Lips Touch: Three Times Read Online Free PDF

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
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    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.
    The cats came for the odor of the smokehouse where Kizzy's father
and uncles made sausages from the various things they killed. With their little
rough tongues, the cats lapped up pooling blood before it could congeal in the
dirt. The ghosts had no such thirst, but came for the clumps of asphodel that
bloomed round the graves all summer, and for the bowls of boiled barley the
rest of the year. Cats and ghosts both partook of the saucers of milk and that
was okay. They consumed different parts of it: the cats its substance, the
ghosts its essence, and none went to waste.
    They came from afar, cats and ghosts both, because normal families
didn't spill hot blood in their driveways or leave out food for the dead, and
they weren't exactly spoiled for choice. Kizzy thought most of the ghostly
visitors came from the cemetery down the road; surely all the spirits in her
family's little plot had moved along, well provisioned as they were with coin,
food, weapon, and wing for their journey. Surely they didn't linger
here. Surely her grandmother hadn't.
    How, then, had her knife come to be on Kizzy's pillow, and her
swan's wing, torn feather from feather, in Kizzy's room? Kizzy frowned,
puzzled, and went back in the house, passing her mother
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    in the kitchen and choosing not to speak of the feathers and
knife. Her people would be terribly disturbed by it; they'd surely keep Kizzy
home from school to scry the meaning of the ominous visitation, to bless the
grave, and to try to return the knife to its rightful owner. And Kizzy did
worry that her grandmother's ghost was weaponless and vulnerable in the
shadowed land. But her mind kept turning back to Jack Husk. She had to see him
again, to see if he was real, so she said nothing of the knife.
    She showered, dried