She smelled like her mother. They looked the same. It was already hard to tell the women apart around here, and those two, well, they were mirror images give or take 15 years. They both wore calico dresses cut from the same pattern: pink checkered squares. And their hair piled on top of their heads like rising dough.
Like fresh baked bread, they smelled. That yeasty smell. He always liked that. Not like how the boys said it would smell, like how he heard his father joking with other men one drunken night, like rotten fish.
That's what he will remember most about those days. Those hours spent in the middle of the night, the deepest darkest hour, when he could breathe to hope that his brother's lying next to him were asleep or at least ashamed enough to pretend to sleep when they heard him thinking about Sarah. Those nights with his brother's snores, and the rain on the roof and hot mouth dreams of Sarah, who smelled like bread.
He's throwing rocks at her window. Small pebbles. They hit the glass with a tinny whisper, like secret pieces of flint.
Now they are in the woods.
She looks at him with those big wet fish eyes. Like a squid's, he thinks wonderingly. The last time he saw her he was stupid enough to tell her this and she stormed off crying. Now she is back and he doesn't say anything, just looks at her. Looks at her face, all eyes and mouth.
He is a gentleman. He takes her by the hand and leads her further into the dark deep. It occurs to him that he might get lost in this darkness. It is so dark. He trips over a fallen log. He can feel her looking at him. He turns around and sees her fish face by moonlight, smiling up at him. This annoys him for some reason that he cannot name and this unknowingness makes him angry. He turns her around, presses her face into a tree and lifts her skirt up.
She is soft and impassive under his hands, like dough. He kneads her breasts through the calico and immerses his face in the soft pile of hair. He drinks the aroma and slides in, easily and without resistance. Too easy. He tangles his fingers in her hair an presses her face harder into the rough bark. He yanks her back by the hair. Her mouth drops open like a kewpie doll.
"Mmmnaaagh." An uncomfortable grunt. At the limit of his frustrations, he stabs upward, hoisting her up on his sex, dragging her face against the trunk. She screams. He clamps his hand over her mouth and begins to ride her, slowly and then with gathering sureness. She bellows like a breaking horse beneath him.
But just when he was getting there, when he was reaching his moment of glory, he gets lost in her. He was going so fast and strong, pulling out so far and driving in that much deeper, that he was not even aware of her anymore, did not know what tunnel he was running in. He flopped out and could not get back in before it was too late and he was soft and sticky against her filth, that place of exit so impertinently close to the assigned entrance.
He hears her sigh low and he wants to cry.
