The clock chimed nine, and I accidentally stepped on the remote control. The sound of the television broke the horrible silence that filled the living room, a silent sound accompanied only by my little half sister Margosha's painful sobs. Her head was buried in the breast of her dead mother, whose black hair was splayed over her bloodied face. On the other end of the living room was my mother, also dead. She was laying face down, but I couldn't look at her. My eyes were locked on the eyes of my father, who was sitting on the couch. The look on his face was disgustingly calm. I could see a subtle satisfaction behind his irises, in the deep black wells of his pupils. But I knew those eyes were not his. I shifted my gaze to the pistol that was pressed against his temple. The same pistol that sent the two mothers into the afterlife, leaving their bodies to be mourned in the world of the living. Gripping the pistol was the hand of a girl I barely knew. She was Margosha's big sister, my other half sister, Emiko. She was less than half a month older than me. We were almost twins, except for the fact that she looked nothing like me. The only thing that was the same between us was our eye color, a blue-green-grey. I got the color of my eyes from my father, and so did Emiko.

"Well, Dad ... " Emiko said with a frightening stillness. "Are you ready to die?"

Margosha was mumbling something in Japanese, between her sobs. I looked down at the girl. Her whole body was vibrating violently, a sharp contrast to the utter stillness of her mother's body. Then the girl stopped and looked up at me thru tear drenched eyes.

"I love you, my sister Alma," Margosha said. Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she fainted. The sound of the gunshot startled me, and I screamed.

I didn't know my half sisters for the first 12 years of my life. When I was born, my parents lived in Utah. We went to church every sunday, prayed together as a family, and lived in a fairly nice house. But this didn't mean that we were a happy family. Mom and Dad hated eachother. They yelled and cussed at eachother when they were really in the mood, and in more peacable times they merely got back at eachother in passive-aggressive ways. I never figured out why they hated eachother, but I knew that there was only one thing holding them together. Sex.

My mother was a sex addict. I knew this even before I fully understood what sex was. When I was really young, I remember Mom would read lots of harlequin romance novels, the ones with Fabio and some woman who was about to fall out of her dress on the cover. Whenever I got the chance, I would get into my parents room and find my Mom's stash of books, and I would turn straight to the dog eared pages. Those were the ones with the steamy sex parts.

When Dad's writing career started to take off, he would go on book tours. I could tell how distressed Mom was without her nightly dose of sex. So eventually she started inviting friends over. I always knew when one of Mom's friends was coming over, because she would come home with a bottle of wine and tell me to go to bed early. Our house had thin walls. I was used to hearing Mom whine and moan, but I didn't know what was really going on until I found one of Mom and Dad's home videos.

Sex was something that I never had a problem with. It was as simple as one plus one to me. I got in a lot of trouble in third grade when my teacher found me and Howie behind the seesaw naked. That was a fateful day for me, an eight-year old girl. I had been baptized three days before, and our family seemed to be doing well. Dad was working on a new book, so he was home. Mom was getting regular sex, so she was smiling all the time. But when Mom came to pick me up from school that day, her smile was gone. I knew that she was frowning for more than my playground hijinx. In fact, she let out a little laugh when my teacher told her what I was caught doing. I saw a very deep sadness in my mother's eyes, tinted by crimson betrayal. As we drove home, my mother spoke to me like I was an adult. She told me that she found a love letter that was written for Daddy, but it wasn't written by Mommy. My parents were divorced very quickly. I stayed with Dad, and Mom fell legs first into a blur of drinking, drugs, and sex.

I asked Dad who the love letter was from, that Mom found. He told me that it was from a long time ago, before I was even born.

"Remember how I told you about my mission in Japan?" Dad said as he sat across the couch from me.

"Yeah."

"And remember how I told you that I met your mom two weeks before I went on my mission?"

"Yeah."

"And remember how I told you that your mom waited for me while I was on my mission, so that we could get married after I got back home?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I met someone while I was on my mission."

"Was it a girl?"

"Yeah. It was a girl. Her name was Chiyaki, and she was investigating the church."

"What does investigating mean?"

"It means that she was thinking really hard about getting baptized."

"You mean, like how I was baptized?"

"Yes, exactly like that."

"Was she a little girl like me?"

"No. She was a big girl, like your mom. In fact, they are both the same age. Back then I was 19, and Chiyaki was 20. She was living on her own, with a cat. One night I snuck out of my apartment so I could go over to her place. She had some beer and, well ... I did something very bad."

"Did you have sex with her?"

" ... ! "

My dad looked at me, suprised. But he continued.

"Yes, I had sex with her. And she got pregnant."

"That means she had a baby, right?"

"Right."

"Was it a boy or a girl?"

"I don't know. I came home before she had the baby. She gave me the love letter the day I went home. I was forbidden from seeing her before I left Japan, but she somehow found me at the airport. I haven't seen her since, but I kept the letter. She wrote it in English, but I wish she wrote it in Japanese so that your mom couldn't read it."

"Do you miss Mom?"

"Yeah. But I'm glad I still have you."

"I miss Mom."

I found out later that Mom had a girlfriend while Dad was on his mission. She told me about Chalese one night when I was spending the weekend with her. Mom was drunk off her ass, and when she's that drunk she just says things without thinking. Mom told me that she got with Chalese while Dad was on his mission so that she wouldn't fall in love with another man. When I asked Mom why she wanted to marry Dad after only knowing him for two weeks, she opened her mouth to speak, but closed it.

"I'll tell you when you're older," she said. "Isn't it past your bedtime?"

I stayed up that night watching Cinemax while Mom was passed out on the couch.

As if by fate, my father recieved a letter in the mail from Chiyaki shortly after he and Mom got divorced. Except, this one wasn't a love letter. It was full of very angry words. In the envelope was the portrait of an eight-year-old girl. The picture fascinated me, because I didn't understand it. The girl looked Japanese, except she had blonde hair and blue eyes. I asked Dad who the girl was, and he told me the girl's name was Emiko.

"Is that the baby?" I asked.

Dad looked at me, confused for a moment. Then he understood what I was saying.

"Yup," he said, looking at the picture. "That's the baby."

"So it was a girl."

"Yup."

It said in Chiyaki's letter that she was having a very hard time in Japan. After having a half American child out of wedlock, her parents disowned her, and she struggled to raise Emiko on her own. After eight years, she decided to move to America in hopes of recieving child support from Dad.

"Is Emiko your daughter?" I asked Dad.

"Uhhh ... yes," he said.

"But I am your daughter!"

"I know. Emiko is your sister."

I looked at the picture of Emiko. She looked really mad. I could almost see flames coming out of her eyes. Her short blonde hair was put into two spikey pigtails, and she was holding some sort of ball. I studied the picture, wondering what she was like, my sister who I never met. I looked foreward to meeting her, but I didn't for four years.

When my parents divorced, Mom kept the house and Dad moved into an apartment. Even tho Dad payed for the house, he said that he owed it to Mom. The letter that Dad recieved with the picture of Emiko in it was forewarded from Mom's address, so when Chiyaki came to America to find Dad, she found Mom instead.

Mom tells the story this way: She was at home on her day off, mixing up a martinee, when the door bell rang. She went to answer it and saw the cutest Japanese woman standing on the doorstep. Next to her was a little girl (Emiko) who was trying to pull her hand away from her mother's grip. The woman scolded her daughter, then apologized to Mom.

"Hello, my name is Chiyaki Tsukimori," the woman said in a thick Japanese accent. "Is Kari home?"

(Kari is my father's name. It is pronounced "car-ree".)

"No, he doesn't live here anymore," Mom said, eyeing Chiyaki.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," Chiyaki said. "I must have the wrong address."

"No," Mom said, looking down at Emiko. "Kari used to live here. I'm his ex-wife, Ashlee Kroeger."

"Ashlee ... " Chiyaki said. She recognized the name. "Nice to meet you. I have seen your picture. Kari showed it to me when he was on his mission."

"Oh, did he?" Mom said. "What else did he show you?"

Emiko said something in Japanese to her mother, who told her to be quiet.

"Is this your daughter?" Mom asked.

"Yes," Chiyaki said. "This is my daughter, Emiko."

"Hmmm ... " Mom said as she looked at the girl. "She has her father's eyes."

"Yes," Chiyaki said, laughing nervously and brushing her hair behind her ear.

"Well ... " Mom said. "Would you like to come in? It's rude of me to keep you out here on the doorstep."

"Sure, thank you," Chiyaki said, bowing her head.

Mom told me that she and Chiyaki got along great. They instantly liked eachother, and Mom let Chiyaki and Emiko move into her house until they could find a place of their own in America. When Dad found out that Chiyaki and Emiko were in America, he didn't let me go over to Mom's house anymore. In fact, we moved to a different state. After that I hated my dad. I mean, I still loved him, but I hated him. I called Mom all the time. Chiyaki and Emiko stayed with my mom permanently, and two years after I moved I found out that Mom and Chiyaki were having sex.

According to Mom, she and Chiyaki were in love. I didn't understand how two women could have sex, let alone be in love. When my dad hooked my computer up to the internet, I ran a search on the word "lesbian", and found a lot of naughty websites. I was enthralled by this idea of women loving women. It was very new to me, and it was exciting. I spent a lot of nights on my computer. After wading thru all the laughable pictures of one woman sticking battery-powered utensils up another woman's vagina, I started to find the salt of lesbianism on the internet. I discovered lesbian chat rooms, and I decided that I could learn more from actual lesbians than I could from a website that required a password to enter.

I talked to my mom about her relationship with Chiyaki, and she spoke openly about it. I asked her if she still loved dad.

"Yeah, I still love your dad," Mom said. "But I'm not in love with him anymore. I'll always love him in a certain way, but the love I have with Chiyaki is a lot better than the love I had with your dad. You see, your father never really understood me. He knew what I liked, and where I liked to go, but he didn't really know me as deep as I wanted him to. Chiyaki knows me. She knows me on the inside, not just on the outside. Chiyaki really understands me."

One of my lesbian chat buddies told me about a cutting edge medical procedure that allowed lesbian couples to have children. The way it worked was: an ovum from one of the women is taken out, modified into an artificial sperm, and injected into the ovum of the other woman. The ovum inside the receiving woman is fertilized by the other woman's ovum just like it would be fertilized by a man's sperm. Since the gender of a baby is determined by the chromosome in the man's sperm (Y is a boy, X is a girl), the female-female fertilization method can produce only daughters (women's ova carry only X chromosomes). I told Mom about this during one of our phone conversations, and she was fascinated by it. She and Chiyaki discussed it, and that's how my other half sister, Margosha, was born.

Chiyaki carried Margosha and gave birth to her. I met Margosha when she was two. Emiko was 12, the same age as me, when I met her. I only got to meet them because Mom hired a custody lawyer. When my parents divorced, they agreed on joint custody, so they could pass me back and forth as they wished, with no pre-set arrangements. However, after Dad moved away with me, Mom missed me so bad that she hired a lawyer and got the custody arrangements changed, so that I would go stay with Mom during the summer.

Margosha was almost opposite of Emiko in her coloring and shape. While Emiko's face shape and eye shape were gained from her Japanese side, her skin tone and hair color were gained from her American side. Margosha's face shape and eye shape were gained from her American side, while her skin tone and hair color were gained from her Japanese side. Margosha's hair was black and straight, like Chiyaki's hair. But her eyes were a mystical silvery-blue. She was a very quiet child, and I could tell by looking at her that she was extremely intelligent, even tho she was only two at the time. Emiko's and Margosha's personalities were opposite as well. Emiko was loud and energetic, and quite a tomboy. She loved to run around outside, but she hated playing with other kids. I was into make-up and nailpolish like most other girls my age, but Emiko didn't even know how to put on nailpolish. She thought it stunk. I was reading YM, and Emiko was reading comic books. Altho it seemed at first that me and Emiko wouldn't get along at all, we were best friends by the end of the first summer I spent back at Mom's house.

Now, I know you're thinking, where do the guns and the violence and the killing come into all of this? That didn't come until me and Emiko were both 18. I moved out of my dad's house, and me and Emiko got our own apartment. We had a roommate named Juney Baker, and she was the one who started all of it.

scene one - Juney Baker

Juney was the weirdest girl Emiko or I had ever met. One half of her hair was put into dreadlocks, and the other half was dyed six different colors. She wore the craziest clothes, which she made by herself, sewn together from stuff she bought at thrift stores and yard sales. One of her eyes was blue, and the other was green, and they were naturally that way. Emiko joked about how she had split personalities, but Juney calmly agreed. It struck me odd that she agreed with such an embarrassing statement, but the more I got to know Juney, the more it made sense.

Juney was British, and she grew up in a family that was, for lack of a better term, fucked up. She was a hardcore pot head. She told me that she did a lot more drugs in high school, but that was back in her wild days. I laughed when she told me that. I told her that I had never done drugs, only drank a few times. Emiko, on the other hand, was almost an alcoholic. Drinking was her life. She made friends with some college guys so that she could get alcohol thru them, but she planned to dump them once she turned 21. I didn't drink nearly as much as Emiko did, and I soon learned that I liked marijuana a lot more than alcohol.

Apart from her almost worshipful love for marijuana, Juney was obsessed with the occult. She studied wicca, druidism, satanism, kaballah, and any other form of magick that she found out about. One form of magick that she was particularly interested in was a very fringe new age sort that was a modern development.

"It's modern magick!" Juney told me excitedly. "It's called Cyclonic Energetics, or Cyclonics for short. It was created by this bloke named Colin Waterton in London. I read about him in Blasted, an independent drug publication. He is completely mad, and he does lots of drugs every day, but he's a bloody genius! He developed Cyclonics around the basic principle that all energy moves in a cycle. He likened the phases of energy to the color wheel. More specifically, he uses the light scale, you know -- red, green, and blue. Could you hand me the lighter?" She paused to take a hit from her bong, then passed it to me. She continued speaking while she held the smoke in. "He uses the light scale, as opposed to the dye scale which is red, yellow, and blue, because he says that ... " She blew out the smoke and continued. "The dye scale pertains to physical things, but the light scale pertains to energy. He says that spirit is basically energy, and the purest expression of spirit is light. So he uses the light scale of red, green, blue. And it goes in that order. Red turns to yellow, which then turns to green, then cyan (sky blue), then blue. Blue goes from violet to red, thus completing the entire loop. He prefers to use color, as it is far more cyclical than numbers or letters. So the three basic factors are red, green, and blue. Red pertains to your vitality, or your life force, the energy that drives you. Green pertains to your emotions, your sensuality, the energy that connects you. Blue pertains to your intellect, your higher mind, the energy that steers you. Red is your lowest or basest energies, and blue is your highest, looking at it linearly. Red is survival, and Blue is philosophy. However, they all connect cyclically."

Juney called herself a "practitioner of Cyclonics". She told me that Cyclonics was an incomplete magick form, and that Colin Waterton urged practitioners to put their own ideas into it and expand on it. He didn't want Cyclonics to become some sort of religion, he wanted it to be a science.

Aside from being intrigued by Juney's madness, I was also very attracted to her. I had a couple crushes on girls over the years, but nothing so intense as the crush I had on Juney. In fact, I wouldn't call it a crush. It was pure desire. Not only did I think she was pretty, but I found myself checking her out all the time. At night, when  I would masturbate in my bed, I would fantasize about Juney. I would imagine her walking into my room and crawling into my bed with me.