Photo by Cassandra Marchman
Bounded by a troika of tenements in the senescent city of London, the Canadian municipality in the portentous province of Ontari-ari-ari-o, was an autumnal weald of ashen trees hosting frolicking descendants. Diverging from this heterogenic progeny, a juvenile sylph in a pallid yellow frock espied an affair through the Sun’s argentate rays. With the sleight of her svelte hand she allocated the filaments of her bobbed hair, coloured aureate chocolate.
The nymphet’s amorous stare revealed an eleemosynary soul behind those incandescent eyes; she glommed from the asylum of a tree as her consanguinities gamed around her, cousins and their cachinnations so frivolous and fun. One of them whispered the nymphet’s metonymic into the diaphanous blush of her ear:
‘Henrietta,’ flapped her kin, ‘Come play with us!’
But our budding Henrietta was caught ogling at all of the young boys with the roughhewn hair of wolves; attenuated by the provincial life, these callow and lithe strangers had descended from the milk of the most infatuating and florid dream, hallelujah.
‘Um, not yet,’ Henrietta swallowed.
The cousin found prodigious merriment in this idolatry, for Henrietta was so enthralled by the delectation birthed from the visage of the young boys that she battened down her doe eyes and osculated the cortex with her velvet lips. Henrietta’s cardinal kiss had been borne out of practice with the fay satellite orbiting around her.
Fledgling fingers woke the naiad from that aphotic world of paradigm osculation, her cousin’s quiet hands brushing a cerise and titian leaf so tenderly and lovingly from her lacteal cheek. A diminutive relative circled the geminate spirits as the firmament greyed above. The cousin giggled faintly while undoing the alma mater jacket she had inherited from her brother, the one who betrayed her for America; she shrugged out of the elephantine sleeves to cape Henrietta in azure, warming her in the wake of the western wind.
‘Parlez-moi,’ the cousin pleaded of Henrietta, her eyes a watery reflection of the waltzing sun.
The softhearted dove was frore without her feathers, vulnerable to horripilation and shivering to warm her pomaceous cheeks. Though thankful for the jacket, Henrietta was also empathetic and returned the readily sacrificed article to her dear cousin. Together they formed a charitable corona. Henrietta then furnished a selection of the most recherché colloquialisms upon her cousin’s request, much to her delight and reciprocity. With catholic mouths they debouched from the faux copse, playing a game of words and phrases that consummated upon reaching the sliding glass doors of the cousin’s apartment.
The withdrawing room accommodated the hyperborean girls with a balmy handshake, and the bisque illumination of an antique lamp blanketed them with venerable shades. From the kitchenette came the antediluvian canzonet of their grandmother, a benignant woman who was cherished by all.
‘Salut,’ the girls saluted her.
‘Back so soon?’
‘It’s cold!’ the girls laughed.
They sauntered into the dove’s welcoming alcove while pressing the wings of their palms against one another’s roseate cheeks, investigating their respective temperatures. On the darling dove’s modest bed they flopped down and liberated their dainty feet from immaculately atramentous shoes. The minikin’s honeyed hair concealed her effulgent indigo eyes as she gazed down to unzip her brother’s quondam jacket, two sizes too generous.
Henrietta espied four substantial books on her cousin’s shelf and picked out the Whale; whilst thumbing through the mammal’s waxen forelimbs she listened absently to her cousin’s adolescent rambling about apparitions, a topic that had always enraptured her.
They ensconced quiescently until the remainder of their kindred came thundering into the flat. Henrietta returned the Whale to its ligneous ocean and rendezvoused with her relatives at the dining room table d'hôte, her devoted cousin carefully catenating their alabaster hands. Coincidentally they sat across from the cherry brethren, those wolfish boys from Henrietta’s reverie; they perspired despite the gelid daggers outside, how intense was their battle for alpha dominance.
All clasped their hands together for an exquisitely compendious prayer from the trembling lips of their elder. The cousin unfastened her incandescent eyes and craftily captured Henrietta in her peripheral vision: her smile was the apex of exultation, an enchanted bow of comely peach.
A minuscule laugh then broke from those ethereal lips, unnoticed by all except our petite and unblinking dove, c'est bien employer un temps si court. Amen.
The table was a panorama of viands, a lavish mélange of prepared dishes and generational recipes. Condiments were passed and birds were carved as the bucks conversed about a mishap that had occurred matutinally that day. A deer had pranged into the broad glass façade of the architecture’s primary artery, scattering claret and shards of melted sand throughout. Propitiously no one was hurt, but the deer had run off in fright.
Henrietta expressed her sympathy for the wounded animal with lachrymal lamentations, and was pacified by nothing less than gingerbread cookies. The conversation was then deftly shifted by their grandmother to ecclesiastical matters and schoolwork.
Once Henrietta and her cousin had curtailed their portions of the repast, they politely exempted themselves from the table and retreated to the clandestine recesses of the cousin’s room. There they drank that mellifluous monument to purity known as milk, savoury as a delicate kiss au jus, to wash down their bittersweet gingerbread men.
The cousin desired to perambulate the beauteous grounds outside, so impeccably blanketed by vermeil leaves. Henrietta arrayed her frock with a woolen jacket, coloured complimentary amethyst, while her cousin added clover mittens to her emblematic ensemble. They said their adieu en masse to their grandmother and relatives before returning to the brisk November air, refilling the cousin with the inimitable vitality that suited her so well. The girls coalesced with veritable joie de vivre.
Following a path to Northbrae, their elementary school, they sashayed past rows of tenements, all with a familiar ménage. A steel cobweb fence circumscribed the school, an insufficient building of terra-cotta bricks and pools of cement. Beyond the consecution of portables was a voluminous field of chartreuse, where the girls promenaded down a scanty slope.
Past a labyrinth of iron fences and kaleidoscopic trees was a dissipated arbour that the girls haunted surreptitiously, a hush-hush hideout of tranquility and kindness. They seated themselves on the settee, painted apricot and tawny by the irriguous leaves that crumpled underneath. A solitary leaf stealthily detached from its papery branch and fluttered down to Henrietta’s mahogany hair.
‘I like your hat,’ was the cousin’s bon mot.
Henrietta glanced up as her cousin obtained the garnet leaf. She tore the chiffon structure in two with her maladroit mittens, and then replaced one half onto Henrietta’s ruffled nest before positioning the other on her own.
They talked tête-à-tête about inconsequential subjects such as their grandmother’s cooking and which of the boys they liked best. From the west came a sustained breeze rustling the leaves and carrying mermaid kisses to their snowy cheeks, heralding a sprightly shower. Their discourse ended abruptly as they ducked beneath a prismatic plant, its rarefied leaves dripping rhythmically upon their flocculent hair and shoulders.
Liquid pins prickled their skin until they were considerably damp, their jackets and frocks drip-drip-dripping into twilight. The girls huddled together for the comfortable sensation of warmth, the cousin nestling into Henrietta’s side. Henrietta reveled in the moment of amity and quiescence, auscultating the drip-drop tick-tock of time as it subsisted on remarkable simplicity.
The burgeoning girls guarded their butterfly cheeks from a puissant wildcat whisk that spirited their dragon eupnea into the troposphere. Anon the applause abated to a pleasant pitter-patter and Henrietta descried in the aftermath a resplendent roygbiv of exceptional luminosity.
Geminate creatures, fairy and dove, irriguous as babes in that pontifical fluid known as baptismal water, found their interstice through the pathetic scene. Exeunt.
‘The rain is nice,’ opined our observant Henrietta with observably pellucid complexion. ‘The leaves are nice, too. Really, it’s all so nice!’
The cousin sighed in agreement. De novo they sallied forth across the sea of viridian, maladroitly recrudescing their steps on the markedly lubricious grass.
August November was the incorporeal embodiment of ataraxia to Henrietta, the penultimate transfiguration of the pulchritudinous soma of numen. With arms akimbo she sanctioned an interregnum upon overtaking the eminence’s crown, reconnoitering the swarthy consolidation of Northbrae. Our amorette thought of the temerarious wolves back home, they of matted manes and wildfire eyes, whom she extolled as classmates annexed to the desideration of kissing cousins.
Abaft the portables on wanton springtide days she fabricated multifarious tableaux of her decadent boys, exempli gratia the filmic folly of their luscious lips coalescing. For Henrietta the familial wolves typified the unalienable jubilance of yearning.
The cousin unfettered the ardent sprite from her apogee of anamnesis with a quavering lilt, and they continued their waterlogged peregrination with exaggerated steps and evanescent bursts of dalliance.
Our two princesses of humble foreground belatedly restored themselves to the plebeian castle, where they were promptly greeted by their grandmother’s clement clucking. The magnanimous hen swiftly draped the girls in opulent towels and ushered them past the roused barking of boys, the pack experiencing tremendous felicity upon kenning their deluged kindred.
Vanilla nightwear awaited the fillies within the dove’s nest, cherry from the dryer and cosy to the touch. Their grandmother departed with a click of the postern and the vernal maidens denuded their ablutionary trousseaux, garbing their leukocytic limbs with copacetic cotton.
The cousin then clambered aloft her plumule bed to procure an ochre case before reposing contiguous to Henrietta. She unfastened the hood to expose a tractable flûte à bec and wended a picayune recitation apropos of her isochronal lessons. Gossamer lips bussed the tan mouthpiece as she poised her nimble fingers along the breadth, fingering swimmingly in accompaniment to her abstinent insufflation. The fipple guided her euphonious breath through the arterial windway before egressing against the nectareous labium, teased into a stimulating tone by her lissome fingering.
Henrietta’s encomium for her dove’s dulcet performance came forthwith in ebullient applause and articulate words of endearment. The benevolent warble of their grandmother then summoned them to the dining room table, so the girls followed a potent aroma of cinnamon to eggshell cups of that igneous extract known as apple cider. They kissed the hen on either cheek in gramercy before seating themselves at the wolf den, exhaling gingerly into their redolent cups as the oblivious boys competed in manifold card games.
Alfresco, the lambent meniscus of the moon emerged through the nebulosity, a presence of resplendent mien in the piceous kingdom. Blithesome howling ensued from within the residence.
Ultimately the coterie of male striplings were made to vacate the apartment for their own. They hurried towards the sliding glass doors before their grandmother could peck them affectionately on the cheek; Henrietta and her cousin fared them well as they padded expeditiously into bedtime.
The twelfth of November, nineteen ninety-three was drawing to a close. The girls polished their ivory keys before retiring to the dove’s halcyon room, where they prayed in winsome whispers at the edge of her bed. They then lay supine beside one another on the comforter as they conversed meanderingly, and both girls suspired over the lupine boys for heterogeneous reasons. Eventually they found themselves beneath the covers and facing opposite directions.
‘Are you sleeping, Henri?’ the cousin cooed somnolently. She permitted her eyes to acclimate to the aphotic room before turning to examine her sisterly nymph, who was in fact sleeping steadfastly.