Writing for Fun
October 2016
The Kiss - Vivian Burdon
He remembered Rebecca’s face.
Rebecca’s young, freckled face, tilted upwards, eyes squeezed shut and soft pink lips puckered into a pout. Even then, in that first view of her screwed up, contorted countenance there was no disguising the beguiling, smiling beauty that was Rebecca’s face.
She had snared him coming out of the kitchen, newly filled glass before him and the last wisp of his apology for lateness floating behind. On her tip toes, arm raised, she held aloft the distinctive branch. A glance up revealed her intense intent. The pearlescent white berries nestling within the forked paired evergreen leaves above her bright young puckered face. She had succeeded, snagged onto a complete stranger, an eligible bachelor, a husband with this time-worn charm.
She had lovingly pressed the sprig of mistletoe from her bridal corsage into her childhood bible. Placing it in a carved oak box, she reverently laid it beneath their matrimonial bed. Then she had given up work. ‘Nesting; she said, ‘for their babies’. There would be babies. Not many, three perhaps?
Time passed and always under the bed, the oak box. The white berries, too moist to ever dry pressed between the scriptures. The berries full of white sticky juice nestling between the forking paired leaves, sexual organs both in shape and content exuding its desires from under the bed. Lying there in their bed his heart could feel the hard sides and holy interior of what lay beneath.
No babies came. The box under the bed, a swollen, bloated presence pushed him to work harder. To shower her with replacement gifts and pleasures. His effort was boundless. Her desires knew no bounds. Her face never lost the beguiling smiling beauty, even as it robbed him of his health and drained his soul.
Now, here he sat, hunched over the oak box beside him on their bed. His gnarled trembling fingers prized open the lid. The vast void within caught his breath. Then the screeching began and branches unfurled, breaking out in anguish from the small box. The struggling branches of an oak tree, leafless, bearing the bloated cluster of a flourishing mistletoe. He cut deep with his knife, stabbing and twisting, gouging out the bloated parasite from the sacred oak. The mistletoe fell to the floor and the broken berries oozed their stickiness into the carpet. The oak tree quietened and heaved a sigh shrinking back into the little box. He rose and walked to the door. Looking back he noticed Rebecca wasn’t smiling any more. And the berries, the crushed berries on the floor, were the blood red of winter holly.