Mirabelle was a slip of a gal. She wore her hair tied back in a loose pony-tail. In her plain yellow linen dress three inches above the knee, and her white pinafore; it looked like a uniform. The house was painted white with brown boarders, and they had a little garden cutoff from the rest of the open scrub-land rimmed with a light blue picket fence. There was a tree too.
Jack worked all day, and Mirabelle looked out of the kitchen window for him at 5 O' clock sometimes. She never saw any animals, or wild ones.
They were the only house up there on the hill. At 5 O' clock she could see above the weather when it was there, and looked through the rain falling down on the houses of the town far below. She liked cleaning the house, but was afraid of the spark in the weather.
"Could windows stop it?" she wondered.
But the raging heat never came up, and the hot flint always went down. Mirabelle liked when it went down, and she cried for the people she imagined hiding from it: Her nails were sharp on his head. There were never any dirty clothes in the house. Mirabelle washed them all: But not when the lightening hunted the people in the town below, then, she hid under the table scratching between her legs with trimmed nails.
Jack would come back and they would eat. He always beat her at Monopoly, and she sulked. They didn't have a television set. They were too far away. She beat Jack at pinochle. So he always wanted to play Monopoly. They went to bed early.
Mirabelle would always dry the clothes too much, and have to throw a wetted towel in the dryer and run them around again for a while. They both frowned at wrinkles, but Mirabelle was only mimicking jack's grimace to get out of it.
Mirabelle was just five foot six and a quarter and loved to chew-the-cud on one of her triangular shaped pubic hairs - she was rather coarse down there. Jack would leave off the quarter when he spoke to his friend about her. Her breasts were larger than one would expect for a mere slip of a gal - let alone being already a woman: Her turds ranging from nine and fourteen inches in length, but more importantly, two-and-a-half to more than four inches in girth. Yes! She was a woman alright. Why, she had taken it in the stink-hole from someone in her past! But, not from Jack... His stork couldn't open her up to four...but, she had visited the delight with someone, and he had to have worn big shoes - and she loved it so.
Her rear was big enough to balance her out well, and it smelled of things she ate...when it made a noise in her knickers. She made jack build a laundry room far off in the side of the garden; apart from the afternoon sun. She would scratch the shaved area of her when it sweated. Jack wondered at the redness of her vent and caccy-hole following hot wash days. Mirabelle liked scratching her holes. She hated Jack's questions. She cut off her two nails short, so she could scratch her rings longer - with less abrasion. Laundry rooms away from the sun, along with a couple of short nails meant extended scratching and less questions from Jack in bed. She spent lots of time in there - the hot laundry room, I mean - as opposed to the bed.
Mirabelle wanted shelves put up for her soap-powder boxes. She wanted them high up so she had to stand on a couple of foot stools to reach them. Jack wanted them lower. Mirabelle let Jack beat her at pinochle, and the high shelves went in the way she liked. Mirabelle loved the smell of Jacks leather brief case, and would empty it out and push her face inside to breath. Jack was taking a bath or something.
Mirabelle made Jack push the washer and dryer as far over to the left in the laundry room so that there was as much of a gap on the right side to the wall that there could be. She wanted more room, but she could manage with a little bit of effort. Her arm and leg scraped on the wall. Jack mowed the lawn.
When Mirabelle was 14 she read something scribbled on the toilet door at school.
For almost a month she went to bed early after that.
She bought a packet of darning needles. There went from very thin to big. In all it took her over a month to do it, and longer to heal. She put her father's duct tape over her mouth, and learned to put Vaseline on her lips first-incase she cried out, but it was worth the pain in the end. She had rubbing alcohol from her mother's bathroom medicine cabinet in a washed-out old ink bottle. For years after the smell of alcohol brought back memories of hours of agony. Jack didn't drink anymore. Mirabelle would cry if he did. She could smell it on his breath.
When he parents thought she was asleep, she would get the stuff out; the tape, the Vaseline, the ink bottle and the packet of needles.
Starting with the smallest it took more than a week to get the thinnest one through on the left one. She couldn't believe that nipples could hurt so much.
She couldn't run around for a while, it was too painful for her.
Working non-stop for over a month she had gotten the largest needle through both of them. She couldn't touch them for weeks.
She would put ice on them as often as she could. They stopped hurting in the end.
She would think about all of this when she did the washing. She always dried the clothes too much. She couldn't help it.
When the pain went Mirabelle got the cotton thread and spent a long time picking out the perfect hair brush to fit her; to buy.
She went to bed earlier that night with the tape, Vaseline, hairbrush, cotton thread and the needles. They had healed. She didn't need the ink bottle anymore. She threw it out.
One day before the Jack built the laundry shed, Mirabelle was drying the clothes. Jack wasn't the most he could have been in the bedroom. He was tired. Mirabelle would bend over in front of him pretending to pick up a bit of lint from the floor. Some times it worked for her. She had a big rear for her size, and it was very firm, and had none of those purple stains from old pimples on it. She made sure she scrubbed it everyday with the loofah in the tub. It was a very clean one every day it was clean, but the loofah was worn out in the end. She was very hairy, and it tickled Jack's nose. Sometime he frightened her by letting out a great big sneeze. They would roll around and laugh, and laugh, but Mirabelle always made Jack finish it; even if he complained about his sore neck. She would slap him on the head, and dig her nails in his scalp. Jack didn't know, but she got mad! Then all was calm after and she would sleep like a baby. Usually Jack would be left awake rubbing the back of his neck. He had to get up early tomorrow.
She forgot the time standing in front of the washer and dryer. She was thinking about the needles.
