"As a coffin," he replied.
The fat dog lifted his head up slowly and looked at them. "You inherit him too?" Kizzy asked. 1 guess so.
"Laziest dog I've ever seen," she said. But then the lazy dog, the dog that Kizzy walked past every single day and who couldn't even be bothered to bark, curled his snout into a snarl.
"He's not crazy about me," Jack Husk said as the snarl grew louder.
I guess not.
The fat old dog actually rose to his feet, something Kizzy had rarely witnessed, and with his head lowered and his teeth bared in a vicious growl, he looked much more menacing than she'd have thought possible. Jack Husk frowned and pushed back his goggles onto his forehead, making his hair stick out in tufts. Anyone else might have looked silly, but he looked like he was posing for one of those fashion spreads in Rolling Stone magazine where bored, beautiful people loll around like they're waiting for the bus in Purgatory, usually with some nipple showing. "Well," he said, "I'd better deal with him."
"What are you going to do?"
"Honestly? Give him a wide berth and slip around the back. But I'll wait until you're gone so you can't see me scramble if he comes after me."
Kizzy laughed. "Maybe I'd better watch, you know, just in case."
Smiling the crooked smile, he said, "No. Go. Please. It's unspeakably uncool to be seen dodging fat dogs."
"Okay, then. See you around, Jack Husk. Be careful."
"See you in the morning, Kizzy," he said, and Kizzy felt, for an instant, as if her blood fizzed inside her like champagne.
Three Ripe as a Plum
After dinner had been cooked and eaten -- scorn and all -- Kizzy went to her room and closed the door. She sat on the end of her bed and looked at herself in the mirror. Really
looked. She was still wearing the green scarf, and though her hair billowed out at the nape of her neck, wild and coarse as always, it was captured flat around her face and hidden, not springing up in its usual topiary way. The effect was to bring her face into focus, and Kizzy stared at it for minutes, getting the feeling that something had happened to her since the last time she had looked at herself, if indeed she ever really had.
She saw proud cheekbones beginning to rise out of the thick husk of adolescence. She saw a coy curl in the corners of her lips, lips that had practically touched Jack Husk's lips. Staring at her face, she began to fancy her outer layer had begun to melt away while she wasn't paying attention, and something -- some new skeleton -- was emerging from beneath the softness of her accustomed self. With a deep, visceral ache, she wished her true form might prove to be a sleek and shining one, like a stiletto blade slicing free of an ungainly sheath. Like a bird of prey losing its hatchling fluff to hunt in cold, magnificent skies. That she might become something glittering, something startling, something dangerous.
Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a sailboat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and who could dance a tango, lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an enemy's blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn't possibly keep, and then shift the world to keep them. She wanted to write memoirs and autograph them at a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley. She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric knowledge, watch strangers as coolly as a cat. She wanted to be inscrutable, have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome adventurer's small airplane, champagne-christened Kizzy, which would vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that she would have to mount a rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging sand, just like the nomads.
Kizzy wanted.
She pushed back her shoulders from her usual sullen slouch and made an effort to sit up straight. It felt unnatural; her sinews resisted. She had a sudden terrifying thought that if she had waited, if she had gone on as she was, her poor posture might have calcified like that. She might have hardened into a slumped carapace of a person who would never, could never, throw back her shoulders, walk tall, taunt vampires with her white throat, toss her head in joy or disdain. She would have curled over herself like a toenail left too long untrimmed. She flushed now, looking at her reflection, shoulders low and calm, neck elongated, almost elegant, light moving over her green silk scarf like a river, and she felt a sense of narrow escape in the ache of this new posture. As if she could still become someone else.
Maybe Jack Husk had already glimpsed that new girl within her, guessed how she was ready to slice free in one clean move like a stiletto blade flicking forth. She thought of his perfect face and sly eyes, his hand catching hers in the air, of his lingering gaze, and the sensation of being penetrated by it. And looking at herself in the mirror, minute after minute, unveiling herself to herself, she began at last to see her great-aunt Mairenni looking out at her, filled with her hungers and her secrets, and radiant with her weird, succulent beauty.
Ripe as a plum ready to drop from its branch at the lightest touch.
Kizzy slept restlessly and dreamed many things that night -- lips and fingers and fruit, and Jack Husk taking off his goggles and tasting her, beginning with the tender insides of her wrists. Strange images came to her all night, and she was greeted by another strange sight when she was awakened in the morning by the wretched cry of the peacock right outside her window.
She opened her eyes. A swan feather drifted past her face, twirled when her breath caught it, and sailed to the floor. She blinked, sat up, blinked again. The room was asift with swan feathers. They were settling to the floor as if she had just missed the strange storm that had deposited them here. A glint on her pillow drew her eye and she turned to see, laid alongside the impression of her head, the mother-of-pearl handle she knew so well, and tucked up quietly within it, resting now, her grandmother's stiletto, back from the grave.
She reached for it, and it was cold as a mountain winter in her hand.
The first thing Kizzy did was check the small circle of family graves in the back field. She stood there in her nightgown, the knife clutched in her fist, looking at the undisturbed ground of her grandmother's grave. She felt the stir of ghosts all around. She would feel them now. It was fall, after the harvest and before the first freeze -- this was the time when the veil between the worlds was draggled and thin, and voices murmured through its sodden membrane from the other side. It was always in the fall that Kizzy felt the ghosts lingering about, skittish as stray cats and drawn by the same thing: the whiff of food.