Yolk

by Mary H.K. Choi

Because: postscript, she’s dying. My sister died of cancer, Patrick. My sister.

On top of everything else, I’m way overdue on sending Patrick thirty words about my existential purpose.

I finger the chocolate-covered dried banana chunks through the black foil packaging. There can’t be more than six or seven in there. I check the price tag. Five bucks. Criminal. I pluck them from the hook, taking them for a walk.

It’s been forever since she texted me. She usually calls because she’s an emotional terrorist.

She glares at me. “I just hope these cum stains are yours.”

“It smells like cats have been peeing in here for centuries.

My sister is not a good person. And she is not my friend. And the

pathetic truth is, I’m devastated.

It is my greatest fear to have this horrible nonexistent, disembodied feeling I carry with me realized.

I allow a smile to tease at my lips, summoning someone beguiling.

Everyone else’s need to be seen is embarrassing to me because I so badly need the same.

I imagine myself as an entirely different person. Someone new. Someone strong. Someone whole.

“Pepcid gang,”

He watches me in a way I remember from when I was a kid. With intensity. Almost as if he’s recording me with his eyes. It’s the opposite of everyone in my life who is constantly looking past me. I don’t have to vie for his attention. It’s mine to lose.

“I can’t take credit,” he says. “If you’re feeling a commotion in your loins, it’s my mom you’re attracted to.”

“Not to be all, I’m going to slip into something more comfortable, but I’m going to slip into something more comfortable.”

Maybe I should remind him again that I’m not homeless so that he’ll extra, really be convinced that I’m homeless.

I didn’t know I had a hole in my heart in the shape of an avocado egg timer.

“We look like Japanese game-show contestants.” “We look like a million bucks,” he says.

I marvel at his lack of self-consciousness or formality. Nothing he does is showy. It’s a quiet kind of confidence that’s unfamiliar to me.

I love this feeling. Like we’re kids having a midnight snack.

They weren’t people to me before.

I used to have this fantasy that I’d invent an app where we could talk to each other through

a filter with translation and microexpressions and tone and all this stuff so we could properly communicate. But then I realized it wouldn’t make them want to talk to me.

but sometimes it’s like, give it a rest already. Just set a boundary and break some patterns once in a while.”

“Wow.” I reach over and touch his cheek. “We look the same and yet…” I touch my own cheek with my other hand. “So different.”

The funny thing about having an older sibling play babysitter is that you’re only vaguely aware that they’re also a child.

Somehow it was even sadder that I’d made June cry.

I even thought about trying to poop without detection while Patrick snored softly, hugging the couch, dead asleep, but I’d rather hold it, poison my microbiome, and die slow.

I find myself wondering how this memory will feel in the future.

They’re so sure they want sex that I try to convince myself I must be wrong about my ambivalence.

because breaking character would reveal how fucking embarrassing it all is.

I wonder if we’ll know each other after this.

judging from his expression how much he’s into this. Into me. How much of him I’ll get to keep afterward.

You’re mine, I think, wondering if he can read my mind. How else would he have known that for all my bluster, I needed a moment to breathe? That I was scared of all we stood to lose? That I wanted to know him first?

We stand there, cheesing.

“You can keep the umbrella,” he says in my ear. “But I want my fucking sweats.”

“If you die, I die.” I spell it out for her. “If I die, you die,” follows June.

“You’d better not fucking die, June, I swear to God.”

The quiet is deafening. As though the sky is filling my ears with huge nothingness and swirling into my brain.

I follow her small shoulders and perm back into the kitchen, wondering how it would feel to be touched by my mother without bracing for criticism.

I was astonished. It was Mom, but I’d caught her in another life. A secret one. As though she played a mother in my movie, but here I was, watching her in another film entirely.

“Mom’s going to pop such a holy boner if both her daughters look like little politicians at church.”

the thought of cruising around with my sister after all this time makes my heart surge giddily.

I just drove around under this stupidly big sky with nowhere to go but at least feeling like I had some say in it.”

“Who gets food at DQ?” June muses. We both shake our heads in disgust and drive up.

Little kids are such creeps.

She does this sometimes. Defies the version of her in our minds.

But you…” She palms my cheek. “You I thought I’d get to keep,

“Be nice to each other,” she says. “You’re all you’ve got.”