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  A Kiss Is The Secret (Inklet, #60)

  A Kiss Is The Secret

  The Making Of A Kiss Is The Secret

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  Nuns, possibly magical—Mary never could get the story from her mother straight—raised her mother. They provided her food, and care, and love—and left her with a legacy.

  Because when Mary reached maturity, it came with a surprise: plant magic.

  But Mary must figure out the secret left by her mother— A kiss? How can a kiss be a secret? Which kiss? With whom? And when?—if she ever hopes to use her powers for good.

  For everyone who longs for magic and a happy ending.

  A Kiss Is The Secret

  INKLET #60

  AMY LAURENS

  www.InkprintPress.com

  A KISS IS THE SECRET

  A kiss is the secret, my mother always said, and it made absolutely not a jot of sense to me for the longest of times. She’d grown up in a convent, you see; not a nun herself—obviously, because me—but with the nuns, raised by them, for she had no idea who her parents were.

  Well, that’s ungenerous. She knew exactly who they were; the nuns were kind in that respect. But her parents had no idea who she was, nor any desire to know; they, unlike the nuns, were not kind.

  So, my mother grew up in a convent, where as a rule there is not a whole lot of kissing, unless of course it is the mother superior’s ring, or something like that.

  Do they kiss the mother superior’s ring? I’m not even sure.

  But regardless, there were no boys in the convent, and Mother was never allowed off the grounds except under strict supervision, and so naturally there wasn’t much kissing of the real sort in her life.

  I used to think perhaps that she meant a kiss was the reason she’d left the convent; a secret kiss, stolen opportunistically in a private moment from my father, whom of course she ran away and married.

  But secrets are never that straight-forward.

  For a happy interlude, they thought that nothing was wrong. They eloped, bought a house with my father’s savings, started a little cheese-making business with three sheep and five cows and a goat, and by all accounts were very, very happy.

  Then they had me.

  Now, don’t get me wrong. Neither of my parents ever insinuated for the slightest of moments that I brought them anything but the usual delight of a baby (which is to say, a fair bit of frustration and the distinct possibility of momentary loathing, all underscored by a whole lot o’ love).

  And for a while, that was true.

  But one day, much later on, they discovered that I’d brought with me into the world rather a lot more than your average ordinary baby.

  Mother hadn’t realised at the time —thought I can hardly imagine she didn’t know, at least on some level—but the nuns she grew up with belonged to a very particular order: a magical order.

  It wasn’t the kind of magic you flaunted around, making things fly and turning these things into those. No. This was a quiet magic, the deep, old magic of the natural world: the magic of life.

  True enough, they were all green-thumbs, and to hear my mother describe it, living in the convent had been like growing up part wood elf: the passageways lined with moss paintings on the grey, stone walls, every sunlit alcove an altar to something green and frondy, hanging baskets endangering everyone’s heads at every door, the entire courtyard one living, pulsing forest of greenery, a homage to nature.

  The whole place smelled like sap and stone, and when it rained, my mother said, the petrichor fairly took your breath away.

  But it was more than just a proclivity for growing things too; more than just green thumbs. That’s wondrous, to be sure, but not, in the truest sense, magical.

  Or at least, not magical enough that it would disrupt my life—or Vincent’s.

  You see, Vincent’s mother had also been at the convent, though for a much briefer time than my mother: four years before my mother met my father and ran away and got married and had the audacity to birth a baby only six months later, another woman stayed at the convent, some fifteen years my mother’s senior, and heavily with child. Heavy with child, heavy with exhaustion, and heavy with bruises, my mother always said.

  Poor thing.

  Of course, when I met Vincent in the woods that night, neither of us had any idea of the connection our parents shared—or of our shared link to the magical nuns—and each other.

  Well, maybe that last we knew: I was nineteen and fancied myself world-weary, too fashionably cynical for love-at-first-sight, too bound up in my university education to remember there were things like magic in the world. I’d only gone walking in the woods that night beneath the silver-barked birches with their yellowing leaves and the light of a near-full moon because I’d been crammed indoors all day studying, and ten p.m. was the first time my body deigned to remind me that curving my spine over books all day was not conducive to good health and prosperity.

  So I’d been walking through woods that smelled of damp leaf litter and rotting wood, the trickling of a small brook in my right ear, the moon over my left shoulder, when I’d seen a man up ahead, his back turned to me, pale hair dusted silver in the moonlight.

  He was staring up at the sky—at the stars—with such an expression of beatific rapture that I nearly turned back the way I’d come so as to leave him in peace.

  But something deep inside my chest stirred at the sight of him, something I’d forgotten being at university, away from home, away from my mother’s tales of creeping vines and old stonework, of the prayerful hands of hushed nuns smoothing over the bodies of the dead and restoring life (I could never quite divine from my mother’s tales whether these dead were human bodies, or simply dry, withered plants the nuns seemed to bring back from the dead, though I have my suspicions).

  Regardless, that something stirred in my chest like a sleeping dragon opening one eyelid, and instead of backing away down the path, I found myself striding toward this strange man in the night, fists clenched at my sides as I wondered what I was doing and if perhaps I was going to end up hurt.

  The man—Vincent—turned to face me, and I saw that the stars were no longer in the sky, but rather were in his eyes.

  My breath caught as I saw Venus rise and set in his irises, watched Mars glimmer and fade away. There was magic in the world, to be sure, and it was concentrated here, in this strange man.

  He held his hand out to me, and energy crackled over his fingertips—or at least, I imagined it did, and I imagined it so vividly, in full, splendid, viridian colour that it might as well have done.

  I took his hand, and I know what you are thinking: there, under the moonlight, we kissed, and that was what my mother had been talking about—to which I respond, we did no such thing. That there is magic in the world, that I am part of it, does not give me licence to be naïve.

  No. We did not kiss, not that first night, nor for many more, but we did talk. It eventuated that Vincent was attending my very own university, though half a degree ahead of me—only half, for he had chopped and changed a number of times before settling on philosophy.

  I think it was the second night I asked him what exactly he proposed to do for a living, how precisely it was that he intended for philosophy to pay the bills.

  He grinned at me, teeth nearly as bright as his starlit eyes, and told me that that was precisely the reason he intended to marry someone like myself: someone practical, in a guaranteed field of employment, who could sustain his quixotic ways.

  I, of course, scoffed, thinking that this—merely an accidental moonlit tryst—could hardly be trus
ted to turn into something so stolid as marriage.

  Three months later, my mother died. My father rang to say she was ill, but by the time I made it home, she was gone. She’d slipped from the world with a minimum of fuss, simply waking unwell one morning, losing strength and colour and body mass by that evening so that father thought to call me, and drifting away in her sleep some time during the night.

  Quietly, quickly, decisively, and with a minimum of fuss: that was my mother, her convent upbringing showing like the stubborn grey streak in her hair that even permanent dyes could only hide for a matter of weeks.

  If I’d been there sooner, perhaps I could have saved her.

  She’d left a message for me, of course, but it was merely a reiteration of the same enigmatic epigram she’d been reciting to me since we all mutually realised at nine that I was Not Like Other Children: A kiss is the secret.

  A kiss is the secret, a kiss is the secret. How I loathed that phrase. I shredded the paper she’d written it on into confetti and threw it all over the kitchen floor in a fit of pique, storming out of the house to phone Vincent—who in the space of the last three months had become an invaluable source of solace.

  He offered to come up for the funeral, but I declined, reminding him that it was difficult to pass exams that one was not present for, and that, while I had an excuse, it being a family member who had died, he could hardly write on an application for extension that the mother of his ‘what even are we is this dating or are we just friends’ had passed away.

  (I said it matter-of-factly, because the fact of the matter was we didn’t know what it was at that point, his ardent declarations aside.)

  It was at the creek in the woods behind my house on the day following the funeral that I touched, for the first time since about age fifteen, the strain of magic energy that ran somehow through my veins as I stood under the canopy of blushing aspens and gilded oaks, listening to the creek flow past—noisier than the one near campus, wider, shallower, full of rocks and white foam, scented like all good fresh water should be.

  I remembered what it had felt like, that time when I’d been nine, and I’d helped my mother plant a garden out the back of the house, plunging my hands wrist-deep into thick, black dirt, spiking seeds into the ground with a fingertip, teeny tiny daisy seeds and large, eye-like sunflower seeds and the spherical, dark brown seeds of cabbages.

  I hadn’t wanted to help, had resented the dirt crusting beneath my nails and the time spent away from my books, but better, perhaps, that it had happened then that at some other inopportune moment.

  For in the morning, the cabbages had been as large as my head—larger, even, than the sunflower heads, which bobbed merrily with their red-and-yellow frills at the sun some four feet above the gutters of the house, while cheery yellow and white daisies carpeted their feet. Pollen drifted in the air, catching in the back of my throat in an acrid, green kind of way.

  Mother had looked at me then, with wonder in her eyes and not even the slightest trace of fear (to her credit), her fingertips brushing her lips as she stared. “You have it too,” she whispered, then went on to tell me—for the first time in any definite sort of way—of the way she’d seen things grow in the convent, nuns trailing their fingertips over baby vines which hastily unspooled and lengthened, following the hands of their human caretakers. She’d seen, in mere hours, acorns turn to oaks, tomatoes blossom and swell with fruit first lime-ish green before blushing through to red, perfuming the air with their sweet, sharp invitation.

  The tales she’d told me all my life of the green-encrusted nunnery took on a different sheen.

  “You have it too,” she’d said, cupping my face in her hands, brushing my hair back from my forehead as tenderly as a feather. She kissed my forehead gently. “You have it too.”

  A day later, the plants had withered and died.

  It was not long after that that Mother began her oft-mentioned refrain: A kiss is the secret, a kiss is the secret.

  It made as little sense to me then as it did now, and Mother had been unable to elaborate on her meaning, stating only that it was a mantra she’d learned at the convent, that she knew it was important for me to know, but that she had not the slightest sense of understanding why.

  So I’d put the magic away, rarely touched it except as a passing curiosity for my eyes, and mine alone (I’d learned already that in middle school, ‘special’ is just a synonym for ‘outcast’). The last time I’d touched it was not long after I’d turned fifteen, right here under these aspens and these oaks, with the smell of leaf mould all around and the fat creek laughing. I’d dared to show a friend—a boy, in fact, whom I’d rather hoped might become more than a friend.

  He ran screaming as the emerald grass shot up around him, ivy winding up trees before our eyes, dandelions bursting into puff balls that drifted away on the wind.

  The accelerated growth had killed the plants before I’d finished crying. Clearly, whatever it was my mother thought her nuns had had, I did not ‘have it too’.

  And so I’d locked this strange peculiarity of mine away, never touching it since then.

  But today... Today I was letting it out again. I touched the touch bark of the oak on my right and let all my grief, all my insecurities, the quiet longing of my soul that I’d managed to stifle but never gag flow out into the tree, a trickle that fast became a torrent rising from deep within me.

  I screamed, because it was the only place in life where I could do so without fear of being heard, shouting into the emptiness of the forest the emptiness my mother’s passing had left inside.

  The tree turned black almost at once, as though it had been burned alive.

  Ash pattered down in the breeze, and the air smelled of charcoal, of the faintest hint of woodsmoke.

  I jerked away from the tree, astounded, terrified—guilt-ridden. Here was evidence once more of the uselessness—nay, the wanton destructiveness—of my ‘talent’.

  I called Vincent that night. I told him we shouldn’t see each other any more, that whatever our relationship had been, it had been made of starshine and magic, and neither of those bore up well in the cold, harsh light of day.

  He laughed at me, told me that if this was how I needed to grieve, then that was fine by him. He’d be there, waiting, when I returned.

  I returned. A week later, I headed back to university to sit my delayed exams and, true to his word, Vincent met me at the station. I spotted him through the maze of people, locked eyes with his night-blue ones, strode to him through people barely more relevant to me at that moment than posts.

  My jaw twitched as I clenched it.

  I reached him; he started to speak.

  I grabbed him firmly, one hand to his cheek, the other to the back of his neck, and kissed him. Hard.

  There was nothing.

  He reeled back, astonished, in the moment it took for my heart to sink the last of the way through my feet and into the cold, hard concrete below.

  Stupid. Stupid to think that one kiss could be any kind of secret, could be any kind of balm for the sorrow I was facing.

  I packed my things. Transferred immediately to a different university, a citified one, right in the middle of three million people with bricks and concrete and scarcely a blade of grass to be seen.

  Vincent called me: five, seven, nine, twelve times a day to begin with, then four, then three, then none. In his defence, most people would have given up after the first six weeks, when I refused to take his calls or return his messages.

  I was done with magic, and anything and anyone who stank of it.

  What good had it done me in my life after all? Bullied and outcast, I hadn’t even been able to scrape together enough life to save my own mother.

  My father didn’t mind, of course. That I’d transferred universities, that I never came to see him, that I avoided the family house like the plague... None of it mattered to a mind cast mute by grief. He went through his daily motions, milking his sheep and his cows
and his goats, turning his cheese, selling them mutely to passersby to pay the bills—but he was every bit as empty as I was full, and what I was full of was determination that I would never, ever again be lured in by the promise of more.

  Until one day, six months later, when a postcard arrived at my door.

  I say ‘at my door’, and I mean that quite literally, for I was now living in the student accommodation on campus, and all our mail was sorted for us and delivered by floor, and our floor held the friendly little tradition that whenever one passed the communal mailbox, one was duty bound to select three items from it and see them delivered to the correct rooms.

  The postcard bore a garish caricature of a pair of lips, and I nearly mistook it for trash and binned the thing immediately—but as I flipped it over, a hasty scrawl on the back caught my attention.

  I knew that handwriting.

  As it transpired, the garish postcard was indeed a piece of advertising—for the spring-time opening of a new club down on the city strip, crammed elbow-to-elbow between a corner grocery store and a Chinese restaurant and no doubt stinking of cigarette smoke and beer.

  But Vincent had scrawled on the corner—and I was sure it was Vincent, his handwriting may as well have been etched on my skin—“See you at 6.” and a big love heart, which was the primary part that made me doubt the writing his after all. Philosophy majors, in my experience, were not terribly prone to signing love hearts.

  Then again, perhaps he’d been studying Sartre this term.

  I admit, I was curious to see what had changed Vincent so, for he knew full well that such as place as this was the last on a very long list of places I cared never to frequent—and if my memory served me correctly, he hadn’t been overly fond of such places himself. Philosophy, he’d told me, preferred bookstores to bottleshops.

  And so, wondering what it was that had lured him to such a place, and that was now luring me through him into its grasp, dutifully, I went as summoned. I’d had to borrow an outfit from my neighbour, for the raciest thing I had in my wardrobe was the knee-length, boat-necked black dress I’d worn to Mother’s funeral, and I refused to sully that in the name of curiosity.