After months of leaving contraceptive devices in the medicine cabinet, coaxing me to enjoy my nubile sixteen-year-old body while I had it, my mother took matters into her own hands. I entered the living room to find my mother kneeling on the floor in a red negligee. Next I registered the pained look on my boyfriend’s face and the way he clutched the cushions on either side, Christ-like. I thought perhaps he’d hurt himself until I noticed the trousers around his ankles.

And worst of all, he was on the couch I’d fought to keep, even though the material had frayed at the arms and the seats had borne the brunt of a generation of ample bottoms. Mother, who’d wanted to get rid of it for nearly a year, had taken to curb-crawling past neighborhood skips to see if she could acquire another couch second-hand, yet my loyalty to this one had been resolute. On this couch I’d had my first French kiss, allowed the first straying hand under my shirt and into my underwear. But now the sofa had been desecrated, it had to go.

Had my father stormed in and shot them both with the Force-issued pistol that rested unused on his hip, that would have been different. Blood spurting over the couch and seeping into the beige and cream fabric would have been quite poetic, ecstasy and death being so closely intertwined. Then I would have kept the sofa as a monument to the sacredness of relationship and a warning to future boyfriends and mothers. Bloodstains, I believe, never fully come out, no matter what the cleaning adverts say.

Read more about Nadia here.

Read more about Higinia here.