and even though colors may fade
and stitching unravels,
we would still hold
that same smell
of being a kid.
I guess I thought
that even as Ariana and I
grew older, grew bigger,
we didn’t have to change
for each other.
But that wasn’t happening.
Ariana was growing
each day
into a person
I didn’t know.
I love my sister, but
I wanted to feel
proud and inspired.
I wanted to share her
with everyone and no one.
But the Ariana
who was crouched on the floor
picking up shards
of a broken figurine
was someone I didn’t like,
someone with a cold, unfeeling heart,
a bristled soul layered in ice.
I didn’t know what she could say
to make it better,
because it wasn’t words
that I wanted.
It was action.
“What is wrong with you?
You’re better than this.”
Ariana
Even there in the bus station I can’t escape from it.
The reminders of death. A song is playing.
Alex’s song. The one about ghosts.
This song is following me, I swear. The way a refrain
gets stuck in your head and follows you
from room to room,
moment to moment,
maybe days on end.
Until it eventually fades.
“Your student ID,” a woman at the ticket counter
with a haggard face interrupts.
I am struck by the normalness of it all.
It’s just like the first time we all went to the grocery store
after Mom died to get milk and eggs and stuff.
The whole time, all I could think about was
that our mom had died
and nobody in there knew.
Nobody knew that this was our new normal.
I was surprised how easy
it was to exist as a faceless child.
A person that no one knew anything about.
But I remember having this feeling
that I wanted people to know.
I am the girl with the dead mother.
Standing in front of the ticket counter at the bus station,
it’s like that first time all over again.
When the woman behind the counter asks me again
for my student ID, I have this impulse
that I want her to know.
I am the girl with the dead mother.
I set the painting on the linoleum floor.
I unzip every pocket but can’t find my ID.
“Just give me an adult ticket,” I say.
I’m trying to be someone more.
The woman nods. “Bus boards in twenty minutes.”
Row
I stare into the empty living room
at a quiet couch, a lonely blanket,
and remember the time
a bird flew into this room.
Small with yellow and red feathers.
It flapped its wings frantically
and bounced from wall to wall.
Ariana and I were alone
with the bird.
“You left the door open,”
she said.
“For two seconds. I swear.”
I shut the door.
The bird flew smack
into a window and continued
to flap around, scared
like we were.
“What are you doing?
Open it back up!”
The bird pooped on a bookcase.
A white smear slid down
the wooden exterior.
A small splatter
hit the spine
of a book.
“A bird poops
every ten minutes,”
I said, as if it were
our call to action.
Ten minutes until
it poops again,
until Dad comes home,
until the bird flies
into something breakable.
Framed family photos.
Mom’s collection of figurines.
“I saw this in a movie,” Ariana said.
She handed me a corner of a blanket.
“What movie?”
“Does it matter?”
We unfurled the blanket like a flag
and held both ends
across the room,
trying to sweep the bird,
coax it closer to the door.
At first it just flew over us,
avoiding the blanket entirely.
But then, maybe it knew
that this strange environment
it landed in wasn’t home.
Maybe it missed
the trees and the wind
and the other birds.
Maybe it started to feel caged
flying from wall to wall.
Hitting the windows,
perching on things
that weren’t green.
The bird flew without coaxing
straight out the door,
heading for the woods,
like it was all a temporary detour
in bird life to see what it might be like
to live in a house
with the two of us.
Ariana collapsed
on the couch
with the blanket.
I plucked a book off the shelf.
“What do you think it says
that the bird chose
to poop on Little Women?” I said.
“It’s still pissed that Amy
ends up with Laurie,” Ariana replied.
I wiped the bird poop off with my sleeve.
Ariana blinked hard at me. She shook her head.
“Gotta love a sister who will wipe up literal shit.”
I shrugged and curled up next to her
on the couch, together reading
the first page, silently
holding our breath, wondering
what it would be like
if someone were to tell a story,
not of four little
white girls from New England,
but of brown girls,
who loved each other fiercely
and of a world
that didn’t get
in their way.
Ariana
Our mother came from an island where it never snowed.
She would have hated this.
“This isn’t natural,” she would have said.
She came from an island where families are traced
through their mothers, grandmothers, aunties, and
great-aunties.
On our mother’s island, women inherited the land.
Women had a final say in governance.
Women defined and shaped and perpetuated the culture.
So when the colonizers came, they were baffled.
What are we supposed to do with an island governed
by women?
In the wars against the colonialists, women survived.
Women held on with power and land and culture in
their fists.
I wonder how our mother would have raised us
as young women. I wonder what she could have taught us
about governance and power, about running a household,
a community, a culture. I think about who she was
before she died. The breadwinner with a fancy corporate job.
Maybe she was trying to show us culture,
through her place in the household with Dad.
But there’s one other thing that women
from the island are
supposed to do.
Mothers are supposed to determine
the destiny of their own children.
The place and role children will assume in the future.
But when your mother dies, what happens
to your own destiny?
Who are you supposed to be?
What role are you to assume
if your mother isn’t there to guide you?
Row
I text my sister
wherever she is.
There’s a lot of fricken snow outside.
For ten, then twenty,
then thirty seconds,
Ariana doesn’t respond.
Maybe it’s because I didn’t
ask her a question.
I text her again.
Why aren’t you here?
I really expect her to respond.
I don’t even care what she says.
Just to know that she’s out there
thinking of me.
We’ve been through a lot of crap.
I get it. But I’m still here.
I’m your sister.
The screen starts to dim
like a slow goodbye,
the kind where someone says,
Hey, I’m going now,
before they finally leave.
I want to believe
that she’s going to text back,
but there’s nothing.
While everyone else
is watching their mothers
soar over them like an airplane,
skirting around weather formations,
showing them different routes,
all I have is Ariana,
who doesn’t know how to fly.
I watch my sister approach her future
with the reluctance
of a train conductor,
and while everyone else
is flying around in airplanes,
who is left to use the rails?
It’s me, Ariana.
I’m behind you.
Stuck on this line,
pulled along the same
steel tracks as you.
But if you’re not here, ahead of me,
who am I to follow?
How am I supposed to learn?
Ariana
“I don’t know what to do with you Ariana,”
Ms. Wex said as she sat at her desk, flipping through
a grade book after class a week ago.
“Because you’re technically failing this class.
You were supposed to complete a portfolio,
tied together with a single theme.
Like Rory’s over there.”
Ms. Wex paused, searching for something
more to say about Rory’s work.
“Her theme is supposed to be letters. Like the alphabet,”
I said. I nodded at a cubist-style painting
of an apple and a surrealist take on a boat.
There was a technical quality to each image,
but nothing that screamed out with heart.
“Five original works of art,” Ms. Wex continued.
“That’s what I wrote on the syllabus. You have
produced only one. And the theme?”
Ms. Wex looked at my painting again. Her head tilted,
in the kind of way that said, I don’t really know where my eyes
are supposed to look, and the color is all confusing.
“Grief,” I said. “It’s about grief.”
“Okaaay,” Ms. Wex said, but it came out long and drawn out
and affectless, like she could have been saying
any other word, like “potato” or “suitcase” or “carrot.”
“The school counselor tells me you need
this class to graduate, so I’m giving you a chance
to improve your grade. You won’t get an A,
but at least you won’t fail.”
“I might not graduate?” A lump grew in my throat.
One that felt like it had been growing
since the beginning of senior year,
whenever I thought about things
related to my future.
Ms. Wex didn’t look up or nod or acknowledge my question.
She scribbled on a pad of paper. Her handwriting,
exacting. Each letter angled and pointed.
“There’s a gallery show in the city next Saturday.
A special exhibit for high school students.
I’m offering extra credit for those
who choose to participate.
Part of being an artist is learning
how to let your work speak for itself on display.”
I didn’t know I was failing or that I was
at risk to not graduate. I figured I still had time
How could I have been so careless to think
that there would be more time?
I should have known better.
There is never enough time.
Ms. Wex slid across a piece of paper
with a date, a time, and an address.
I looked at my lonely painting on the easel.
A frayed edge of canvas.
It looked exactly the way I intended,
even though it took me this entire semester
just to get over the fear of making
this painting, that I didn’t have to
let go of the grief; I just had to let it all out.
I watched Ms. Wex’s eyes drift over to my painting,
then dart back to mine. Like she was afraid of it.
Of what it might mean and say.
Part of me wanted to take the painting
and shove it in a closet forever,
but I folded up the piece of paper
into a stubby little square
and pocketed it in my bag.
because maybe if I did hang it up on a wall,
maybe if Ms. Wex, if I, if all of us,
stared at the painting long enough,
we would stop being so afraid.
Row
I know I shouldn’t put
this much weight
on a single text.
But I do.
Because every second
Ariana fails to answer
I worry about
who we have
become.
I want us to be something
that resembles a family.
Like a soccer team,
all running around a field
in choreographed patterns,
heading toward the same goal.
But that’s not what our family is.
It’s a frayed string of lights
that someone needs to fix
with electrical tape.
It’s the electricity
that can’t get to us
because Mom’s bulb
has burned out,
so now the whole string is dark.
But without the lights turned on,
does anyone even notice
that we are broken?
Ariana
The overhead storage is too narrow for my painting.
The floor space too dirty. The seat next to me,
not wide enough. I settle on resting the painting
on my knees and lean it against the seat back in front of me.
Air is blasting through tiny vents overhead,
smelling like strangers. A guy in front of me
eats a bag of chips, an elderly woman
hugs a reusable bag. Her eyes dart around.
Her shoulders fold inward. She hugs
the bag tighter as people pass her by,
like she’s afraid of something.
Is it the snowstorm brewing outside?
The safety record of the driver?
Is it the place that she’s headed
or what she’s leaving behind?
O
r is she just afraid of the rest of us
trying to steal all her stuff?
Sometimes I wonder what people think about.
Whether their feelings are intense, like mine,
or completely ordinary and mundane.
Sometimes I wonder what it might be like
to spend a whole day thinking about small,
insignificant things. Like the scratchiness
of the seat fabric or the steady breeze of recycled air.
The driver releases the brake, the bus rolls forward.
I take a few breaths, sink down into the upholstered seats,
trying to feel excited that I’m here,
doing something, anything,
not just for a passing grade,
but to convince myself that I don’t have to be so scared
of the future. I don’t have to be scared of the past.
Row
I stare at the screen, rereading
the unanswered text.
I think back to the first month of school.
When the captain of the soccer team
called out to me
in the hall.
She stood in the center