My Sister

Ever since my sister lost her husband and moved in with me, the moon has stayed full. I can’t see it because it’s hidden itself behind the forest, but I can tell it hasn’t waned for weeks by the bright light that shines between the gaps in the trees. Walking at night feels safer now, but when I go to sleep I can’t shut out that eerie, unnatural glow. Hence my bad dreams.

My sister has become clairvoyant in her mania. Today when I brought breakfast up to her room, she called me by my name. Not the name our parents had given me, the one she’s known me by all our lives—but my true name, the one I haven’t said ever aloud.

I stopped and stood for a moment by her bed. “How did you—?”

“How did I know it?” Her eyes were serene, but her lips were twisted into a medieval snarl. “I’ve always known you have the heart of a man. I could tell by the way you used to pull the wings off flies when we were children. And like all the rest, I know you’re just waiting to run off the first chance you get. To leave me and let me rot.”

She pushed the tray off the bed, sending it crashing down to the floor—china plate, teacup, and all.

One night, with the moon still burning behind the treetops and blinding the stars, my sister came to me.

I heard her by the creaking of the floor; her footsteps had the furtive but inexorable rhythm of a nocturnal thing, a tangible ghost. My bedroom door opened—I kept it unlocked for her sake, for her fears—and in she crept, a shadow of shadows.

She didn’t need to say a word. I could see loneliness radiating from her shoulders, her hair, her hands. Like moonlight. She wore a white nightgown that hissed and rustled when she moved.

She climbed into bed with me. Touched my face in the dark, moved her hands down to my breasts. Called me her brother. Straddling me, she ran her hands over my thighs and said, “I wish you and I had been born joined at the hip. No doctor could ever cut us asunder.”

I burned with cold fire. The moonlight was so dazzling that it hurt.

As suddenly as she’d arrived, this morning my sister packed her battered suitcase and departed. She left behind small, strange mementos of herself all over the house. On the kitchen table, she placed a red apple with a knife stuck into it; on my bed, she put a veil of white lace—the veil she’d worn at her wedding. She told me she didn’t need husbands any more. “But as for you,” she said just before she boarded the train, “it’s high time you took a wife.”

Looking out the window tonight, I saw that the moon had risen into the sky and become crescent, as sharp and mad as the curve of my sister’s mouth.

︎