Jumping at the Moon by Venero Armanno

Author:Venero Armanno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Limited
Published: 2021-11-10T10:59:17+00:00

Forgetful Fingers On The G String

1 A Witch

Naked by the glass, on the day she had been looking forward to for two years and more—which by happenstance was the tenth anniversary of the American Woodstock Music Festival—Emma set about making herself up layer by layer.

Early morning summer sunshine fell across the patterned quilt of her single bed as Triple Zed’s sardonic breakfast shift announcer played ‘This Ain’t the Summer of Love’ for the occasion.

The music was low as if it might disturb others in the house, but the truth was that Emma had lived alone in her guardian’s rambling old colonial ever since he had first decided to go backpacking across Europe.

From her window overlooking the street Emma watched the small crowd she would soon join at the number 177 bus stop. She slid tight jeans over her tightly muscled bottom, automatically thinking: eight kilometres jogging five days out of seven, fifty Olympic swimming laps nine days out of fourteen.

Her legs were long, there was firm definition in her biceps, and the symmetrical lines of muscle were clear in her abdomen.

But when Emma buttoned a white shirt over her small breasts, their points seemed to stare back at her from out of the clean glass of the closet’s full-length mirror. Hard, long, curious, unloved—these were the words which came into her mind.

Still, it was the great Summer of Love ten years earlier that was most in her thoughts, and would have been anyway with or without the anniversary. For the bolt out of the blue had arrived only the day before: ‘Emma flt 226 Luft 10.20am tomorrow, Your Faithful Guardian’.

No wonder then that in these recent years of school and university there had only been the occasional boy to grope her here and prod her there and bore her senseless with sweaty palms and seas of Old Spice.

But her guardian, Saul Bellman—a picture of him was creased into a corner of the long mirror’s glass—was something else, all blue eyes and golden-brown hair that ended in ringlets at his shoulders.

The photo was an old one, taken in 1969 when Saul had been playing in his flower-power band, several years before her parents had been killed and he had shown his true friendship for them by becoming her legal guardian.

Emma was now six months from turning twenty; when one day she had realised her affection for Saul was real and deep and not the product of some prepubescent fantasy, she had experienced a sense of relief.

In essence, all that was missing was Saul himself.

There was so much to tell him: her dates with adolescent boys too nervous to hold her hand; the trendy young punks at university dances who broke the skin on their wrists with glass and led their loved ones around on spiked dog collars; the reviewer at Triple Zed whom she had spent a night with and who the next day had sent her a gift-wrapped leather G-string.

A child of Woodstock, Saul would understand this poverty of spirit Emma saw everywhere.

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