Affection Read Online Free PDF Page B

until now I have proved him right with the slow torture of my abstinence, squirming with the fleeting possibility of other entanglements, struggling to contain the force of my love for one friend after another.
    At the end of Christopher’s shift we say goodbye and barely glance at each other. My heart breaks just a little for the string of people I have lusted after in this slow, sad way, love danced in time to the monotonous beat of the daily grind. Everything in its right place, except this little fragment of misplaced emotion that I have picked up like lint and curled into my hand with no place to rest it.

THE FIRST CENSORSHIP
    Blacktown 1981

    My sister gave me a book by Marion Zimmer Bradley for my birthday. It was set on a distant world, in a place far, far away, just like in a fairytale. I liked her books very much; I had been wanting to read this one for months. It would complete my collection, the collected works of Marion Zimmer Bradley.
    There was a cake my grandmother had made and a little Princess Leia figure on top of it, her white robe sinking into the icing. There were thirteen candles, one of which had been placed too close to the action figure, and I watched as her face began to blister and blacken. My mother smothered the plastic girl in white icing and I washed her and vowed to love her more because of her disfigurement.
    I opened my presents and they were mostly books that I had coveted. I would read them all, but first I would read the book
my sister gave me because I had been longing for the final Marion Zimmer Bradley for so long.
    Someone had cut some of the pages out.
    My mother saw me notice them and was quick to explain. “Just one bit that is adults only.”
    I counted the numbers on the bottom of the pages. I could feel my rage percolating inside me. There was the biley hiss of it just below the boil.
    â€œIt doesn’t affect the flow of the story. There was just no need for that sex stuff.”
    That sex stuff.
    I noticed the tight-lipped anger of my sister. This was her present to me and it had been hacked into, desecrated by the censors. I thought of all the books my sister had stolen from the library and passed to me in the dead of night. Banned books, books with love, kissing; sometimes more. I thought about the note I had to take to my English teacher excusing me from reading the set text because of the unsuitable content, and how my sister passed me an illicit copy of 1984 that I read using a flashlight under the covers late at night. An odd parallel between Orwell’s world and my own.
    We weren’t allowed to visit any of our friends at their houses. We weren’t allowed to get mail without my mother reading it. My mother was protecting us, I knew this. But I wasn’t sure exactly what from.
    I read that book late into the night. When I came to the missing
pages I closed the book and imagined things that I had never seen written even in the banned books snuck to me by my sister after dark. I knitted in all the darkest possibilities, casting a spell to bind together the empty fragments of the missing pages. I thought about the worst things possible, the rapes and the ravaging, the fondling of the dead and the dying. I didn’t flinch from any possibility in my imagination. I closed my eyes and pulled the covers over my head and I let myself stray into all the forbidden places that were unavailable to me in the sunlight world of my family’s fairytale.

THE FIRST PORNOGRAPHY

    It was hot the day of the school swimming carnival, a languid summer day smelling slightly acidic like the juice of an ant squashed between your fingertips, and I was signed up for the 200 meters.
    I have always loved to swim. I swim very slowly but I can swim for hours at a time without tiring. I love the breathy rhythm of it, the way the surface of the water creeps above your ears, obliterating the world.
    There were whispers about the photograph before anyone had seen it.