Fiction: electra contemplates the death of her sister

By a.d.

 

after iphigenia died there wasn’t much of anything. all the grief came flooding later, rearing up like a wave until it drowned the entire house and everything in it. 

i mostly remember my sister as a series of anecdotes— her disembodied voice whispering secrets in the dead of night, a hand made clammy with our mingled sweat as we held on to each other in line at the amusement park, a blooming face floating above my own in the mirror while she braided my hair. she was always hovering a few steps above me, casting out her glow or shadow in equally occluding measures.

the relief i feared never found me. one day i was a sister and the next i was just a daughter. this shift was palpable in the way the atmosphere changed around the house, like a thermostat that suddenly stops working; the hush around my mother, the static electricity she gave off, her simmering grief stifling the air, the atrocity of my flaws rebounding in the vacant space my sister left behind.

i understood that my sister had gone never to come back, like all the other girls who eventually went away, like all the older village boys who used to eye me curiously whenever i went out with my mother, those bold ones who proffered tentative offers of play, who then one day went off to war and never returned. i used to imagine the war as some warped baggage carousel, where people went in and came out broken, or didn't come out at all. 

in some part of me i knew that after my sister died, it was only a matter of time until my father died— and if the war didn’t claim him, then this wretched house would. death only needs to enter your life once, then it becomes much better at finding you. 

you could say i grieved more for my father’s dreaded, impending death than my sister’s concrete one. and i think that says all you need to know about me.

 

 

 

 

 

a.d. is a bisexual poet, writer, and visual artist. Her work has appeared in HAD, Don't Submit!, God's Cruel Joke, Bullshit Lit, Loser, Apocalypse Confidential and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter: @godstained