Bloodlines

The air smells full of anticipation tonight.  It smells like listless nights, too hot to move.  Of baths under the running cold tap and that incidental splash of the sprinkler over your feet, the grass rough and sodden beneath.  We used to spend so much time with them, our cousins.  In their cubby house we would play school.  I'd be the teacher.  A blackboard seems so archaic now.  When we grew tired of it we had grown into our bodies and we could see that creation had continued.  Our grandparents started to look different to what we remembered.  Our Nonna had kept travelling as we had.  We couldn't see that in our parents yet though, that would come later as our eyes opened.  And so, we didn't see them as often, our cousins.  Our father and our father's brother had started to look different to each other too; time had carried them apart.  This we couldn't understand why.  My brother and I made a promise to make sure this didn't happen to us.  Our children will be cousins and never grow apart; my brother is my brother, I am his sister, and we will never grow apart.