Your sister was like twilight coming out of your mother, the day so impossible your mother’s body became it. Your mother was there with her black hair and her face an ambulance siren, and the doctor who tried to deliver her, and the nurses, and the eventual midwife on the tailend of thirty-two hours who pushed her sleeve up to her elbow and reached in to turn her over, slide her slick mewling and half-lavender out of the hot wet into the sterilized holding pen of her new planet, and your father by your mother’s shoulders with his useless face changing every second. Your sister turning over and over. Your sister hit her skull on something hard inside your mother. All anger was aimless and so necessarily static. All bodies are bloody. The stroke of God’s hand—your sister’s evening-soft head propped on a whip-thin crook, wheeled through the blankness of the hospital into wadded-gum-wan January sun over the dirty world. You too moved through the blues of her body while your sister took radios apart and put them back together perfectly. Your sister traded stocks online when she was like, fucking nine. Your sister wielded a graphing calculator like a tiny-fingered gladiator. You used to hiss at her when she bumped into you and broke dishes in the kitchen. She broke dishes because she was clumsy on the right side of her body. Your sister’s body was a story that kept getting told. Everybody who met her tried to tell it to her. The physical therapist was pale-haired and Christian and careless. The counselor at the community center fell in love with your mother so she had to find another. The girls who found her were ruthless and she didn’t try to find others. You never lost track of it. You never stood in for her. Wherever you left her, you knew they would find her there. Your body kept leaving her body alone. She never ran away from them because she was their friend. They held your sister’s head under the sink and dyed the back of her hair pink. They pushed her into the wall and told her to push back. They said hi when they saw you and you said hi back. They told everybody your sister couldn’t piss in the toilet seat. They spit in your sister’s milk.
