The sound of the radio on in the kitchen. My brothers in the backyard. Sunlight lighting the living room. My cousin, biting the shit out of my forehead.
He was five, but his muscles were made of lead and he could pin you, and if he wanted, feast on your face, training his four teeth (two on top, two on bottom) right around the (narrowest?) part of your forehead. I was 10, and I thought he was adorable, with his blonde curls and his giant baby head and smell, so I let him. At least until I went inside, covered in mud and the general grime that coats childhood in the summer, and my mom saw. The marks on my head, not deep enough to bleed, but a dozen tiny indentations where the baby teeth had tried to break through.
My aunt made costumes. She had long, beautiful hair that frizzed right up in the summer, which of course, was the only time I saw her, so that’s how she looks in my memory of those years; barefoot except for the occasional toe-ring, frizzy auburn hair down to her waist. She smelled like the coop- so, patchouli, jasmine, and coffee. My mom smelled (smells) like warm, clean soap and wore closed-toe sandals. This aunt, wonderful and gentle like a goddess from someone’s high dream was the type to discuss things. Discuss the reasons why, perhaps, a five-year-old might choose to bite someone’s face, and discuss why, perhaps, we shouldn’t do that again. Maybe this works for some people, but I think to my five-year-old cousin, it was a joke, a mandatory stepping stone of a conversation on the way to sharpening his teeth on the soft flesh of my forehead once more. You could see it in his beautiful round eyes. He wanted to know what skull tasted like.
His father, my uncle, was different. I never understood, as a child, why they were married to each other. “Opposites attract,” my aunt would say. Not yet familiar with the science behind magnetic force, I was never quite sure about the logic behind this, and turns out, neither were they, as they divorced some time later. In the course of our family’s exploration in that delicate science of opposites attracting, we discovered that my parents also were opposites, as were my grandparents, and later, all of my boyfriends and I, as the laws of magnetism only work in very specific circumstances, and only if those circumstances don’t involve anyone I’d prefer stay very much in love.
My uncle drank and swore and yelled, all of which he did as much as he could, maybe in an effort to live as fully as possible, or, more likely, in an effort to piss off his mother (my grandmother) as to his best ability during those short summer vacations we were all together in her house. I would later discover the innate pleasure of pissing my grandmother off, but this was before all that, so I mostly thought he was pretty rude, but also really fun.
My mother wasn’t one for incredible patience, but in observing the impressions of my dear cousin’s newly grown teeth on my forehead, exercised some of it, stashed away from some inner corner of her heart where all the beer was kept, knelt down, investigated, and said, quietly, “Next time he tries to bite you, kick him in the balls.”
Maggie Goscinski is a New York native living and writing on the rocky coast of Maine. She currently serves as President of Cold Comfort Theater in Belfast and writes plays and short stories. She has written stories such as ‘Apology to a Sea Bird’, ‘Albert’s Dignity’, ‘Not Even the Moon’, and plays such as ‘A Collection of Things We Forgot to Say’, ‘Heart for Hire’ and ‘The Stranger’. She lives with her boyfriend Matt and stepson Ian.
Photo courtesy Stocksnap
