Julia Paradise by Rod Jones

governesses and when Julia stayed shut up with her books, Joachim had become casual in the matter of nudity around the house. He had dismissed all the servants the previous year out of deference to his ideas on racial contamination.
    In the late afternoons when customarily he bathed, and the slanting light fell deep through the slats of the shutters and along the passages, there seemed to be a third presence, quite apart from the man and the girl, and which could not entirely be ascribed to the memory of the brooding, ill woman who had died in the room at the back of the house, and to whom all the months of enemas and foments had given the appearance of utter lifelessness long before it was actually so. Now, in the afternoons, there was something subtly and inevitably manipulative in the silences.
    On the occasions when he did have a woman from the brothel at Mem make the journey up to the Duck River, Joachim was not always careful to ensure that the bedroom door was completely closed. By this time he had his doubts about the authenticity of his daughter’s deafness and on one occasion that summer, the woman’s howls of slaked lust brought the girl silently to put her eye to the crack of the door. Joachim noticed the slight disturbance in the configuration of light there (in spite of the fact that at that moment he was still in complete possession of the woman) and he knew that it was with jealousy and not shame that the girl slunk away, her childhood finally behind her.
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    It was the rainy season again, the season when Joachim, who hated the wind, spent entire days in bed with the shutters closed, locked into a semi-permanent artificial night. He sat up in his bed with his spectacles on, the candles burning, his writing tray balanced on his large stomach. Reference books he had carried in from his study weeks before were stacked up on the floor as high as the bed, his notes and manuscripts scattered around him.
    During these times, Julia’s household duties doubled, then trebled, so that whenever she had a moment to herself she fell asleep. She had to cook for him, and in spite of his inactivity his appetite was voracious. She had regularly to empty his chamberpots, of which there were two, one for each bodily function. And she massaged his paunch to ease his pain through his attacks of flatulence. Then, as though it were a natural concomitant of her nursing duties, with his wind expelled and his member erect, she made of her mouth a repository for his semen.
    The longer his periods of hibernation, the less inclined he was to leave his bed at all. As with his other corporeal urges, there had been another subtle transformation in the relationship between them. Their sex, since she had begun menstruating, had retained the spontaneity of that first time they had begun ‘playing birds’, the game by which he had introduced her to partial penetration. She accepted it as quite natural for him to take her at any moment of the day or night. In the kitchen while she was at her chores, outside in the garden, even at table during a half-finished meal, Joachim would simply move behind her, raise her skirts and take her with several brutal efficient strokes. This was always his method of enjoying her, as if to have to look at that pale bewildered face while he was performing his act would have been too much for even his hardened heart to bear. From this early age of thirteen she had come to accept the insertion of his erect penis as a natural and unremarkable bodily function.
    Now, as her father spent longer and longer in bed, she learned to judge his sexual needs by the clock. These duties became so mundane that she performed them without thinking. After she had helped him break his wind, she pulled her long black hair from her face and rested her cheek on the soft paunch and performed her perfunctory but efficient act of fellation. From that position she found she could stretch her neck over the edge of the bed