Finally, I realized what I was doing and felt a bit odd. I broke the kiss and pushed back. Joseph had a sort of dazed smile on his face, as though he were more than satisfied with the reward he received for the magazine. To hide my embarrassment in my sudden loss of control, I picked the magazine back up.
“Where did you find it?” I asked.
“A customer asked me to throw it away after I checked him out, I just hung onto it instead,” he explained. I held the slick paper up close to my face, enjoying the feel of its foreignness and weight in my hands.
“It is my favorite gift ever,” I said to Joseph and he blushed.
“I’d get you anything to have you look at me like that,” Joseph said slowly, with intense embarrassment. I blushed back but couldn’t speak.
“Well,” Joseph said finally after a long pause, “I guess we should go back in, Father will wonder what is keeping us.” He said. And he left. When he was gone I carefully unzipped the back of my dress a bit, slid the magazine down against my back and then zipped myself back up. Then I rushed to the house, hoping that no one would notice my slight hunchback.
* * * * *
A few hours later I was in my room, a candle burning on my desk. I was sitting in my chair staring down at the magazine. I had already read the first article, something about Chinese labor conditions. There were so many uncertain words with uncertain meanings that I really had absolutely no idea what I was reading about. I didn’t even really understand the purpose of the papers, I mean the only thing I’d read were religious documents. I didn’t think there was such a things as “news.” However, regardless of my lack of understanding, I was enthralled by the magazine. It had such lovely paper and wonderful pictures. There were men and women, people I’d never seen before. It was just a slight taste of what my brother had been experiencing all along and it was amazing. There were little cartoons and info-graphics and it was almost a sensory overload. Every couple of minutes I had to stop and take a breath to keep myself from keeling over.
I was proceeding slowly, trying to understand what the magazine was saying. Then I turned a page that would be very important for my life in the future. It was somewhere near the middle of the magazine and when I flipped to it I was looking at something that felt out of place. Everywhere else there had been lots of words and just a few pictures scattered around. But suddenly I was looking at a full-page picture with just a splash of words across it. The look of the magazine to that point had been very serious, but all of the sudden, it looked playful. I later figured out that it was an advertisement, but I was seriously stumped.
But I was less confused about the exact purpose of the full-paged picture than the content. The picture showed a man with long dark hair and smoldering looks. Most surprisingly, the man wasn’t wearing a shirt! I’d never seen a man’s chest before. I knew from the way my father’ shirt and my brother’s shirt draped over their frames that a man’s chest was different than a woman’s. But I’d still never seen it before. The man had bulging muscles; his stomach was covered in ridges. Even stranger than that, the man was not wear pants. He was just wearing a little pair of tight white short pants. And there, between his legs, was a large bulge. What was that?
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