Tucking her dress around her knees, Kizzy watched Jack Husk lay out purple linen napkins and a real silver knife with just a hint of tarnish on it, and then a footed silver bowl of chocolates wrapped in foil, and she was wide-eyed with the elegance of it. If she had ever thought to dream up a cemetery picnic, the cemetery would have been a different, better one -- in Paris or New Orleans, somewhere " with moss and broken statues -- but the picnic would have been just like this.
"Nice," she murmured inadequately. Jack Husk smiled at her, and he was so beautiful it almost hurt. A wave of skepticism swept over her, not for the first time. Why, she wondered. Why me?
"Silly girl --" she heard or imagined her grandmother hissing in her ear.
"Chocolate first," said Jack Husk, the raspy edge of his voice erasing the faint, ghostly one. "That's my only picnic rule."
"Well, okay," Kizzy said, feigning reluctance and unwrapping one of the chocolates. It was so dark it was almost black and it melted on her tongue into an ancient flavor of seed pod, earth, shade, and sunlight, its bitterness casting just a shadow of sweet. It tasted ... fine, so subtle and strange it made her feel like a novitiate into some arcanum of spice.
The cheese was the same, so different from anything she'd tasted she could scarcely tell if it was wonderful or terrible. They nibbled it with the bread, and Jack Husk asked Kizzy if she thought it was too early in the day for wine, which he produced from his basket and poured into dainty etched glasses no bigger than Dixie cups.
It was as earthy and dark as the chocolate and Kizzy sipped it slowly, softening and softening, stretched out on one elbow, her hip full as an odalisque's hip, a lush hummock of apple green for Jack Husk to lay his head on, and he did, and closed his eyes while Kizzy lightly teased the ends of his unruly hair.
After a little while he sat up and reached one more time into his basket. He took out an apricot, which he cupped in his hand, and a peach, which he handed to Kizzy. She took it and held it. Its skin was as soft as the velvet of Jack Husk's jacket and the scent... she could smell the honey sweetness of it even through the skin, and she lifted it and took a deeper breath. Nectar, she thought dreamily. But she didn't take a bite. She didn't want the juices dribbling down her chin. She just smelled it again and watched Jack Husk eat his apricot and toss the pit. Then he leaned back against one of the stone urns, arranging the billow of ivy and blossoms around his head to look like a wig.
Kizzy laughed. "It's a good look for you," she said.
"Like it? Here." He lifted a heavy cluster of ivy beside his head to make a wig for her too, and he motioned her to sit close. She scooted into the space at his side and held still as he arranged the flowers over her forehead, pausing to gently tuck one stray curl of her real hair back under her scarf.
His face was so near hers. She couldn't keep her eyes from straying to his lips; she could smell the sweetness of apricot on his breath, see a trace of moisture on his red lips. He was looking at her lips too. She was suddenly very nervous. He leaned closer. Kizzy froze, not knowing whether to close her eyes or leave them open. She had a horror of being one of those girls in movies who closes her eyes and puckers up while the boy sits back and smirks.
And seconds later she was glad she hadn't closed her eyes, because Jack Husk didn't kiss her. He took the peach from her hand, lifted it to his lips, and took a bite. So close, the perfume it released was like a drug, and Kizzy had a powerful urge to lean in and taste it too, to taste the nectar on his lips. She couldn't take her eyes off his lips. She moved forward ever so slightly. Jack Husk saw, and leaned closer.
This time it was real; it was really going to happen. Kizzy was going to kiss a beautiful boy. Why then was she thinking about the peach, of how his lips would taste of it?
Why was she imagining how delicious Jack Husk's kiss would be?
She stared at him, and at the periphery of her vision something glinted. It was the little silver knife, still impaled in the rind of the cheese. Knife, she thought. Her fingers twitched, wanting to reach for it, as some kind of knowing skimmed the glassy surface of her mind. All the omens of the day, the swirl of swan feathers, the grave of dead grass, her grandmother's blade still rimed with the frost of the underworld, all her memories of warnings, they coalesced into a simple understanding: Deep in her veins ran the admonition never to eat fruit out of season. It was late autumn; all orchards were bare, and no peach trafficked in from a far hemisphere could smell so sweet. Surely only one orchard could have ripened it.
With that, Kizzy knew. A goblin had her soul on the end of his fishing line, ready to reel it in. She knew. But now, in the fugue of wanting, of almost having, filled with the musk and the spice of that wine and that chocolate, her hip still warm from Jack Husk's head, the knowing was as insubstantial as words written on water. Every trace of it vanished as soon as it was written, leaving only the reflection of Jack Husk's too-perfect beauty. It was an imaginary beauty dreamed up just to please her, and it did. It did. It pleased and drugged her. Her eyelids were heavy but her soul was light as gossamer, a spiders web in a wind, anchored only by a single thread.
Kizzy knew, but she willfully unknew it, and the plangent voices of the dead were lost to the drum of her hot blood and the tingle of her ready lips. She wanted to taste and be tasted.
She didn't reach for the knife. Heavily and hypnotically, with her soul flattening itself back like the ears of a hissing cat, Kizzy leaned in and drank of Jack Husk's full, moist mouth, and his red, red lips were hungry against hers, drinking her in return. Their eyes closed. Fingers clutched at collars and hair, at the picnic blanket, at the grass. And as they sank down, pinning their shadows beneath them, the horizon tipped on its side, and slowly, thickly, hour by hour, the day spilled out and ebbed away.
It was Kizzy's first kiss, and maybe it was her last, and it was delicious.
[ILLUSTRATION: The knife in the woman's hands.]
[ILLUSTRATION: A woman and a man.]
SPICY LITTLE CURSES SUCH AS THESE
[ILLUSTRATION: Three men walking.]
[ILLUSTRATION: A woman and a man walking.]
[ILLUSTRATION: Birds flying.]
[ILLUSTRATION: A woman in a cemetery.]
[ILLUSTRATION: A tree and a woman going down stairs.
[ILLUSTRATION: The woman holding a bottle.]
[ILLUSTRATION: The woman holding a baby and other kids walking.]
[ILLUSTRATION: A old woman holding a baby.]