upon enlightenment.
It felt good to hurt Violet a little, just enough to bring her to her
senses and to prevent her from spiraling fur-their into the dense and
animal sensuality to which she had surrendered herself. He knew he was
right to punish her. He waited eagerly for her to lift her head and
face him, for he knew that they had entered a new relationship and that
the awareness of the profound changes would be evident in her eyes.
At last, breathing somewhat normally, she raised her head and met
Candy’s gaze. To his surprise, none of his own enlightenment had been
visited upon his sister. Her white-blond hair had fallen across her
face, and she stared through it, like a jungle animal peering through
its wind-tossed mane. In her icy blue eyes, he perceived something
stranger and more primitive than anything he had seen there before. A
gleeful wildness. Indefinable hungers. Need. Though she had been hurt
when he had thrown her against the pantry door, a smile played on her
full lips again. She opened her mouth, and he felt her hot breath
against his face as she said,
“You’re strong. Even the cats like the feel of your strong hands on me
… and so does Verbina.” He became aware of her long bare legs. The
flimsiness of her panties. The way her red T-shirt had pulled up to
expose her flat belly. The swell of her full breasts, which seemed even
fuller than they were because of the leanness of the rest of her. The
sharp outlines of her nipples against the material of the shirt. The
smoothness of her skin. Her smell.
Revulsion burst through him like pus from a secret inner abscess, and he
let go of her. Turning, he saw that the cats were looking at him.
Worse, they were still lying where they had been when he had pulled
Violet from her chair, as if they had not been frightened by his outrage
even briefly. He knew their equanimity meant that Violet had not been
frightened, either, and that her erotic response to his fury-and her
mocking smile-was not in the least feigned.
Verbina was slumped in her chair, her head bowed, for she was no more
able to look at him directly now than she had ever been. But she was
grinning, and her left hand was between her legs, her long fingers
tracing lazy circles on the thing material of her panties, under which
lay the dark cleft of her sex. He needed no more proof that some of
Violet’s sick desire had communicated itself to Verbina, and he turned
away from her too.
He tried to leave the room quickly, but without looking as if he was
fleeing from them.
In his scented bedroom, safely among his mother’s belongings, Candy
locked the door. He was not sure why he felt safer with the lock
engaged, though he was certain it was not because he feared his sisters.
There was nothing about them to fear. They were to be pitied.
For a while he sat in Roselle’s rocker, remembering the times, as a
child, when he’d curled in her lap and contentedly sucked blood from a
self-inflicted wound in her thumb or in the meaty part of her palm.
Once, she had made a half-inch incision in one of her breasts and took
him to her bosom while he drank her blood from the same place where
other mothers gave, and other children received, milk of maternity.
He had been five years old that night when, in this very chair, he
tasted the blood of her breast. Frank, seven years old then, had been
asleep in the room at the end of the hall, and the twins, who’d only
recently reached their birthday, were asleep in a crib in the room
across from mother’s. Being alone with her when all the others slept
how unique and treasured that made him feel, especially since she was
sharing with him the rich liquid of her arteries veins, which she never
offered to his siblings; it was a sacred communion, dispensed and
received, that remained their secret.
He recalled being in something of a swoon that night, merely because of