Sisters

by Daisy Johnson

It would have surprised neither of us to have found, slit open, that we shared organs, that one’s lungs breathed for the both, that a single heart beat a doubling, feverish pulse.

When she is angry with me I don’t know what to do with myself.

I am a shape cut out of the universe, tinged with ever-dying stars—and that she is the creature to fill the gap I leave in the world.

September could make her sister do anything. Had always been able to. The way September was with July sometimes reminded her of how Peter had been with her: his withholding of love for tactical advantage, the control concealed within silky folds of care. It wasn’t the same, she thought over and over; September was not like that man. Except sometimes she wondered.

You had sex with him even though you knew I liked him. I didn’t think I said the words out loud but she swivels to stare at me, her face flat and blank as a reptile’s, her hands raised. She shrugs. You weren’t ever going to do anything about it. I helped you. I wish I hadn’t spoken, that I could draw the words back into my mouth. She is angry with me and I am uncertain what she will do with the anger. You could text him a photo, she says, and the words are so nasty that I feel them physically, like stones.

She would give her pound of flesh if it was necessary, just to know there was no longer an absence where there had once been furious, ridiculous presence.

Did it mean something that her father was a man whose hate so closely resembled his love?

I am not a person without her. My sister is a black hole my sister is a falling tree my sister is the sea.

There has never been anyone but September. There has barely even been me.

Write it down. If you write it down you won’t ever break it. I hold the pencil and then squat down and write: If there could be only one of us it would be you.

One day I think again about what it would be like if September were still alive, and I do not know which is worse.

This is not the way I would have done this if she were here. I would not have been able to live if she were here.

If brains are houses with many rooms then September lives in every single one.

She was alive; she was so alive then that she stole living from those around her.