Attic Tale
Devotional origins
The dream began faithfully: a Saturday afternoon in 1957.
Emmalee insisting she wasn’t letting Alice risk the attic again alone. Someone’s friend had fallen through floorboards at their own house; besides, they could check for “monsters.” It was so hot they got in their nightgowns to make the climb, the air shifting around them.
The walkway smelled of old beams and papery dust. The half-burned beeswax candle Alice carried gave off its warm honeyed scent, still hanging in the rafters. Lavender oil, spilled long ago and never quite cleaned, rose faintly beneath it.
Then it happened. Alice leading by a foot but turning back and kissing her on the mouth. Almost confident.
Emma’s eyes betraying a welcoming but her movement to the corner, where she fleetingly shifted her feet, felt the jambs, then turned around, saying how much more secure it felt.
Alice coming over and standing with her legs braced and arms wide against each wall.
Emma sliding down, sitting suddenly on the dusty floorboards, weak-kneed and losing her grin. Gazing up at Alice — transfigured by the shaft of afternoon sunlight cutting through a broken slat. Alice in her nightgown, hair backlit, the dark panties faintly visible through cotton. Emma felt overcome by something nameless.
Her younger sister stood over her, face unreadable, a girl-saint, a little goddess born of heat and dust. Who had her cornered.
There was nothing to be done; but there was something she could give back, and she didn’t yet know how. The blonde rolled her spine up and forward, ducking beneath Alice’s wide-braced legs to stand on the other side, her chest at the girl’s unmoving back. One sweetened breath later she opened the gown with reverence.
Home was there in the shape of smell when Emma pressed her nose to the soft place between Alice’s shoulder blades. She kissed the heat-softened skin — slow, trembling, certain. Warm milk. Sun on cotton. And something purely Alice — some goodness deep and rising. That, and a promise tomorrow would always come.
This was the beginning: sister skin.
