by loqueesesencial
“When she lay down I massaged her feet with mint oil and cut her toenails with silver scissors. I coiled her hair into living snakes and polished her teeth with my saliva.
I pierced her ears and filled them with diamonds. I dropped belladonna into her eyes.
When she was sick I wiped her fever with my own towels and when she cried I kept her tears in a Ming vase.
There was no separation between us. We rose in the morning and slept at night as twins do. We had four arms and four legs, and in the afternoons, when we read in the cool orchard, we did so sitting back to back.
I liked to feel the snake of her spine.
We kissed often, our mouths filling up with tongue and teeth and spit and blood where I bit her lower lip, and with my hands I held her against my hip bone.
We made love often, especially in the afternoons with the blinds half pulled and the cold flag floor against our bodies.
For eighteen years we lived alone in a windy castle and saw no one but each other. Then someone found us and then it was too late.
The man I married was a woman.
They came to burn her. I killed her with a single blow to the head before they reached the gates, and fled that place, and have come here now.
I still have a coil of her hair.”
jeanette winterson, sexing the cherry
