Affection by Krissy Kneen Read Free Book Online Page A

her sentence. The others nodded.
    I looked toward my sister. She was still scowling into her copy of
The Fountainhead . She had heard the exchange but, unlike me, refused to be curious. Their business had nothing to do with her. She was an island separated from us by the bristling of her back.
    â€œAll right,” my mother conceded. “Tomorrow night.”
    My grandmother warned, “It might be something wrong. A mistake.”
    â€œAh! Ah! Ah!” My aunt glanced toward my sister and me, both of us pretending to be engrossed in our novels.
    â€œI’m not saying,” my grandmother said. “I just mean not to count your eggs.”
    â€œChickens,” my aunt corrected her.
    Â 
    Â 
    Chickens, eggs, crème de menthe. This is how I came to realize that the win was not a little one at all. First-division lotto, which meant there was no trip to the rocks to buy Sepik art. There were no scones with strawberry jam. Instead there was a promise of something entirely more grand.
    â€œWe are going to move to Dragonhall,” they told me. “But it is a secret. Don’t tell them at school. If they know you are leaving they might stop caring about you in class. They might fail you because they are jealous. Don’t tell your teachers until we are all packed and ready to get on the plane.”
    â€œWhere is Dragonhall?” I asked them.
    They pointed to the map, somewhere in Queensland, a place
near the ocean, a fly-spot labeled Bororen with the blue of the sea less than a finger reach away.
    â€œThis is our Disneyland,” my grandmother told me. “Dragonhall because my name, Dragitsa, means dragon.”
    â€œNo,” Sheila corrected. “It means Charlotte, Lotty. A female version of Charles.”
    â€œYes, Charlie; but it is also like a dragon, my family’s symbol had a dragon.”
    â€œA dragon on the top of it,” my aunt confirmed.
    â€œDragon-hall. You want to go to Dragonhall?”
    Of course I wanted to go to Dragonhall. I wanted to go away from a school where I was harassed by older kids and abandoned by my sister. I wanted to stop being afraid that the man who raped a neighbor and carved his initials in her skin might climb in through my bedroom window and carve his name in me. I wanted to live in a place that was like Disneyland only better.
    I went to bed early and slept without the nightmares that always plagued me. Instead I dreamed of chocolate frogs, gingerbread forests, and measureless caverns dripping with stalactites. The promise of Dragonhall.

THIS THING WITH PAUL 2
    Brisbane 2008

    Paul is there again. Most people put their own image on their Facebook page but he has a piece of art. A house, balanced on a mountainous peak, a wash of a storm brewing. I have come to associate the picture that stands in for him with pleasure. I smile when I see it and when I am anxious I close my eyes and there is his house behind them like a reassurance. I know it is silly, but I associate our chats with a feeling of contentment and his picture is enough to evoke this feeling. He chats to me about books and styles of writing.
    I have started a blog, I tell him, because I am jealous of Christopher’s “Furious Horses,” writing a new story every day.
    What is it called?
    â€œFurious Vaginas.”

    Hahaha, he says and then it seems he is gone. A silence which I punctuate with question marks at intervals.
    I like that it isn’t about sex. He is back again.
    Isn’t it?
    No, he says. It seems to be about other things.
    I ask him to send me some of his work. I have heard that his writing is good but I am not sure that I have read any of it. We talk about Nicholson Baker as he gathers things together to send as a file. Paul multitasks like a demon. This, more than anything, marks him as a member of the next generation. I know that I am far too old for him. I am from a different era.
    Vox is about us, I say. You and me.
    Ah, but I never