or take *****, or jump in the river like people who want only attention and slip away almost by accident… she went out down the pub - she was 15, my father approved, in his liberal way. School had just started again. She stepped in front of a train at the last minute. She was selfish, and no idiot, she knew what to do. She staggered down to the rail line, drunk as hell or so we were told later, and jumped in front of the London to Norwich intercity 22 15, when there was no chance for the driver to stop. She was of course, killed instantly, wiped out; there was in fact very little of her for my parents to bury; the part of her I committed to the ground was unharmed however, it was inside of me.
I knew she did it for me, because of me. We never really talked again before she died. A few awkward conversations but it was not the same. I killed her, do you see? She was the clever one of course, but she was always messed up and I just pretended to be, maybe still do pretend to be, to try and be like her. I was never like her, she was not like me.
So you see, you understand… I killed her. I worshipped her at the time, but looking I see, she never ate enough, she braider her hair tight, she only ever saw the bad side of things… She was the weak one, but I could not protect her, I drove her over the edge instead, because I was too weak to resist. When I say I killed her, I fear you will think I am being childish, self serving, feeding my own depression… this is not true… I kissed her on purpose, I kissed her and I killed her, it was me, it was me that was the straw the broke her, I killed her, I killed her, killed her. All my life I wished for anything to change this, but I cannot. In my heart, I remember the feel of her slender shoulder in my hand, I remember the taste of her, the texture of her wavy, silly hair, the feel of her body against my own. I killed her, I killed her, oh God, I really did kill her, she is dead and no one in the whole world understands…
***
I fucked Anna with pure abandon now, driving myself and twisting myself up into her busy from the back. I sensed she was about to cum, and knew I was about to, so pulled again, and violated her anus yet again, pushed my penis inside of her, ever so slowly and carefully again, and withdrew equally carefully. After this invasion I felt Anna relax, so I decided to violate her again, she whimpered harder than ever and started to cry little, with frustration rather than pain, when I gradually, stage by stage, pushed my cock right inside her ass and out again. Next, I flipped her onto her back, and held her arms outstretched, so that she was held cruciform against the bed and started to really fuck her pussy, she was on the edge already, and I was not far behind, I drove myself up into her while she was pinned as hard as I could, I made her come once, then twice… as my last act I twisted her round, pushed her hard into the bed and roughly penetrated her ass, I was close anyway, and came up inside her ass after two or three thrusts. I ejaculated, felt myself completed by her. She gasped at every thrust as I hit that three or four times after I'd cum. Anna gasped her breath in and tried to calm, but I did not let her off lightly. She had cum twice, but I kept teasing her, I slipped my hand underneath her, laid on top of her with my weight to deny her movement and finger fucked her, hard. She made noises half way between crying and crying out, but was trying to hold it all in because after all our son was sleeping two rooms away…
She was all whacked out, but I fingered her to torment her for seven or eight minutes, I realised she was not able to come again, so I gave her another three minutes of whimpering and hopelessly trying to pull her vulnerable sex out of the way before I stopped. She had tears in my eyes that made me feel terrible, but she kissed me and kissed me, holding her body close to my own until I felt better. I wrapped my big arm around her slender frame and she fell asleep against me, I was awake for hours, but finally dropped off myself, exhausted, having cum and made her cum 3 or 4 times… Maybe it was the success of her old life that demanded such a grandstand show from me to make her truly happy.
***
Anna, my movie star, my love, my super star… yes I love you, I never loved anyone else, but I love you. I hugged her close to me while she slept, feeling an intense need to protect her after the passion of our love making…
I want to tell you of our house, the house I had when I was younger and my sister was alive… the house was big, but it was not ours…. The garden was three acres, mostly a wide lawn, which was shielded at two sides with thick laurel hedge. From the front you could see the back, a wide green spread of lawn. Toys and rubbish defining our part from the whole… the way the rowan tree at the top of the garden bent towards us, the row of fast growing pines my father planted in the early 90's, the sand pit he built out of concrete blocks and me and Em were both scared to use because we had seen a grass snake in there, the old Anderson shelter that was still standing… oh, how could I describe this to you?
This garden, this piece of landscape, these bushes, these outgrown toys, this uncut grass, this lone apple tree, this old and rusting Anderson shelter… this was my life, this was my life! In that wide stretch of grass, that simple construction of branch and stolen packing crates that I still see standing when I walk passed our old house. My whole life is contained, defined and decided before I was even grown up. It hurts my heart so much to think of it. Oh, Emilie, Emilie… I'm so sorry, so very sorry, you could have been ok, you could of gone on take your rightful place in the world, a minor celebrity with wealth and a small fame, something academic perhaps… if not for having a brother like me. I know that I killed you when I kissed you, of course I am sorry, so sorry, but what can that mean, what can that do? Even now, I write your name on my hand, but your dead, what can it mean?
How ironic, that my sister, with all the talent, all the brains should prove to be nothing, and I would be the one to succeed. Not only am I in a good job now and will probably be financial director her in 5 years time, I achieved a real fame the easy way, I married a girl on TV.
I picture the garden right now… can you understand? Can you feel what I feel? The smell of the grass, the smell of coconut sun tan lotion that bewitched me that lazy afternoon when we kissed and kissed and I felt so strong. Oh, God, Oh God…
***
After fucking her completely, fucking her in the ass and pussy in turn till she dissolved into me, I rested. After I was sure she was asleep, I placed my hand in Anna's (dyed black) hair and ran my fingers through it, up and down… I kissed her hair again, it smelled of soap. I wrapped my arm more tightly around her and pulled her closer to me. I felt her body next to mine, snug, belonging… I felt bad for all the bad thoughts I had, my wife Anna, surely was the girl for me. Everything I ever did wrong I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Slowly I fell asleep too, and cuddled my wife as I did so. I never meant to do any of things I did wrong, and if they have fucked me up forever, I did my best to get better, I did my best.
What is the difference between the day and night? What is the meaning of these strange epiphanies I sense but do not understand about the night, the dark, its special meaning to me? I just don't know anymore. In my mind, I visualized myself walking through the night, all the way through the night, south east of here, toward the sea… into the sea, into the sea… Oh God, I never meant for this, but Anna I love you, really I do.