Where’s your bedroom, is what Jane, once being inside of Papa’s house, asked of it. Like this.
She placed a palm on my oily jeans. Don’t worry, she said next.
I said Clara.
I said Jane—Sisters, I said. You two are different.
They looked at each other and licked, up and down their puckered up lips.
Together is where their puckered up lips went next. In the threshold of Papa’s house. Kissing, is what these things made them do.
Like this.
Where not all of the outside isn’t in, where not all of the inside isn’t not out, is where they began giggling.
How I looked. Being in the threshold. How I said it. These things, made the girls do these things.
This, is how I said it. Look at me. This is how I looked when I said it.
Grown up ages. Revving engines through this wooded, hole-in-the-wall place. Tonight, this night of which we’re talking. This night I brought Jane and Clara to Papa’s house, I looked like I had never once watched a naughty girls’ hole-in-the-wall boots—like boots—rise up into the cab of my big brown truck.
I looked like I knew nothing.
But I knew.
Jane, Clara, grown up ages in a place so deep in the woods, in houses set way back where roads curl like curly-cue’s and people don’t live in the large houses set way back in them. Girls, like these, are looking.
Like girls from there do.
I know what it is they’re looking for.
It’s in the bedroom, is what I said. There in the threshold.
Where not all the outside isn’t in.
Where not all the inside isn’t not out.
Tyler Dempsey is the author of a book of poems called, “Newspaper Drumsticks.” His work appears in Heavy Feather Review, trampset, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Bending Genres, The Daily Drunk, and the like. He is a fiction reader at X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine. Find him on Twitter @tylercdempsey.