Sarah Norek
My sister’s face remained flat. Where I’d before known anomalies to cause in her hysteria – an albino skunk, a grinning, limbless child, one eyeless horse sneezing its lips to flutters, empty sockets pulsing – now there wasn’t a pinch, not one blanch. All afternoon, story unfolding, her unfamiliar calm prevailed.
Finished speaking, she set her cup of cold yellow tea down to the table top, the cork coaster, and remained in this position for several minutes: leaned into her thighs, holding the table’s edge with its fine detail work, copper gladiola stalks inlaid. She looked down and spoke to herself, lips moving, silent.
Had she been just a friend, her story would have been a chore – its telling, my judgment – and so would she, gently pitching now on the middle sofa cushion. However, as she was my sister, I believed it was my duty to listen, withhold opinion. This was the first we’d spoken in years, the first we’d seen each other in more than a decade. Her call and my visit meant something, were steps, perhaps, towards some kinder, gentler place. Any understanding we’d reached as children and young adults had disassembled itself. Old roles of cruelty, thoughtlessness, guilt, now felt false.
My sister’s waist was thicker than her skirt wanted it to be, creating a fatty bump. Down her legs snaked varicose veins, dark purple in her strange tan that looked like she’d bathed in dirty orange juice and had yet to wash off. Where was her true cream color? And she’d been dyeing her hair, which I wasn’t expecting, red-wine headed when I knew she should be gray; we were a family of early onset grays. I’d turned so in my thirties. Our mother’s photo albums showed our father with a gunmetal head at twenty-four, full silver by twenty-six.
Since lunch we’d sat in this room with its drapes pulled open, a single, large window looking out on her well kempt backyard: magnolia tree, blush-berried yews, lilies crowning through the hard winter’s dirt. Now, before us, the fireplace is dead with ash. Along the mantelpiece my sister’s child sits in frames: my niece with our mother’s pillow breasts, mounting a downed tree trunk for a senior high school photo, jeans too tight and the seam of her underwear showing through. Another of her floating just beneath the swimming pool’s water, eyes opened, skin a dead milky blue. Not a single photo of what she's now become, ten years older at least.
When my niece was a child, I brought her trinkets: snow globes from airports, a marching baton with gold glitter liquid inside that surged up and down like a school of sparkling tiny fish. Once, a book of cut-out dolls in ornate period clothing, bustle skirts and high feathered hats: my sister cut free these intricate edges for an entire afternoon, sighing and sighing, glaring.
On those early visits to my sister’s family, my niece would grab greedily my wrist, pull me into the entry’s cavity, demand her souvenir. She’d yank my satchel to the floor and shatter delicate gifts placed intentionally at the bag’s bottom. I believed then, and do still, in manners. Visit after visit, we’d listen to tinkling shards. Her face would crumple, ready for the wastebasket. In whimpers, I’d be told to remove my shoes, please, so as not to ruin completely what lay beyond.
While our visit was still young, my sister began:
I believe I am an alien.
She took measured sips of her lukewarm tea before starting again, quiet and evenly toned.
I believe, she said, that I was abducted while unconscious. Perhaps as early as my daughter’s birth, during the stay in the hospital and the after-effects of labor drugs. Perhaps it was later than this. I could have blacked out for some reason, at some point, been stolen and returned. This inability to identify the time is, I think, a plausible repercussion of aliens tampering with my synapses, my whole then-working body.
I was taken to a holding tank not unlike those which aquariums use for larger specimens, their killer whales and dolphins. It had no water. It was very cold and bright and I understood it to feel the way I had always imagined the North Pole to feel. Still, nothing was unkind to me. I don’t remember being hungry, or having any pain in my shoulder or knee, both of which would normally flare up under such chilly circumstances.
The aliens, when I saw them, had no human likeness. They fluffed along the ground like centipedes. Their bodies pulsed colors, rainbows beyond rainbows. The most expansive box of crayons. If they had eyes, I couldn’t tell. When they touched me, there was no physical contact, only a warming of parts as my heart, my organs, all spun deeper within.
My sister stopped, briefly caught my eye. Began again: Obviously I look nothing like these creatures. They didn’t alter my outward appearance whatsoever. Also, my shoulder and knee continue to bother me in inclement weather, and I am no less desirous of my husband. So far as he goes, there is nothing of me that appears in any way different. But I have changed.
She took a deep breath, held it, let go.
She said: My hearing is unbearable. Over the past year it has reached this – she made her hands into claws, shook them tensely at her ears, clenched her jaw so the knob of it throbbed. Said: Once a single sound focuses for me it piggybacks a picture that blurs my sight. When it first occurred I rubbed my eyes like a maniac. I took myself to the hospital where they treated me as a psychiatric case. It was humiliating. My husband was called to take me home. They gave me eye drops to soothe what irritation I’d caused.
Now that I’ve grown accustomed, when the sounds and sights come they aren’t so much a shock as an inconvenience, a diversion. I drop off in conversations if I’m not careful. I’ve been asked before whether or not I might be seizing.
Across town, she sighed, is a toenail peeling up beneath the bottom edge of a heavy wooden door, snagged. The door, slowing slightly, changes in pitch from a whistle to a moan. Then the nail, disengaging from flesh, makes a clatter like the beginnings of a rockslide a mile or two up. There is the steadiness of the earth cracking, new plant growth like the sound of newspaper continuously crumpled. When a bud finally pulls its chin from a stem’s cradle, it is what roar a pestle makes in the basin of a mortar, around and around. This growth is so prevalent these days, the sound so incessant that the inside of my skull is like a TV without reception, filled with the speakers’ rasp.
Yesterday held a pear’s skin cracking, its meat crushing. The first sound was cellophane, the kind used for gift baskets, stiff and tightened down with a hair blower. The second, all the sugars being flattened, was similar to the ground on a day of rain and then, suddenly, a clearing, the soil able to breathe, tiny caves of air opening across the loam.
There has been a person’s temple bashed, like a dog chewing its bone, that rolling of edges. Then bullets, one entering at a shoulder, one getting inside a gut, this last at first like a paper snapped taught, then a water cooler’s large air pocket shifting position from spout to canister’s head. That gooey burble.
She stopped speaking abruptly, took several more sips of tea, gazed out the window.
I don’t know why they’ve done this to me, she moaned quietly, and in the next second composed herself to say: My coloring remains healthy and look – here she held a hand out over the table, over cookies wound around a tray’s edge and into the center like a finely patterned snake – I hold a steady hand. This one, too.
My sister showed me next her other hand. She held each out for what felt like several minutes while we both waited silently.
I know, she began again, that I’m breaking down. I can hear it inside me, can feel it. Whole sections of my arms, yesterday a portion from my left chest. This morning, not a minute after waking, the front half of my esophagus. What parts still hold fast inside are struck by those which drop. Often my lungs tickle and it becomes difficult to swallow. A bone will begin to float, nothing to clamp it in place. It will raze the underside of my skin and I’ll feel it not just there but in a corresponding spot on my body. My armpit, for instance, or the back of my hip, in the dimple.
I am afraid, she sighed, that when everything beneath my façade has disappeared – all my bones and organs, my entire nervous system, my fatty gray lump of brain – I am afraid that I will continue. That the aliens have made it so I will not, cannot, destruct. With all that open space inside me the sounds will only vibrate louder. How will my eyes not burst? How can I not expect blood from my ears, dark red tears? Inevitably my pores must fail and I pray that then the rest of me will too.
Already it’s becoming dark outside, the day eaten by drizzle and low clouds.
I should go soon, I say. You’re good to have me, but I have to get back. The cats are at home, alone. Not a single light on in the house.
My sister, looking out the window, nods. She replies she’d almost hoped I’d stay for dinner, to visit with her husband when he arrived home. Not today, I think, rocking slightly in my seat. I think: Enough for one day.
All of this has been a surprise, a string of them: seeing her, her story, the call she placed to me the day before.
Hello? she'd whispered, both our mornings still black.
Immediately caves in me dampened. I was a child again, Chinese food wolfed, departure awaited in a vinyl red booth. There my sister grasped my hand, my cradled cookie, and crushed its sweet body between us. The whole time she smiled. Our downy legs kept sliding for the floor. Our knees became embossed with crumbs. Together we gasped. Don’t let go, she told me, and I didn’t. Just that once, I gripped like I’d break my way inside her.
Is that you? she’d whispered, years and years later, and I’d said, Of course it is, who else would it be. I meant to snap but my lungs wouldn’t help me. What air gush I craved came instead as threads. When had this rot begun? Termites of love and longing had snuck inside and eaten my aloofness to shreds. My structure swayed, unsafe.
I need to see you, she told me softly. You’re the only one.
I’m right here, I’d said. I’m on my way.
Now, husky with spit, I say how the weather is supposed to worsen. I say my eyesight fails in the dark. I need to make it home this evening, I say, I just do.
My talk is babble. Again my sister nods.
Up she presses herself, hands on knees, weight borne in heels. She says: I hope you got a good look at the magnolia while you were here. It hasn’t flowered this fine since the second year we had it.
I glance out the window as I stand to leave. The tree’s trunk has grown to the width of a hearty woman’s thigh, the bush of it climbing past first floor windows, hovering beneath second. Its branches bend and stretch, invisible in their inching. The flowers tremble beneath the veiling mist. I think of biting into a petal, its thickness, the wax left on my teeth. The sound it could make breaking in my mouth, like snow cold enough to splinter.
A moment later my sister is holding out my coat, my scarf, standing at the door to turn the knob and let me out. She peers past my head, down the hall to the room we’ve left. Her eyes widen briefly, amber color pulsing. She shudders and fidgets, shuffles her feet.
Well, I say.
She tilts: Well.
Out in the damp dusk I fiddle at my car. Teeth scrape the paint deeply as I try to fit the key inside its lock. Cursing, I get finally into the driver’s seat. I start the motor up, make the wipers move across the windshield to clear the water collected. All I can think is how much that scratch will cost me of the car’s worth. I obsess over this fact, my brain relieved by something so banal.
My sister has closed her door but still stands in the long glass beside it, peering out. At the street corner, when I look in my rearview, her silhouette has yet to move.
A month passes.
I haven’t worked in several years, but still I wake as though I do. When I practiced medicine, I was up at four and five in the morning, preparing coffee, frying eggs and toasting bread.
Any longing for sweets died in my youth. My toast holds butter now and nothing more.
Years ago, a particular case had me in the emergency room during a winter’s blizzard, two-thirty in the morning. The patient was old and food poisoned, unable to hold fluids and expelling from both ends. Dehydration was imminent. The ambulance retrieved him, drove the sloppy, dead streets with lights spinning but no siren wail. He was delivered through the bay’s sliding glass doors on a stretcher blanketed in snow, enough so that we brushed it to the floor in great wet handfuls. The custodian came along to mop.
He was the last patient to arrive during the remainder of a dim morning stretch. We had no family of his to contact. He’d called himself in, then lay waiting behind his unlocked front door, wrapped in old blankets that the paramedics kindly took to be laundered.
The town was suspended in white. Streets kept still and the snow-smothered lamplights looked like suns and moons pinned beneath clouds. After tending to the sick man, several nurses and myself stood out in the bay and watched for nearly an hour while all foliage disappeared. It is, one of them said, like watching quicksand in reverse.
Another one nodded. Like watching the quicksand step onto its victims instead of the other way around.
We were hypnotized. Time could’ve ceased or cranked ahead.
When my shift ended and I was free to go, I couldn’t find my car. I was unable, really, to see or do anything, and so I gave up, walked back inside the building and found an empty exam room where I got beneath a thin, pink blanket. I thought to myself how easy it would have been to get lost out in the heart of the storm, not five steps from the hospital’s walls. To get lost and to die, my body missing until the sun seared through the clouds again and the blue sky tacked itself high up, work crews at last able to plow. One could be pinned beneath a pile from a storm like that for a week at least, depending on the temperatures and the rate of thaw.
Another month passes, then another. It is almost half a year before I see my sister next, at a bon voyage party for her and her husband, the couple headed overseas for a long overdue vacation. These are my sister’s words, written in her nervous pen at the bottom of the invitation where she also wrote: Things happen, we both know this. Who can say when we’ll see each other again, in what form or where.
Before leaving for her house, I check all dials on the gas range. I make sure the toaster, the coffee maker and blender are unplugged. My two cats I find in my bedroom, deep in the bed’s top blanket. On my way through the kitchen, out the back door and into the garage, I add food to their bowls, check that their water dish is filled.
Summer has closed and fall opened up. The leaves are turning, the barometric pressure dropping. I’ve got my eye on a storm cloud banking the horizon, moving no closer but not leaving, either.
When I saw my sister last, when she spoke about the aliens, she also told me of her daughter. She’s tested positive for pregnancy, my sister said, the two of us still in the entryway. With a woman, she softly added, looking at the floor, the closet, back to the floor to watch my shoes come off. Already she held my coat. It was here I first noticed her sacky jowls, her once slender, enviable neck all loose with folds.
I resisted each urge to stoke her discomfort. Congratulations, I said instead.
We walked to her kitchen, waited for the tea to steep. Then visited the deck briefly, then got back inside, to the back room overlooking the yard. Over the course of our visit, I’d watch my sister's mouth tell me everything, her once thin and lipless face looking overused and bloated now. The aliens were revealed, but it was her daughter, my niece, I kept returning to. Seeing her pictures on the mantle was strange. The last I’d known her she was still a plank, some boy-haired girl, androgynous with a mole below the corner of her left eye that she’d rub at like a sleep pebble only it never gave way. Then, in the photos, she was spilling all over the place, a soft and curvy pelt. And now this: fertile ground. The guts of her poor manners ground into paste and seasoned, fed through some tube of defiance, packaged as a woman with a woman on the plate of a mother who didn’t care to eat it but refused to be so rude, to push it away. My sister was being tested. It was a wonder to see her surprisingly limber yet, absorbing each impact.
I’d been at the party for almost an hour, keeping mostly to a corner of the kitchen that had me wedged between the telephone and the backyard’s sliding glass door. The glass chilled me through my clothing but I didn’t leave it, enjoying a flurry of goose pimples.
My sister had, by that time, already ushered me to her husband who’d embraced me intimately, strangely, and who’d then said I most likely needed a drink and he was my man, he’d get that, pronto.
Daddy’s in charge, he grinned at me, and I nodded, unsure how to respond. He skipped away to the bar, returning promptly with a tumbler filled to the brim in clear, thick liquid, three wedges of lime.
Cheers, he said, chinking the glass now in my hand with his own, drenching my knuckles with spillage. His eyebrows wriggled. The doorbell began to ring and ring, and again he skipped away, to help welcome guests. I’d never liked him.
Watching my sister, I’d wondered what was going on inside her, anywhere inside her: what it was she heard, how much beneath her skin was left to fall. Truthfully, I wondered then, though I didn’t realize this until much later – until they’d been away on their trip for probably two months and were still not due to return for another three – if she could hear my wondering, the synapses sparking beneath my skull, and how it might sound.
I did not for a second doubt anything she’d told me – about the holding tanks, the aliens’ shape and colors, what her body has become. I’ve seen gruesome, otherworldly things, inside and outside peoples’ skins, and have been unable, even when I’ve held them, have felt them, to account for their astounding reality.
When I was still new to my practice, we operated on a woman complaining of severe cramps, an inability to stop bleeding between cycles. We harvested a tumor from her ovary, sent it out for a biopsy. Later, we were called excitedly to the lab where it lay open, dissected: long strands of black hair grew inside and two small, perfect white teeth nested in the flesh.
The woman, when we told her, asked to see it herself. When we showed her she vomited so immediately into a wastebasket, and with such an exact calculation of distances and height, that I could only conclude she’d noticed the receptacle along the wall when she’d first arrived. Then, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand, she asked if there was any way she could take the body home with her. Was there any way at all to preserve it.
This is likely the closest I’ll come to giving birth to something, she told us, bending so her face was only inches from the opened lump. She said, quietly: It did come from me. It should be mine to keep.
I remember leaving the lab, walking the quiet hall, catching glimpses of a day alive beyond the windows. The sky was dark blue. The hillside nearby had grown its grass green and long by then, stalks curling in wind gusts. At one of the windows I stopped to look out: stuck to the glass, irritating my sight, was a round, black beetle. It was then I recalled a mole on the young woman’s hip. I’d brushed against the growth with the edge of my hand, my pinky finger, able to feel it just barely through my glove’s skin as we began. This happened before the first incision. I brushed against it a second time only after the young woman had received a last black stitch. The skin around the mole had been goose pimpled throughout the entirety of the procedure, and by the time we finished the dark spot reached taller than I’d remembered, wider than a quarter dollar, and stiff. I wanted to peel it up with a fingernail like some anise flavored candy, dropped from spoon to sheet to cool. Put the treasure in my mouth, melt it, its sweet trickle slow and dark and down my throat.
Meeting my niece’s wife was a pleasure. She was charming, maybe the same age as my niece, maybe younger. She spoke of her work as an art instructor at a small liberal college, of her students. I was shocked she could be teaching already. She looked so tight and fresh, so new. There were no lines in her forehead or at the corners of her eyes or lips, no suggestion of jowls. She said, frowning: If I were another department’s lackey, I’d die. To have to publish, to pony the administration on my back. Instead I work, like any student except with the title of instructor. She shrugged her shoulders, then said: We have a wall to throw disasters against, a punching bag hung in the corner for release. Here she mimed jabs left and right, a quick roundhouse swipe of her foot, up near my throat, all the time grinning wildly. I wanted to reach out and pinch her mouth closed, crimp it securely to her face. To corral her joy a place it couldn’t be fiddled with. How happy she’d stay! How unencumbered by disappointments!
Next, she and my niece recalled the sculpting professor’s seduction by a student on the night of a bronze pour. These two women, eyes eaten by mounding cheeks, mouths rowdy with teeth and indulgent shrieks, together acted out a scenario that, through peals of laughter, they informed me was representative of the sculpting professor and the seducing student groping each other through the protective space-like suiting required when dealing with molten materials.
Like two retarded Emperor penguins forgetting their fatness, my niece gasped, then said: Trying to grab. Searching for touch.
The area around us had cleared. I could see my sister glancing over from a different room, through the doorframe. Beyond her, windows showed the gray street, leaves fallen and slicked to rot, a car’s window unrolled and drizzle flicking in.
For several minutes we doted on the silence between us. They stopped their acting and began only to hold each other, little finger clutches at first, then the press of a hip against an ass, finally my niece’s wife encircling my niece with her arms, spreading her legs so my niece could relax against her. They stayed like this for some time, seeming to forget I was there, intent only on the pulses of their bodies, aligning them in order to hear more clearly their love for one another: these two women – one of whom I was so closely related to yet knew almost nothing about – and then this tiny extra beat fluttering inside my niece. They gripped what grew between them, determined to protect it so long as they could.
I never married. I have no children of my own. What few children I played parent to briefly have by now all disappeared, repeating my own vanishing from their early, imprintable lives. My two cats are the only beings I still believe I might succeed in caring for, however poorly. Together they survive, flourish. Their teeth remain white, their breath tolerable, coats thick and shining. To them I’m a mere furniture piece, which in the end suits us all.
Halfway home from my sister’s house, I took my car off the road. The shoulder was nothing, a strip of crumbled asphalt, brown glass litter, the soft remains of fast food bag. Scrubby grass angled steeply into drainage ditch. On the ditch’s far side spread a recently shorn hayfield, random strips of uneven stalks, new bales bound to bursting. Far away, machinery sat beneath a tin shed, dark and hulking in the lean evening light. Already a great pile of bales was stacked. The wind had begun and from the mountains galloped clouds, violet gray herds that would later stop to piss en masse.
At the pile, workers attempted to tarp, to beat the storm and its battery of rain. The distance turned their bodies to toys. I watched while gusty air tumbled loose pieces of grass across the road, sent a puffed plastic bag into somersaults. Watched how the workers, each time a new breath blew, held tight their tarp edges while the enormous sheet inhaled. Again and again these inhalations came into the canvas, gray like a swollen tick, until the workers were lifted to their tiptoes, were nearly airborne. Slowly, slowly, stakes were driven and ties anchored, corners folded and tucked and pinned into place by the taut pulls of bungees. In the airtight car, I strained towards the far windows, those nearest the action, as though to hear from so far away the snapping and cracking of material, the calls and cries of its people. I waited for a body to be tossed by the wind, to see the arc of flight and the smash of landing, the crumple that would come. I waited beyond the time this could still happen. How they broke such a wild, snorting thing. How no one, not even once, let go.
While my sister prays for silence, I hope to startle from this surrounding soundlessness, so like that snowstorm years ago. I’ve walked myself into a blank, my blood going mute, everything colorless, vanished. In this muffled place I’ve picked the ticking carefully, fluffed it to incredible width and arranged it around myself. I’ve sat in its center willingly, almost eagerly. Perhaps just now I believed my sister to be the key. That our reconciliation, her daughter in our midst, would smother the silence. Finally all the clicks and snaps and bangs of a live, working body would be heard again. I would hear myself again. I would be found.
The last I saw of her, my sister held some stranger at the elbow, leaning a side of her head towards his moving lips, tilting her ear to better funnel his words. I watched her finally look up in time to see other faces laughing. An infant learning cues, she followed suit. The fabric of the man’s jacket bunched in my sister’s hard grip. His cheeks’ shelving shined as he glanced down at her hold on him, then to her face, then down again. He never, not even in a deeply taken breath, shifted any weight away. He leaned closer, cradled my sister’s tense hand with his own soft one, and held himself still, a patient, quiet island.