And she may have done. Really, who’s to say?
But Fran’s little sister was a pretty child. No one ever snatches the ugly ones.
Fran’s lover’s son was not a pretty child. He whimpered and wheezed. He chortled and pleaded. An endless litany of wants.
Grant me a snow cone.
Grant me a foot-long.
Grant me a deep-fried candy bar on a stick.
Fran tried to dash away at the restroom, but the child appeared like magic at the doorway and grasped the hem of her skirt. Fran tried to dodge him in the haunted house, but he kept close to her heels in the dark. He hid in her pocket. He slid into her shoes. The weight of him swung from side to side. She heard him flapping and flying. Watch me!
Fran sent the child to the top of the giant slide hoping for an opening, but a convention of police officers gathered without warning to look appraisingly at the hordes of ugly children hurtling down yellow humps, their faces lit by the misplaced love of their fawning parents on the ground. Fran was, she saw, surrounded by idiots. And she couldn’t slip away.
The child at the top of the slide—her lover’s wife’s child—shivered and shook. He gripped the burlap sliding sack the way a skydiver hangs on to his defective parachute before his final bounce upon a pitiless ground. Fran looked up. Felt her shoulders hemmed in by police.
She flew away, she wanted to say to the cop on her right. Children disappear every day, she nearly said to the cop on her left, especially the pretty ones. It isn’t my fault that the boy is hideous.
The ugly child peered down at Fran, held her gaze. She imagined him in black mary janes. In bobby socks with lace at the ankle. She imagined him on the arc of a swing, unhooked from gravity, bumping against the sky. The wind lifted his pale hair like the crinoline lining of a fluttering skirt. Fran felt her breath catch. Watch me! the ugly child mouthed. Watch me! He swayed and swayed, and Fran found herself swaying too.
Grant you feathers, murmured her lips.
Grant you wings.
Grant you light and wind and helium.
Grant you cloud and moon and star. The vacuum of space. The infinite distances between lover and love.
The child sat on his burlap and pushed off.
And somewhere inside, Fran grew wings.
She flew away.
2. Margaret
Red lips invite trouble, when trouble requires an invitation. Which it usually doesn’t. Margaret knew that trouble hid under dirty rugs and scratched coffee tables. It lurked behind heavy drapes like in old vampire movies. It gathered in great clouds like pollen in the spring and fall and settled like dust in between.
Margaret stood in front of the mirror painting black around the eyes, muting acne scars and fresh pustules with muddy makeup, and crafting a false beauty mark at the hollow where her chin met her neck.
She wore pink lips to school, black lips to visit her grandparents, and red lips for everything else. She wiped Vaseline across her small, white teeth to prevent stains—like a barrier against blood on crisp new sheets. The color of the lip is significant, Margaret knew. The color matters.
Margaret’s teacher, for example, was terrified by a red lip. He pulled at his earth-tone tie until his face went red, then purple, then green. He stammered and hesitated before shooing the girl away.
Pink, though. Pink was a different story.
Two weeks with pink lips. Only two. By then he was weak and trembly, his fingers fluttering gently as they grazed her neck.
They found him the next day. Heart attack. Hard-on. Pink lips. Really, who’s to say? Margaret offered no opinion.
Her mother snored in the next room, her new boyfriend at her side—also snoring. The room stank of liquor and sex, and Margaret wrinkled her nose as she slipped inside.
Margaret intended the black lips for her grandfather, but it was her grandmother who, somewhere between the tuna casserole and the Cool Whip surprise, began to nervously run her fist through the porcupine spikes of her black-and-white hair. And shiver.
“I was a Girl Scout once, did you know,” her grandmother said. Margaret curved her black lips into a grin. She slipped her supple fingers into her grandmother’s rice paper hand, felt the old woman’s soul leak out in a long, slow sigh as she leaned inexorably in.
Grandmother still wore her oven mitts when they found her. Black lipstick on her mouth.
Borrowed time, people said.
Margaret crawled in between her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. Her mother slept openmouthed, wet breath catching in her throat.
It’s only a matter of time, her mother had said earlier that day, as she checked the fit of Margaret’s new bra. Her thumbs lingered on the dense, round breasts as though checking for freshness. Every Tom and Dick’ll want a taste. A kiss, I mean.
The boyfriend had leaned in the recliner, his hands occupied by a cigarette and an icy highball glass. But his fingers itched. Margaret could tell.
A kiss is a dangerous thing, the boyfriend said. I feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch. Won’t know what’s hit him until it’s too late. Still, he said, dragging deep on his cigarette, not a bad way to go. He had given Margaret a full-handed smack on her rear as she passed.
Margaret leaned over, placed a hand next to each of his shoulders, peered into his sleeping face. Too late for you, she whispered in the dark. His face was calm, his jowls slack. The stubble on his chin stood at attention. His lips were full and slightly parted, the corners twitching with each breath. She licked her lips.
Too late.
She licked her lips again. Tasted musk and cinnamon, and oh god, salt, sweat, and lemon juice, and oh god, grass and wheat and meat and milk. Tasted youth and birth and decay.
She licked her
