LING
©2005 by C. A. Smith

Chapter 1

It made no sense.
It was absolutely unlike her.
No phone call. No advance warning. Just a totally unhelpful one-paragraph e-mail. Then, poof! Gone. Right off the face of the earth.
“Just a heads up,” she had written. “I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I joined a travel group a while back that specializes in locating low fare trips to exotic places on a standby basis, and an opportunity has come along for a trip to Taiwan and China that was too good to pass up. But I had to move fast to take advantage of it, so I’ve taken an indefinite leave of absence from work and Lyle (sigh!) to make the trip. While I’m over there I’ll see if I can track down some of our family. The route and arrangements are rather convoluted so it may put me out of touch with everyone for a while. But not to worry! Lyle doesn’t like being left behind, of course, but he can’t go (as usual) because of all those pregnant ladies in need of his constant attention, etc. etc. Well, I figure by the time I get back he should be in a pretty appreciative mood and eager to show how much he missed me, if you catch my drift :-). Tell Mom and Dad I’ll bring back lots of pictures. Hugs! Your weird but excited sister, Ming.”
No, she hadn’t mentioned it before, and weird was the word, all right! But then, both of us fit that mold. We grew up playing fantasy games that most other kids thought way too weird. One of us, usually Ming who was two years older than me, would be a wicked queen or a witch or a conquering Amazon, with me as her vanquished victim. Accordingly, I spent much of those games tied up and gagged or lashed to a piece of furniture while my sister pretended to whip, torture and slay me in various imaginative ways. Looking back, I can now say that those games gave me my first prepubescent taste of erotic stimulation, foreshadowing the headier jolts I would come to cherish after Ming showed me what to do with that little button in my girl slit. The torture turned real in later years, if only in my mind, as I wallowed in her wake through high school and college. My intellectual abilities never measured up to Ming’s, and my parents never understood that rubbing my nose in Ming’s brilliant accomplishments and pushing me to be “more like her” would not make me smarter. In fact, it was not only useless but hurtful. Far from inspiring me to achieve higher grades, it merely frustrated me and made me resentful of nature’s unfair distribution of smarts. Had I Ming and I loved each other less, I might have resented her, as well. But she was the perfect antidote to these painful comparisons: never taking the opportunity to gloat; always assuring me in the secrecy of our room that Mom and Dad meant well but were old-world clueless and I was doing just fine. That was Ming.