p1

We don’t talk about my sister anymore. She came out of my mother’s womb with a question on her tongue, but it was five years before we began to hear it. After that time the question banged and rattled so loudly that it was impossible to ignore. Those blank, dumb eyes staring out from deep cauldrons of unknown origin, the distorted movement of her branch-like limbs spinning like uncontrollable pinwheels. We were scared of her and she knew it.

With thick hair curling around her neck like caramel she moved through the house like a youthful Ophelia, gorgeous and demented in her world which she carried as a shield around her. It was like the wind, this world, we could sense its whispers, feel its bitterness roar through us, but never actually see it; we knew it was there but could never pin it down to anything corporeal in nature.

Sometimes, when the fireball inside ceased to burn, she would turn to me and smile, and for the briefest of moments the soul that lay trapped inside would tremble and wake and she became more human than any human being I have known before or since. These moments were eternal; yet, when I recall them I realise they could not have spanned more than the few seconds it took for her to stretch her muscles into a grin and flash her teeth like a freshly painted picket fence. Whirling away like a wild animal, her matted her aflame in the dying embers of afternoon light, I was left to wonder at what I had just encountered. Which was the real girl? Was this untamed thing just a shell, a trap in which something more delicate was caught, or were these exploding limbs a mere physical manifestation of the currents running wild in the limbic region somewhere beneath her thick crust of skull.