The Children's Hospital

30

I hardly know my own part, so why do I feel like my sister’s should be harder? She has always been ordinary. We do not have the same complaints, though she has always been sympathetic to my complaints, even when she didn’t understand them. I say, The world heaps me. She says, I am fat. I say, I am the root of all evil. She says, I am lonely. And she is fat, and she is lonely, and though she likes everybody, no one likes her, while I hate everyone and have a hundred friends.

One summer when she’d had a particularly rough day, I told her it didn’t matter that people she liked didn’t like her; the one person she did like more than anybody else would be her friend — I had promised — beyond the end of time. She thought I meant Jesus, but I told her I meant me.

Repeat after me, I told her, You suck-ass motherfucking cock-sucking pavement-fucking fuck-faced slimy-crotch bitch, go fuck yourself with a moped and shit in your own mouth. I had her memorize eight different phrases and even combine them all together into a marathon-length cuss-fest that she could barely complete without breathing in the middle. If she replied with this whenever someone called her fatty, I guaranteed they would stop.

They’ll just think I was crazy, she said.

But they’ll leave you alone.

It’s easy for you to say. Nobody thinks you’re crazy or fat. You’ll go to eighteen proms and wear seventy-five different tuxedoes and get elected Emperor of Maryland.

Say it again, I said, and she did. But she could not, when challenged, speak the words. So I kept composing cusses for her, and I designed a ritual to make sure it really never did fucking matter what somebody said to her or how they treated her, nothing would touch her and nothing would hurt her because she was protected. One night we went out her window and down to the little clearing where one of our dogs was buried. Kneeling by an arrowhead-shaped piece of slate that marked his grave, we burned candles and beef fat and I sacrificed one of her stuffed animals, an old bunny named Moronica.

Whatever they say, I chanted, let it come back to them. Whatever they say let it be silent. Whatever they say let it matter less than nothing, and let every mean thing they say or do come down again on them a hundred times worse in the after-time. I put a kitchen knife through Moronica, dipped her in wax and fat, and then we buried her. There in the ground she would become a scape-bunny, the absorber and repository of every ill ever done to Jemma, storing it all up like a battery until the after-time, when she would rise to give it back to everybody who had ever perpetrated a cruelty upon her, a truly terrible rabbit.

And the next day she went out in the world again, and nothing was different, but overnight I dreamed of her protected, surviving when the rest of the world vanished in flame, and she was queen of the world when all her old classmates were dead or worse than dead. I could not, and can’t, reconcile my sister with my visions of my sister. And why should I see her, wielding fire and killing angels, and angels bowing down to her, when what I really need are dreams to instruct me in my own purpose?