Cataclysm Baby

Beatrice, Bella, Blaise

The older was the first to show us the scars, the archeology of her sister-scribed history, hard-written by their cutting, their stabbing, their sawing. The younger better hid her sister’s handiwork, bore well the bands of reddened flesh and puckered scars beneath shirt, beneath sleeve, beneath shorts and underwear.

Even in the bath we barely noticed.

Even when the younger found trouble standing, even then we refused to believe.

Always the younger had limped, we argued. Always she had struggled to balance. Always her ears had been notched, her fingers a crooked nine.

What trust we had in the older then! What light touch she had, what blinding perfect smile made to answer our questions!

It had taken the younger’s retribution to reveal the older’s now-avenged crime, took the continuing destruction of that first body for us to discover the slower attrition of the second, and so afterward what right to anger did we have toward the younger, even at the shocking sight of the diminished older, our beloved eldest?

Perhaps none, we decided. Perhaps girls will be girls, no matter what we parents say.

And what else to do next, but let them work this out themselves?

To support their interests, we buy stocks of whetstones, of wood blocks filled with meat knives, of blister-packaged scissors, until at last our house is pregnant with the voices of children playing, craving only to get nearer each other, to have the other close at hand: Tag, you’re it, then, Duck, duck, goose! The older leads these games, a born teacher, but it is the younger who best exploits their rules. Every evening their screaming laughter cuts through our locked bedroom door, until one night we hear only the voice of the younger, playing all alone.

Ring around the rosie, she sings, skipping through the house, calling out our names, our titles—yelling mother up the stairs, shouting father outside our door.

We all fall down, she sings, throwing her skinny bones against the bolts.

We all fall down together!

And then: the creak of the doorframe, the give of the lock, the tenuous grace of a chain, pulled short.