Elizabeth Rosen
“Is it bad that this kind of headline – ‘Great White Shark with Red Mouth Washes Up on Beach in Rare Incident’ – is what gets me through the day?” I ask my sister.
When she doesn’t respond, I continue. “The algorithm also sends me stories about people who hate Angelina Jolie.” She keeps her eyes on her food. “And butt-lifts. A lot about butt-lifts.”
Still nothing. “And alligators attacking fire pits.”
“Enough,” she says, pushing her plate away. Elizabeth Rosen
We had found the spaghetti and Ragu sauce in the pantry. It was there and so were we, and there was a job to do, and we couldn’t afford the time to leave and come back. We both had flights out for the following night, and the estate company was coming tomorrow to sell everything we didn’t take for ourselves.
I couldn’t help it. I knew it was making her crazy, but I literally could not help it. And besides, “enough” could have been referring to the half-eaten pasta and not my yammering.
“And face epilators,” I say. “I don’t know. Do I look scruffy to you?”
She leans across the kitchen table into my face and lets out a hair-raising scream that seems to go on for seconds and seconds. If we’d been cartoon characters, my hair would have been blown back with the sound of it. The house, full of our dead parents’ belongings, and also emptier than the void of space, is suddenly occupied by the sound of my sister’s voice. It streaks from room to room like a full-bodied apparition. She screams until her air runs out, and then she sits there, wide-eyed, panting.
“Whoa,” I say. “Tell me how you really feel.”
She rises to her feet, eyes brimming, and looks down at me.
“Can’t you…not everything is a joke.” Elizabeth Rosen
She stalks from the room. I hear her footsteps on the stairs and know she’s gone back up to the bedroom where our mother had slept to get away from our father because, she said, he liked to read late into the night. I hear the low sound of murmuring and figure my sister is communing with the ghost of our mother, probably apologizing for my lack of seriousness. Just another thing of the list of things she thinks she needs to apologize for me about.
I pick up our plates and take them to the sink. I think about rinsing them and putting them away, but what is the point, really? I leave them on the bottom where the faucet drips lazily on them as it has for years while my father stubbornly refused to let anyone fix it.
Tomorrow, strangers will wander through the house, touching the lifetime of things that my parents collected into a home, assessing them for uniqueness and worth, not understanding or caring that worth is hardly ever a matter of money.
I wander through the downstairs of the house. I try to imagine how each item will look to the people who come through, having seen a sign outside that welcomes them and tells them to be careful where they step because the estate company is not liable for accidents incurred while they rummage through dead people’s stuff. I imagine them handling things carelessly, frown-lines appearing between their eyes as they look for a maker’s mark or scroll through their phones to see if the book in their hands is a valuable edition.
My sister’s footsteps move across the ceiling as she goes into our father’s bedroom to determine if there is anything she wants to take with her. She has a cardboard box she is filling. The only thing I will take from the house is my sister who I have always protected with my silliness, and who I learned to smile for even when I was dying inside. She has no idea that my parents were the same as her parents, that our experiences of them are so distant they might have been from opposite sides of the galaxy. My father must have known that if he touched her I would have found a way to rain hellfire onto him. Even today, this is a tiny spark of fierceness I value: that I made him afraid of me in this one thing, but the only thing that mattered to me.
My sister clumps down the stairs, cardboard box in her arms. She stands on the third step from the bottom and glances around the living room from that vantage point to see if there is anything else she wants to add to it.
“I’m ready,” she says, finally. Elizabeth Rosen
I turn from the needle-pointed Live, Laugh, Love our mother had hung on the kitchen wall so many years ago that the white thread has turned yellow.
My sister regards me. “Are you really not taking anything?”
I go to the front door and open it, gesturing for her to precede me out.
“Nothing,” I tell her, but I touch her shoulder on her way past, knowing I’m leaving with the only thing that matters.
