A wooden framed swing creaked
sadly outside under a sky that looked like supple grey suede. Tucked inside her
attic bedroom, a cocoon in the skull of a tall semi-detached terrace house, Genie
leant back on her elbows and sighed, the longest, bluest sigh the room has ever
seen she hoped. The walls were spattered with spots of damp that multiply and
grow down towards the lilac skirting boards. The force of the exhaling, the
earthy steam boiling up from her lungs, slowly brought down her ribcage until
it was level with her pointed hips and she lay flat on the floor. There was a
slow quietness in the dawn hours, a kind of tremulous fog that slithered
creamily out of the cracks in the windows and doors. Genie could feel it
clinging to her eyelashes and pooling in the twin hollows of her collarbones.
It dripped down the cabinets like spilt milk. It seemed to her that she was
entirely alone, a feeling that the King children weren’t used to. Genie, her
four sisters and one brother had always moved freely through each other’s
spaces, slipping in and out of rooms and conversations like silvery minnows in
a stream. To feel entirely alone, like there wasn’t a spare sibling or two
perhaps curled in a corner reading a magazine or dozing gently, was a strange
and unwelcome feeling to them all. Since the relocation of the King family
to their new tall house Genie had acquired her own bedroom, a converted attic
room with sloping walls and yellowing daisy wallpaper leftover from someone
else’s childhood. A flight of warped wooden stairs separated her from the third
floor, which housed her sisters Josephine, Mallory and Francine, and the sounds
of their pattering up and down to her attic soothed her like a mother’s
heartbeat. Tonight however the attic was still and Genie lay prostrate on the
carpet next to an open lined notebook, pen between her teeth like a cigar. She
twisted her neck and laid her right ear flat on the floor in order to read back
what she had written so far:
‘A Thorough and Honest Assessment
of the Genetic Benefits and Drawbacks of Choosing Genie King as a Mate*
*Author recognizes disambiguation
of noun ‘mate’ and here clarifies that within this report it shall hereto after
refer define ‘mate’ in terms of reproductive means as opposed to colloquialism
of ‘mate’ as meaning friend.’
Genie was sixteen years old, an age at which she had
realised that she had never thought about romance, or love. It seemed romance
oozed from every television programme, every advert, every carefully designed
mini skirt and choreographed teen ritual, and yet Genie had never even kissed
anyone, never doodled their name decorated with hearts onto her notebooks. The
decision to catalogue all of her various personal habits and failings had come
shortly after her sixteenth birthday party.
