Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     Marion wanders through the downstairs rooms. It is hot and the shades are drawn against the sun. Air moves fitfully through the doors. A curtain bellies out and then hangs limp. Marion is bored. She does not know what to do with herself. Lunch is over and cleaned up and Mother is sitting on the side porch in the tall straw chair, her head thrown back and little snorts coming out of her halfopened mouth. Aunt Jenny is in the upstairs room that is hers for her yearly weeklong visit. Perhaps she will have some ideas on how to spend the afternoon. Marion turns toward the stairs.

     She feels the soft push of air caressing her arms. She reaches the top of the stairs where she will see Aunt Jenny sitting by the front window fanning herself. Perhaps she will tell Marion the story of how she helped put out a fire with a bucketful of water when she was a little girl or about Clementine who had a white and a red and a black kitten just before Aunt Jenny came to visit.

     Aunt Jenny’s door is open a crack to let the air through. Marion sticks her head in but Aunt Jenny is not sitting at the window. She is lying on her back on the bed snorting the way Mother is. But she is naked. her body is white and shadowy in the dim room. Marion pulls back. She knows she should not go in but goes in anyway.

     The woman’s arm is lying flat on the sheet and, sagging against it, her breast punctuated by a huge dark red circle and a nipple the shape of a bullet. Marion moves closer. Aunt Jenny’s stomach rises and falls with each breath. Her belly is round and full. At its lower end Marion sees a triangular forest of thick brown hair and below it her aunt’s thighs which are spread apart from one another. Marion tiptoes to the foot of the bed not able to take her eyes off the hairy place. Also she cannot keep from looking at her aunt’s legs, which have always been hidden from her under stockings and skirts. They are pale and ribbed with ugly knobby blue veins. Marion moves around the bottom of the bed. She looks up her aunt’s legs, which from where she stands appear short and thick. The hair seems to make a beard against her aunt’s sleeping face. The other breast lolls against the other arm. A heavy acrid smell fills the air, one Marion had noticed when her aunt was holding her on her lap. Then, between her aunt’s legs, Marion sees a dark crevice and in it a fringe like the edge of a full purple flower.

     Suddenly a breeze rattles the shade and Aunt Jenny stirs in her sleep. Marion’s body becomes rigid with fear. Aunt Jenny rolls over on her right side. Her breasts tumble together. Her huge sweaty buttocks rise steeply up from the surface of the sheet. Again that odor.

     The door is far away but Marion moves toward it hoping Aunt Jenny will not open her eyes. Finally the child edges around the door safely into the hall. She leans against the dim wall, trembling, out of breath, strange with herself.