EULOGY
Tria Andrews
My sister had bruised feet and violet fingernails. Someone hung the telephone wires too close to the pool. She wanted to go out like that, she told me once. Lit up like an accident. Wet as a seal in her one-piece. Blowing pink bubbles into the twilight. Moths, I think, fluttered around her. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t remember the color of our father’s eyes. Which is why she carved crosses into her thighs. Smearing ink into her skin like a salve, she drove our mother crazy. Peeling the edible wrapper from rice candy, saying it was our grandmother’s skin. I watched Mama Mary dissolve on her tongue. All summer she made love to a mechanic with a single braid down his back. He’s wild as an engine, she laughed and he bit the cleft of her chin. We purchased Crybaby, the parrot with the broken wing at a discount and for months he bobbed around our room. Perched beside the perfume on the vanity table, he called out to his own reflection. Died choking on the gum she had left on the windowsill while kissing the mechanic. Rest in Peace, Crybaby, scrawled across the shoebox. I watched her dress and undress, comparing. Counted her ribs when she slipped the t-shirt over her head. When the mechanic undressed her at night, I thought about him undressing me. Long fingers and powerful hands later disfigured in a war. When he left, the mechanic stored his motorcycle in our garage. I posed on it and she took my photograph. She posed on it and started crying. She looked so pretty I took her picture anyway. She read to me from a plank in a tree we called our tree house. Read the endings first because everyone should know where she is going. When we played with Barbie and Skipper, she said, My head comes on and off like a doll’s, it’s true. A large head with eyes that blink. Off with the head and the shoulders feel light like your arms are not weighted down with books. Pop goes the head and you expect blood, but there isn’t any. Instead, a fist, and she showed it to me and it was true. I pretend the mechanic is mine though he is not mine. I never had the chance to make someone mine, so I pretend, and when I do, I pretend he is heaven. At night, in our bunk beds, we can hear each other trying not to make sounds. Below and above, we explore with our fingers. She takes the motorcycle for rides at night. I go with her, because I am afraid. Don’t be afraid, she says. My sternum to her spine, I hold on like the mechanic. Later, her toes curled over the diving board. I want to go out like this. Lit up like an accident. Crackling like our grandmother’s rice paper skin. Not me, I say, I want to live. Screeching tires and I fly out through the air like Crybaby never could. Beneath me I see my sister, carving the shapes of us out from the world.