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PodCastle 530: Kin, Painted





* Author : Penny Stirling
* Narrator : Julia Rios
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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Originally published in Lackington’s.


Rated PG-13.
This episode is run in honor of Non-Binary People’s Day on July 14.  If you are interested in reading more fiction by non-binary authors, check out A.C. Wise’s review series, “Non-Binary Authors to Read.”
Kin, Painted
by Penny Stirling
Watercolour.
I brush water in thin lines down my right arm before adding green pigment. Colour spreads down each lane. I twist my arm to surface tension’s extent and then past it, letting the paint escape.
Think how lovely I could be covered in watercolours. Gradients with geometric patterns, perhaps, or precise stripes with thought-provoking colour-mixing drips. Now and then a performance piece, using my own sweat to blur and degrade my body’s art.
No I sloppily write in water across the smeared lines as disrelish seethes inside me, shaking my arm — no — and washing the brush — no — and writing no until my arm is clean.
I am running out of paints to try.

Red, pink, orange.
Older Brother wears the Duchess’s prizewinning roses, witch-tattooed to bloom and wither on a weekly cycle. When she entertains guests — usually inside but in her garden on warm summer days — he wears naught but a sculpted skirt to wander as a flower vase.
Every night he covers his roses with thick strokes of rainbow paints — more dollops than a coat — that do not dry but instead smear and mix and splatter as his body slides and rubs against the Duchess’s eldest son. Since the betrothal ceremony they are no longer allowed to flirt in public, but no one knows that the Duchess’s son prefers paint to engagement rings if they’re both clean and proper before morning.
“Will you go with him when he marries?” I ask Older Brother as he checks the garden’s roses for pests.
Of course. “You could take over my duties,” he signs, winking. The betrothed lady doesn’t care for roses, he later confides. The Duchess won’t allow it, he frets. But, he muses, if someone else could be roses, even unwitched ones, she just might.
I imagine being beset with roses, scentless yet still cloying, and I demur. After all, I am mid-puberty; our parents would never allow me tattoos yet. Even though he assures me he jests, I dream of their tattooed thorns slicing my skin.

Black, white.
Father’s back is a chess board, his chest backgammon, repainted every day. In his younger days his legs were strong and he could kneel or stand, bent over, for an entire game but now he lies on a divan while the Duchess and her mother play games on him. When the Duchess’s children were younger his arms were often covered in tic-tac-toe grids.
Sorting threads for his next embroidery project, he asks me how I’ll paint myself. I don’t know. I keep trying different things but . . .
“You’ll figure it out,” he says with a voice so full of trust and confidence it makes my stomach hurt the nights I lay awake staring so unsure at my unvarnished flesh.

Fountain pen ink.
Paint I write on the back of my hand. Paint. Paint. The black ink spiders.
I don’t paint. I don’t paint. Will I paint? Paint. Paint. Paint. Paint.
My pen has a thin nib and it takes a long time for the ink to...


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 July 10, 2018  39m