Educating Jenny Six (closed)

[peterpan]

OOC: This thread is closed for Marie Lavallois. My character is a cloned girl who knows nothing about being a woman (so everything has to be explain as if to a moron, or a guy )

My Character:
Name: Jenny Six.
Age: 18-20ish in appearance. Less than a month from ‘decanting’
Hair: Blond-brown, very short being just a few days growth.
Eyes: Grey, (black-white flecks if examined closely)
Description: Athletic, smallish breasts, a little short. Large wide set eyes, absolutely symmetrical face and perfect skin with a uniform slight tan. Add just a little bit of that bulldog look into her face to stop her being a perfect 10













IC Intro:

The birthmark stain on my left shoulder stated, in clear black block letters, GEN-E6. So they called me Jenny Six. Not very imaginative, I now realise, but there were so many of us to process when the war ended; and in all other respects we were identical.

But let me start from the beginning.

My first day of life was spent strapped to a sterile cot in a white, high-arched room. I think there were many of us there but I could not yet decipher my senses, so I am not certain. I heard colors. Saw sounds. Synesthesia. I could have been a wonderful musician. Needles embedded in perfectly developed but never used muscles delivered electric shocks as noise assaulted me through earphones. Images were projected on the ceiling far above. They would not let me sleep until I could tell my senses apart.

The second morning they taught me to crawl, to walk, to run, to throw myself to the ground and crawl again. There were others. Us. We all knew how to do these things. We just didn’t know that we knew.

There were things we shouldn’t do that were harder to teach. An afternoon and a night were all the time they spared to teach us about hygiene and shame but they made sure we would never forget. We were civilized now and could look down with scorn and pity on the day-and-a-halfs.

The third morning, we were each given boots and uniform and a weapon (there were no different sizes) and packed into battle-scarred trucks.

The war ended when I was eleven days old. We lost.

The next day, a twelfth of my life, were scary and still confusing to me. Many strange and conflicting orders were given to us. On the thirteenth day an officer from the opposing side arrived at the trenches that were our childhood, and with little ceremony we were transferred to his command. Immediately we belonged to the winning side, though they did not seem to know what to do with us.

I am twenty-one days old now.

My name is Jenny Six.



+++



On the rain-spattered rooftop we waited, covered by torn rags that had more to do with camouflage than our comfort. ‘Two-o’clock,’ my partner whispered. I swung the telescopic sight to the right and there they were: A woman with her coat pulled tight against the weather, hurrying in small steps, hauling a midget by it’s tiny hand. The midget’s face was contorted into a hideous red gargoyle’s mask.

‘That’s a kid,’ my elder, more knowledgeable sister said. ‘They worship them.’

‘I have never seen something so ugly,’ I replied, though there was also a sort of morbid fascination. My sighting-eye was glued to the strange dwarf.

‘Shoot it,’ she urged. ‘See what happens. You get a ration cube if you get it in the head.’

I thought about that. I really didn’t want to. I waited till there wasn’t time for argument and swung my rifle back to the mains street.

‘It’s not a target,’ I said.

The instructor eyed me dubiously. “That is a very good start Jenny Six. I asked you what this is, however. What this is, is a child. You may sit.”

We spent quite a long time on that slide. That sister had been right about the way they felt about their children. Then there were several slides about families and mommies and daddies that were a little too rapid and just confusing.

Flash-forward to the present. A week of retraining and we weren’t soldiers anymore, we were servants if anyone would have us.

We were absolutely forbidden to raise a finger in violence, even in self defence. It was not just a rule but also compunction -. we were always good at taking orders. We would call strangers Sir and Ma’am, owners Mistress and Master.

I was the last to be called. We had been driven from the internment faculty to another deserted building and made to wait in a room with chairs and desks far too small for us. Primitive crayon art covered the walls. One by one a sister was led from the room and never seen again. It seemed a very long time before the instructor arrived to lead me away down that long hall also.

I had no idea what or who awaited me at the end of it.

 

[Marie Lavallois]

Paul had to go to the elementary school by himself to pick up the new house girl because his wife, Gia, wouldn’t get out of bed that morning. He knew that she wouldn’t bathe, brush her teeth or change clothes that day either. Depression had paralyzed his wife.

In the car, Paul tried to make small talk with this Jenny, this, person, he supposed. He pointed out a cloud that looked like a rabbit. Then, they both fell silent as the car drove through the front gates of Paul and Gia’s costly home.

Jenny stood in the middle of the sparse, modern living room while Paul tried to explain a little more about the situation. “My wife is upset, and I can’t stay with her anymore. I have to go back to work, start traveling again before my bastard of a boss gives my out of town clients to someone without a family.”

Jenny stood there, looking like a new accessory, her blank face matching the simplicity of their replica of ‘Bird in Flight.’

Paul looked down at his packed suitcase and ran his fingers through his gray-blonde hair. “My wife will be supervising you day to day. Her name is Gia, and she’ll be up soon. She’s sleeping. She sleeps late, just let her. Gia, ah, Gia is upset, like I said, because she lost a baby.”

Gia hated that expression, ‘lost a baby.’ As if she put it down somewhere and just walked off. She listened to Paul’s brief explanations from behind the bedroom door. He was a good-looking man, still athletic and trim in his forties. He would have a younger wife who could bear him children in one, two years tops, she thought.

Gia’s first three pregnancies never got too far, those miscarriages were squeezed out in a mass of blood, hardly noticeable. But the last one lasted well past twelve weeks, so she told people, family and co-workers. At fifteen weeks, Gia started to wear maternity clothes. At twenty weeks, she bought a crib and a little white sweater.

The cramps gripped Gia in the middle of the night. She woke to a blood-soaked bed. In the hospital the nurses behaved with professional tact. They used a sheet hung over Gia's waist, to keep her from seeing them suction the dead fetus out of her womb. But Gia saw the whiteish body, the round head, and the curled legs, in a reflection of a silver lamp base.

Paul left for the airport. Jenny still stood in the middle of the living room, waiting for orders.

Gia slowly set her feet down on the bedroom floor, then walked to the closet to drag out a robe. She caught a glance of her face in the mirror, stringy blonde hair hanging in unwashed locks to her shoulders, dark circles rimming blue eyes. As usual, Gia thought, Paul hadn’t done anything practical like show the new girl where she is going to sleep, or where the bathrooms were. So it fell onto Gia.

Gia’s body still showed the effects of her recent pregnancy. Normally, she was as trim and athletic as her husband. They spent hours at the gym together, hitting the squash courts and lifting weights. But now, Gia’s hips and belly were soft. Her breasts, heavy with milk, swung as she walked.

 

[peterpan]

He had called it a ‘living room’. I had never been in a room as inimical to life as I knew it: as sweat and muddy boot scuffs and the breath of sleeping sisters.

I don’t think he wanted to be there either, yet the room suited to him in a sense. The room was an obligation, as talking to me had been an obligation. It was hard trying to contrive a response to words that were neither commands nor a serious request for information.

It did not surprise me at all to learn I also was a tool to satisfy some obligation to his wife.

His obligation dispensed, the man left.

When the war had ended it had been little more than a change of command. Standing there, alone in that room I think, emotionally, only then did I really admit we had lost and been consumed. An alien culture, a thousand times older than my world of sisters and mess halls and trenches, had confronted us and swallowed us. I had never been so far from a sister.

A tall mirrored panel was set into the wall by the door. It contained the only familiar thing in the room: another me. I found myself standing by the mirror looking at the unreachable sister in an identical room. She was dressed identically in a white shirt and trousers, merely a surplus uniform from which the khaki green had been chemically removed. Combat boots could not be disguised by a bleaching. They had taken hers. On her feet were simple synthetic slippers.

Her face was perfectly symmetrical. No telltale mole or freckle on the wrong side of the face betrayed that she was merely a reflection. With the man, our expression had been instinctively blank, guarded as if he was an enemy. With my own kind, we could hold conversations without speaking. This girl was frightened. My sister looked at me seeking assurance but knowing I was really just a reflection. By manipulating my own lips and brow, she now smiled confidently at me.

At the first footstep behind me, my face was a mask once more.

The woman that entered was nothing like a sister. She was more alien even than the man had been. Everything about her form was exaggerated. Her curves, her breasts, but most especially her hair. The length of her hair told me she must be ancient and possibly therefore very wize. Only by the length of hair could you tell a veteran sister from a cherry, and I had never seen a sister with hair nearly this long. Mine was less than one joint of my finger in length.

She looked us up and down also; me and my reflection. We felt we should say something.

“Mistress,” I said, lowering my eyes. But of course my reflection was silent. My last illusion had abandoned me and I was entirely alone.

 

[Marie Lavallois]

Gia’s fuzzy house slippers flopped against the polished hardwood floor as she showed Jenny around. Each room came with a set of instructions. “The bathrooms needed scrubbing and mopping. Pick up the clothes on my bedroom floor and wash them. Dust the desk in the spare bedroom, but don’t touch anything. Take the garbage out from the kitchen. That door down the hall is another bedroom, but you can’t go in there, ever.”

Back in the living room, Gia pointed at the floor to ceiling windows and said “those need washing, inside and out.” Outside of the windows, a dense forest of bamboo laced with kudzu vines filtered the sunlight so that a dappled pattern shone on the hard wood floor.

Gia and Paul’s wedding picture sat prominently in the center of the living room, framed in silver. The studio-lit, black and white could have been the promotional picture sold with the frame. Other than that, the house could have belonged to anyone, or no one. It could have been a catalog cover, glossy and uninhabited.

In the middle of the afternoon, Gia slipped back into her large, unmade bed and fell into a dreamless sleep. When she awoke, groggy and alone again now that Paul left, she shuffled back into the living room. Jenny shocked the hell out of her, standing there in the middle of the perfectly clean living room, waiting for orders or something like that.

“Did you get something to eat?”

Jenny stared back at Gia, empty eyes and an empty stomach. “No mistress.”

“OK, do not call me that. I hate it. Can’t you remember Gia?”

“Yes . . . Mi . . . Gia.”

“Good! Come on.”

Gia led Jenny into the kitchen and showed her where everything was. Gia hadn’t gone shopping, and lately, Paul took his meals at the office, so the cabinets were mostly empty. There was bread and jam, so Gia told Jenny to make a sandwich but Jenny just stood there in the middle of the kitchen. It exasperated Gia that this being, who looked like an adult, had to be taught everything. Gia had to show her how to take the bread out of the plastic bag, how to open the jar of jam, how to spread it on the bread and then how to smush the two pieces back together and eat it.

“Aw shit, I just realized that there is no place for you to sleep. It will have to be the couch then.” Without waiting for a response from Jenny, Gia found some extra bedding and threw it on the couch. The couch could have been in a waiting room in a doctor’s office, upholstered in expensive cloth with just enough padding to be comfortable for a short wait. That would be Jenny’s bed.

 

[peterpan]

There had been quite some time between finishing my chores and when Gia had returned from her room. I had partially expected her to know by mysterious means when I had finished. I had waited ten minutes, then decided to examine the house more closely. Most of it had already been encountered during Gia’s introduction to my chores and the subsequent execution of them. This time I walked the house memorising every detail. I counted and recounted my steps from one doorway to another, until I could walk from one end of the house to the other, turn around and walk back without bumping anything or setting a foot down awkwardly; all with my eyes closed.

There was no discernible sound coming from the forbidden bedroom, not even when I cupped my ear to the door and listened for several minutes.

Still Gia slept. I could hear her breathing through the door. Her room was not forbidden. I had already visited it to pick up her clothes, under her supervision. She would not want to be disturbed but.. I could be very quiet.

Gia’s bed was very large, four sisters could have slept in it, but her sleeping form was huddled in one corner. The bed-sheet had slipped almost entirely from her to the floor. She was cold. I watched her partially exposed form for a while before gaining the nerve to carefully cover her once more.

There was no reason to stay in that room as long as I did. Many minor reasons could be invented: things that hadn’t been dusted, things a little out of place that could be straightened but soon even these excuses were exhausted. I stayed. The sounds of another’s breath were comforting but the longer I stayed, watching her, the more it came to me that I was somehow disobedient to be there.

When Gia stirred fitfully, I had fled.

+++

The sandwich was horrible. The bread sucked all the moisture from my tongue and the jam was so overpoweringly sweet it almost stung. It would not let me swallow quickly. I had to chew many times before I could force it down my throat. I found that was the secret. Mix it with enough saliva in my mouth and chew till it was of a uniform consistency, and suddenly it was not unlike the ration cubes. Still my throat clenched on it.

My stomach had just begun to master solids shortly before the war ended. Most of my twenty seven days of life I had been fed only liquids. I knew Mistress, Gia, was not being deliberately cruel. Dare I ask if she had liquid food? Or perhaps I should offer to gather more food from the nearest unplundered supermarket.

Thankfully Gia left the kitchen to prepare my bed. This gave me opportunity to add some water to the sandwich from a tap, and mulch each mouthful in my hands a little before forcing it down.

Gia had just finished my bed as I entered the living room. My mistress glanced at me and did a double take. “Your face!,” she inspected me closer, “Your hands! What were you thinking!” Then she questioned me closely, until I had told her exactly why I had failed to consume a simple sandwich by the method instructed, in excruciating detail.

 

[Marie Lavallois]

Gia grabbed a dry paper towel first, pulling it from the roll and then flicking it apart at the perforations with a quick wrist flick. That got most of the crumbs off. As Gia wiped Jenny’s face, the paper left red scratches on her cheeks. Gia switched to a soft cloth and gently patted the rest of the jam away.

“They didn’t give me any instructions on you. I don’t know what you eat. You do eat, right? I am not expected to set up some feeding tube right into your belly or something like that?”

“I am sorry. I do not eat. We drink all of our meals.”

“Ah.” Gia turned to the refrigerator and found a carton of milk in the back. The expiration date had already passed, but it didn’t smell bad, so Gia poured some of it into a cup for Jenny. Even that proved to be messy because Jenny tipped the cup up too fast, so the milk dribbled down both sides of her mouth. Using the cloth, Gia wiped Jenny’s face off again. Then, she made Jenny sit down on a stool. Her feet dangled above the floor. While Jenny waited, Gia went into the forbidden room, the nursery.

The bottom of the door scraped softly against the newly-installed carpet, yellow, good for a boy or a girl. Gia headed for the crib in the corner of the room. Baby shower gifts filled it. Gia’s family threw her a surprise shower, as soon as she passed the twelve week ‘safe period.’ “Miscarriages after twelve weeks are extremely rare,” her doctor told her. The same one who told her eight weeks later that there wasn’t a heartbeat. “Prick,” she said under her breath. She tried to return the baby gifts, but most people gracefully declined, saying, “keep it, you’ll have another,” knowing full well the odds were sketchy.

At the bottom of the pile, Gia found a gift back of bottles. She had inwardly scoffed at them because she intended to breast-feed her baby. Formula wouldn’t be good enough. But, the bottles would come in handy now. Back in the kitchen Gia carefully filled one of the bottles with milk, screwed the silicone nipple onto it and gave it to Jenny.

+++

Paul flew overhead in a company plane. The ten seater held him, and two other sales people from a different division. One of them men leaned over an empty seat and said, “Hey, I hear your wife’s expecting. Way to go!”

“Oh, well. Good news travels faster than bad, I guess. She, uh, lost the baby,” Paul replied with a half-smile as if he had clearly gotten over the loss himself.

The other salesman, an older man with flecks of gray in his neatly trimmed hair, spoke up. “My wife lost three. She carried the last one to term, but when it was born, no heartbeat.”

“Oh, do you have kids?” Paul hoped to change the subject, hoped that the older man would flip out his wallet to display a long, accordion folded piece of plastic with pictures at every stage of childhood.

“No.”

Paul changed the subject again, to baseball this time. All three men agreed that the Giants were in it to win the pennant this year. When a little time passed, Paul excused himself to go the bathroom. He returned, but none of the three passengers spoke again.

 

[peterpan]

The ‘milk’ was much more satisfactory than the ‘sandwich’. It was almost delicious. The cap was strange. Chewing on it released a few drops but also pinched it shut. Soon I learnt how to suck and squeeze with my lips just right so that the smooth white liquid squirted onto my tongue. Soon I was gulping it down.

My eyes were shut to better enjoy the experience of real food rolling into my stomach; one hand placed there as if.. I really don’t know why. I didn’t realise until Gia spoke.

“That suits you better, I see.”

“Yes,” I said, still drinking and a bit escaped to run down my cheek. A sleeve took care of that and then I remembered my ‘manners’ technique. “THANK you, Gia.” I beamed at her, but the facial signals she returned were discordant so I dropped my expression back to neutral.

+++

That night, curled up on the couch that was my bed, my stomach was quite unsettled.

I knew something was going wrong with my body when the cramps began. I do not know if it began this way with the other ones, but I knew how it ended.

After my decanting, and they had us all lie in those cots, row by row, the next morning already some of the cots were vacant. The second day during the training one of the sisters began to cough blood and she was also removed. In the trenches, blood could go unnoticed for days by the sergeants, or they just did not care until the illness had progressed to the stage where the girl would not rise, would not obey, and was shot for mutiny if breath still bubbled from her.

When my fingers touched the wetness between my thighs, I knew it would be blood. That is, I told myself I knew, but when the smell of blood and worse on my fingers removed all doubt, I felt the hole in my chest where all my secret hope had been.

Quietly and in darkness I took myself to the bathroom and put the soiled garments in a basin with soap. Without really admitting why, I then knelt in the empty shower cubicle and tried to wash away the blood and other filth that was my body leaking from me, using a slow trickle from the shower faucet.

Not much blood really but there always seemed to be a little bit more. I couldn’t wash it all away. The stain would return even if I could remove it and that ancient briny smell would not seem to go away.

I would be taken away. I did not know what they would do with me. Not shoot me on my mistress’s lawn, I suspected. More likely they would do nothing. Give me a cot, and no orders and no reason at all for my short life. Just the symmetry of ending it as it had begun.

I was crying silently, senses dulled by self pity and the patter of running water when, with a snap like a trap closing, someone switched on the bathroom light.


Gia found helping Jenny clean up frustrating. Did this girl know anything? Apparently not. Gia dug for pads in the back of the bathroom cabinet, where she left them after her last period over six months ago. Jenny sat on the toilet, her blood-stained panties in a ball on the floor.

"So, Jenny, you aren't going to die. This isn't blood exactly, its the lining of your uterus." Gia hoped that would ease the girl's mind.

"What's a uterus?"

"Its your womb, where you will have a baby. This means that everything's operating normally. It means that you aren't pregnant now, but that everything is normal, and you can get pregnant."

The topic of conversation was hard for Gia. Her own periods had not resumed after the last miscarriage. The first three pregnancies never got that far, those embryos were squeezed out in a mass of blood, hardly noticable. But the last one lasted well past twelve weeks, so she told people, family and co-workers. At fifteen weeks, Gia started to wear maternity clothes. At twenty weeks, she bought a crib and a little white sweater.

The cramps gripped Gia in the middle of the night. She woke to a blood-soaked bed. In the hospital the nurses behaved with professional tact. They used a sheet hung over Gia's waist, to keep her from seeing them suction the dead fetus out of her womb. But Gia saw the whiteish body, the round head, and the curled legs, in a reflection of a silver lamp base.

Gia left Jenny in the bathroom and looked through the clone's things. Jenny didn't have any other pairs of panties, so Gia got a pair of her own and brought them back to the bathroom.

Jenny's face was a mix of confusion and disgust. Confused about the events, and disgusted at all of the mess. The water in the toilet bowl was tinted red. Gia showed her how to clean herself off by holding some toiler paper in running water, and then wiping with it. Then Gia stuck a pad in the panties and gave them to Jenny.

"You have to change this every few hours."

"Thank you mistress," Jenny said, forgetting once more.

Gia sighed, tired and hoping this would not become her refrain. "Don't call me that, I hate it. Call me Gia."

"Yes Gia," Jenny said as she pulled Gia's silken panties around her own hips.


My body felt strange. Alien and also new. Instead of dying I was just shedding a skin, Gia said. Now I find myself in a strange new body with strange functions. Even the sensation of that smooth material against my buttocks and under my fingers as I walked was new.

Gia led me back to my bed on the couch. There was a spot of blood on the sheets there too. Gia was tired. I did not draw her attention to the stain. Laundry was my job now. She waited till I was between the sheets before turning to leave.

Gia understood all about my new body. None of this was foreign to her. I wanted to question her all night long but I knew I mustn’t begin. Nevertheless one unconsidered question slipped from me:

“Gia, why are you so sad when you are asleep?”

 

[Marie Lavallois]

“I cry because life is sad. Is that answer enough for you?” Gia put her hands to her hips.

Jenny nodded.

“Fine. I have one last task for you, then you can go to sleep. Change all of he linens on my bed. Fresh sheets are in the hall closet. I’m taking a shower, have it all done by the time I am through.”

The blood-spattered sheets from the night of the miscarriage had been changed before Gia came home from the hospital. But when Jenny changed them she saw the faint brownish traces on the mattress.

Gia stood directly under the shower spray while she thought about the situation. Jenny had already cleaned the house from top to bottom. There was nothing to occupy the girl tomorrow. Perhaps Jenny could come with Gia to her appointment to Dr. Escher. That decision made, Gia began to wash her hair with tangerine-scented shampoo. When she rinsed it, her hair hung down her breasts in wet locks. She even picked out something new to wear to sleep, a soft nightgown with pearl buttons down the front that Paul had given her.

Jenny, finished with changing the bed, stood in the corner of the bedroom waiting to be told where to go.

“Jenny, you can go to sleep now, in the living room.” Gia pointed to the door.

Jenny, quiet, left.

Gia slumped down into the clean sheets of the newly made bed. She slept all day, but still she could sleep some more. As she rolled over onto her side, Gia felt her breasts roll against her chest. Before the pregnancy, Gia could lay on her side and each breast would still pertly point ahead. But now, the top one softly spread against the bottom. She sat up and pulled her gown down over her shoulders. Her nipples had darkened and spread. Little white dots appeared at the very tip of them.

Dr. Escher warned her that this might happen. Her confused body would make milk for the baby that was never born. There was nothing she could do, he said. Gia rolled onto her stomach. At least she had that again, the ability to lay flat on her tummy. Soon, she slept.

“Arrrghh!” Gia screamed as she awoke. It felt like two hard rocks had been slipped under her chest.

Jenny threw the door open. It hit the wall with a loud crack. She turned the light on to see Gia sitting up in bed, the gown pulled down around her waist. Gia cradled her own breasts with both arms.

“I am OK, calm down.” Gia said. “Turn the light off.”

Jenny flicked the light off, but didn’t move.

“Come here, Jenny, there is something else I need your help with.”

Jenny moved through the darkness to the bed.

“Here Jenny, lay down. That’s it. Are you still hungry? I have something like a bottle. You’ve got to help me empty it.”

Jenny leaned against the tangerine-scented pillow. Gia silently guided Jenny’s head downward until it rested on her forearm. With one hand at the back of Jenny’s head, and the other cupping her engorged breast, Gia gently guided lips to nipple.

 

[peterpan]

“I am OK, calm down.” Gia said. “Turn the light off.” She was cradling her breasts defensively. She was not afraid, though. The room was empty but for the two of us.

Gia did not ask me to leave, explicitly. I stayed.

When she spoke, rather than what I expected, it was to request me to her side.

Gia’s bed was very soft, and I felt myself sinking into it. Her back was against the head-board so I rested my elbow on the pillow that smelt of her hair, to lift my face nearer to hers. No part of us touched although we lay closer than I had ever lain to another. I took care not to touch. That was a remanent of my earliest decency and hygiene training. There had been some unspecified danger in two sisters sleeping together. We had always slept in cots one foot apart or in bunks with two feet between each level.

I was a little giddy, being so close. The thought of Gia commanding me to touch her in bed made me feel weak and uncoordinated. My mind was a blank because, even thinking about what Gia might ask of me, I kept stumbling on wrong thoughts that dissolved instantly into white noise.

“Are you still hungry? I have something like a bottle. You’ve got to help me empty it.”

What she meant escaped me, though I wet my lips expectantly, eyes searching hers. That is when Gia’s arms enveloped me, and we were touching. My head was full of white noise and my limbs became useless things. I could not touch or resist her touch, so I lay in her arms as confused and helpless as when I had first been decanted.

This time, however, I was not lying alone on a cot. My head was cradled in her arms and Gia was in control of what was possible and what was right. She lead my lips to her breast.

This time I would not disappoint Gia with my ignorance. My lower lip reacted instinctively to the touch of Gia’s swollen teat. At first I sucked too hard, pulling the nipple against my teeth. Gia’s wince and sharp intake of breath informed me before any words could.

The first milk was warm as my own spit, but smooth and sweet and unmistakable. I knew it would taste like milk but there I was pleasantly surprised. Gia’s tasted much better and more fresh by far than whomever’s milk had filled the now empty bottle in the fridge.

The sensation of her body against mine still impinged on my consciousness yet it was distant, foreshortened by this new perspective. Warm. Sort of nice. My hand was on her belly for balance and I do not remember placing it there. My world consisted of the taste, the sensation on my lips and her face looking down into mine. Watching her I learnt what pleased and what was too greedy. My tongue kneaded her nipple as I drew on her, and when my mouth slipped, I would wrap my lips around as much of her breast as I could and use my tongue to guide my lips back into position.

All too soon the flow of milk from that breast slowed. I was not near full but that was not the true reason I kept trying to draw one more drop. Gia might not want her other breast drunk. When I was finished Gia would have no more use for me in her room.

I hoped in a tentative way that Gia would fall asleep, forgetting to dismiss me, though this frightened me as much as it excited me. I would have to lie there the whole night not moving, but I would not have to return to sleep in the living room by myself.

 

[Marie Lavallois]

Gia awoke as Jenny finally fell asleep. The breast in Gia’s mouth had been emptied, the skin softened again. But Gia’s left breast swelled in anticipation. Filled with milk, it took on the feel of an over filled water balloon. Gia touched it with one finger and the whole breast moved as one solid object.

In her sleep, Jenny’s head rolled away from Gia. A trickle of milk ran down Jenny’s chin. There was something in one of the childcare books Gia read about “rooting.” Stroke the infant’s cheek with the nipple and she will instinctively turn her head to the breast. Gia slid out from the covers and walked around the bed. She lay on the other side of Jenny and stroked her cheek with the rigid nipple. Jenny’s lips parted as she turned and latched on. Fully relieved now, Gia slept.

Gia woke first. After days of continuous sleep, her legs yearned to stretch. Quietly, Gia drew her nightgown up about her shoulders and went to the bathroom. In the bathroom’s privacy, Gia slipped her nightgown back down and looked at her breasts in the mirror. The nipples were a deep rose, and about the size of an open bloom too.

Gia went to the kitchen. She wiped the breadcrumbs left on the counter from yesterday’s sandwich disaster. From there, she heard Jenny’s two feet hit the bedroom floor. Then, the quickening tempo of search as Jenny ran in and out of the back rooms.

“I’m in the kitchen!” Gia called out before Jenny could reach the locked nursery.

And the pittering-pattering feet ran to the kitchen.

“I’ve made you something to eat. I think you’ll like this better than the sandwich.” Jenny stirred a pot of rice baby cereal mixed with milk and applesauce. It smelled blandly sweet. “Now Jenny, you and I need to talk about secrets. Do you know what a secret is?”

 

[peterpan]

I did not find myself trapped awake and fretting while Gia slept. My only responsibility was to keep my lips to Gia’s breast and that responsibility was easily satisfied. Lying there listening to Gia’s heartbeat and her breath was very peaceful, the bed sinfully soft and although the blankets did not cover much of me I enjoyed Gia’s warmth sliding against the length of me.

Drowsily I lay there, and do not know when actual sleep came; for my dreams were much like waking. I lay on a bed that stretched out forever, an infinte plane and Gia formed the arch of the sky above me, a breast hanging down to my very lips and I drank all night long. Except in my dream it was sunny.

I woke in a patch of morning sunlight, spread expressively on Gia’s wide mattress. I am sure I looked more like a rag-doll land mine casualty than a soldier girl in repose.

Gia had left, and not woken me. Why hadn’t she woken me to begin my chores and prepare the house for her? My sheets with that stain still lay on the couch. Was she somehow displeased in the manner I had performed my chores? Would she take them from me and call me useless? Paranoia, I understood, yet I could lie there not a second longer and leapt immediately to the floor.

The cramps were still there, and I would need to see to myself as Gia had taught me, but that could wait.

“I’m in the kitchen!” Gia called out, obviously alerted by my feet on the hardwood floor as I searched the rooms.

Gia was in her nightgown, and this made me remember that I was still undressed, wearing only the tee-shirt and satin knickers I had slept in. My trousers and shirt lay folded by the couch still. Despite my recent instructors advice that there was an inexplicable taboo against mixing daytime and night-time wear, Gia did not seem offended.

Gia was fixing food for me. It smelled interesting but nice, and looked much more like the food I was used to. Clearly Gia did not immediately require my attentions to ease her breasts’ pressure, and this disappointed me a little. I sat on the stool next to her.

“Now Jenny,” said Gia, “you and I need to talk about secrets. Do you know what a secret is?”

“Yes Gia,” I replied promptly.

Gia watched me, making me nervous. Finally Gia said “And..?”

She wanted a definition. For a moment I could not think. We had been decanted all with the exact same vocabulary. We just knew what words meant and never once in my life had I been asked to explain a word in terms of other words. They just were. I wanted to say a secret is a secret over and over.

“A secret is intelligence that must not reach the enemy,” I said, and winced inwardly. Bad wording.

They had told us there were no enemies now the war was over. Not to use that word because it would make good citizens nervous. But if there were no enemies then there would be no need for secrets, no need for privacy. A word I had understood but never needed. But in this society, they had also said, privacy was very important. Every good citizen wanted privacy from every other citizen. Every family wanted privacy, every group wanted privacy. Everyone an enemy.

Still it was not enough. Gia expected more.

Finally blurting, “I have been trained to resist torture.”