Every now and then, we’ll invite one of our regularish writers to basically do whatever they want here on this Tumblr. Krissy Kneen decided to write a weekly column called SISTER SEX for a month or so. I think she was avoiding doing a new draft of a book. Meanwhile, she also just came second in the Josephine Ulrick Prize for a story about sisters. GOOD.

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Her friends have a lot of hair.  When they bend forward like that and put their heads together to whisper it is just a big block of hairiness all different shades of strawberry and pale.  Her friends are not as pretty as my sister.  Her hair is blonde, the exact shade that all her other friends try to mimic.  Her hair is long and straight and the colour of straw and she doesn’t need to dye it or bleach it or anything.   

Sometimes I sit on the edge of the bath and watch her brush it till the golden strands fill with static and reach up to the ceiling like it is electric.  It looks like something out of Greek mythology, the Medusa or just one of those women whose hair lifts up with the power of her magic on the cartoons.   

If my sister knew she was magic she wouldn’t have to hang out with her friends.  They are nothing like my sister.  They are a gaggle, or that’s what my father calls them, and they spend too much time talking about their clothes.  They are going out tonight and it has been all about dresses and hair and makeup and they don’t even say new things, it is just the same thing over and over with slightly different words. 

I could wear the blue dress, one of them says for the one hundred millionth time. They are sitting on my sister’s bed and I can see the weight of them sagging the wooden slats.  They are all skinny-minnies says my father and I am glad of that because if one of them was a fatty-boomsticks the bed might break and I would be flattened.   

I need to pee.  It isn’t as urgent as it could be.  If I hold onto the end of my penis it is easy enough to forget about it.  Under the bed there is nothing but dust monsters and me and my sister’s pile of magazines with the sex bits in them. I know them all by now, the ones with the sealed sections, which are no longer sealed. I like these the best, not because there is anything bad about the sealed sections, but because they were once sealed and therefore I should only read them with a parent or guardian present.   

My sister’s friends could be my guardians in this instance; that is if they knew that I was crouched here under the bed.  My sister’s legs are the furthest away, which is a shame because she is the best.  Her legs are straight and smooth and they have a tan, gold like her hair and with little areas of pale on her ankles where her school socks fall down to.  One night I fell asleep on her lap in the lounge room and her legs smelled fresh like soap even though she hadn’t had a shower since the morning and it was already way past my bedtime.   

The closest legs to me smell stale like the shoes.  Her toenails are painted a dark blue and the polish is chipped and worn and one of her toenails has very little paint on it at all.  When I shuffle a little closer to the untidy hang of sheets I can see the row of bare legs, and, when I shift closer still, I notice that my sister has taken her dress off entirely.  She is standing in her knickers, white with a little pattern of blue flowers.  She has a matching bra.  It has been ages since we shared a bath or since she let me stay while she was changing out of her uniform.  The last time I saw her she had a bra but it was mostly spare space for growing into, a little flaccid slump of flesh-coloured cotton over nothing much at all.  Now she has filled it all up and by the swell of her breasts over the white lace edge it seems like there is no space left to grow into.  I am still holding the wee in, my fingers clamped over the edge of my penis and it is all itchy and uncomfortable and it is getting the hardness and I rub my fingers up and down because it feels better when I do that. 

My sister is holding a dress up in front of her underwear and for a minute I cannot see her knickers at all, but when she throws the dress to her strawberry friend there are her knickers again, white and clean and with her two perfect legs telescoping down from them.  She is standing with one leg straight and one of them bent slightly at the knee and her hips are on a slant and her thighs are apart a little.  The oddest thing is the bit at the crotch of her panties.  The way the cotton describes what is underneath without really giving too much away.  I rub my penis with my fingers and the needing to pee is almost a nice thing, the pressure there from inside and from outside.  The place at the crotch of her knickers has no lump for a penis.  Instead there is that little crease where the cotton slides up and into her body and clings around what looks like little hillocks on either side of the valley.  I try to remember what it used to look like in the bath but it was years ago and I wasn’t terribly interested in my sister’s Venus (dad’s word) in those days. 

My sister’s friends will have little Venuses of their own.  They will take their dresses off and shift from foot to foot and their Venuses might hill and valley like my sister, but their hills and valleys will be a pale imitation of the one my sister is showing me right now.  She puts her hands on her hips and her body adjusts to the new position and I am filled with the scent of soap.  That sleepy falling asleep on her lap so close to the Venus trap, feeling. If I only turned my head, resettling on her thighs, my mouth would be right up close to it.  I know people put their mouths on it.  I know that a daddies tongue goes into it before his penis does.  I know this from the Book Of Sex that Mum bought for me and from the sealed sections, but I never quite knew how or why.  I look at the tight stretched cotton and I am really pulling at myself now, a jiggly rhythm because I could have turned in her lap and there would be the hills and the valley and I want more than anything right now to be the daddy in the sealed section with my tongue all pushy and shovey and my sister smelling like soap and all gold tan under the clean white cotton. I have to put my other hand over my mouth because the jiggly is so good all of a sudden and I roll back into the dust monsters and the scratchy edge of the magazines and hold my penis extra tight because I might have wet myself this time.  I might have peed in my shorts from happiness because this moment here, right now, is the happiest moment of my whole, entire life.