Human Sister

together.
    I had thoughts about how nice it would feel to hold Elio’s penis in my hands and kiss it, but Grandpa’s admonition to respect Elio’s privacy kept interrupting my fantasies, so I lay still, feeling happy in Elio’s embrace, and waited for sleep to return.
    Sometime later, I was again wakened, this time by movement as Elio lifted his arm and leg off me and began to sit up.
    “Hi,” I said, stroking his back with my fingers.
    “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” he replied as he got up unsteadily.
    When he returned from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, I pulled the covers back to let him in, but he stopped by the side of the bed. “I don’t feel good,” he said. “Could you go and sleep in your own bed?”
    I wanted to say: Crawl in. I’ll hold you and make you feel better.
    But obviously that was not what he wanted.

    “Does it tickle a little?” Michael asked a few minutes ago, turning his specimen brush inside me.
    “No. Just a bit cold. Like everything down here,” I answered.
    My long underwear and two pair of pants had been removed. My legs were spread, as if in love with the cold, damp air of this hideaway far under the sea.
    Grandpa had sent along soil samples from the vineyard, neighboring orchards, and the shore of the Russian River. The idea was to prime the immune systems of Michael’s children by early exposure to the millions of terrestrial organisms contained in those samples. In furtherance of this priming project, Michael was now taking specimens of my vaginal and anal ecosystems. The teeming swarms of life from these specimens will become part of the children’s first meal, colonizing their intestines with the important microflora they would have ingested during a natural childbirth.
    “Love pitched his mansion in the place of excrement,” Michael said, looking up at me, his head framed by my bare knees.
    “Yes, I know the Yeats poem,” I replied. “Didn’t some Christian saint precede him in that observation? Something to the effect that humans are born between feces and urine.”
    “Augustine,” Michael said.
    Next, he will vacuum out another egg or two and a few more ovarian stem cells for use in the artificial wombs. Like a dinosaur, I will reproduce simply by laying eggs.

    It was the sounds of Aunt Lynh’s getting ready to go to work that woke me next. Normally, I would have gone out and talked with her, but I didn’t want to be questioned about what had happened the night before, so I waited under the covers. At about 0700 I heard her open the outside door and leave. I popped out of bed, showered, and dressed as quietly as I could so as not to wake Elio, then went out to eat breakfast.
    About an hour later, I looked in on Elio. He was still sleeping, so I decided to go for a walk. I left a note on the kitchen table, telling him I would be out walking and would be back by 0900. But even though it was a beautiful morning, I came back to the apartment early; I didn’t want to miss any time with Elio. Thoughts and feelings of his holding me in his bed kept leaping into my consciousness, and each time they did, I felt a strange weakness inside.
    He wasn’t in the apartment, but my note was still on the kitchen table. Below my writing he’d written: “I can’t be with you right now. I’m sorry.”
    What, I worried, did I do? Did I say something wrong?
    To keep my mind occupied while I waited for Elio to return, I tried to work on a few of the statistics problems Grandpa had given me to solve in my spare time. He believed that science was fundamentally a statistical interpretation of nature, and he was determined that, unlike most humans who handle equations with the grunting labor of lifting heavy rocks, I was to see the real world through these precious mathematical lenses as easily and intuitively as a child with excellent vision sees the individual facets on brilliant-cut melee. But I couldn’t concentrate. Worry about Elio kept spilling into my thoughts.
    When Aunt Lynh arrived home from work, she asked where Elio was. I said I didn’t know and handed her the note he’d left behind.
    She appeared to read the note several times. “Has he called you since he left?”
    “No.”
    “Are you upset?”
    I felt myself rapidly losing composure, but I shook my head no.
    “Of course you’re upset. You’re a good pretender, though.”
    With that, the levee holding back my tears crumbled. She hugged me. “It’s not so bad, honey. I