D2 :: Navillera Fear

it spreads more and more
holding your breath tightly as i color you, color you in
my poison in this kiss mark
it spreads slowly and you lose your mind
you can’t deny this truth: venom

It's all Navillera's fault and it always has been.

Their mother frets by the door each morning and every night. Her hand reaches out fearfully, touching the door knob as if it scalds her skin. She dances horribly like that for hours sometimes, reaching out to punish her palm and flinching away to suckle at the wounded flesh, choking down her sobs as if they're a particularly awful kind of sustenance whose taste she cannot stand, but without which she would waste away to a very real death. She knows exactly what she needs to do in order to save herself; she lacks the courage.

Their father is in denial. He goes to work at a temp mining job, a warm-bodied scab crossing the picket line without a care for the striking workers bellowing profanity at him. He comes home. He sees nothing except the necessity of moving from Point A to Point B and back again. He forgets to talk, but he remembers the basic routine of life and allows it to carry him around and around like he is an automaton. Where his soul has gone, no one knows. He is a vacant body, running on muscle memory and nothing more.

This is what often happens to parents who have lost a child.

Except Noe is still out there, perfectly alive. She is only lost in the truest sense of the word: she has been misplaced and has become difficult to find. Well, not that difficult to be honest. In fact, she is where all lost things are — the last place she was left.

She still attends the same school and takes mostly the same route to walk there as she always has, just a little longer. While she doesn't return to their family's deserted apartment, she still hangs around with the same friends she always has and spends most weekends in the same park she has always loved. A group of them are living in the basement of an abandoned parking garage on the outskirts of the neighborhood. It was as effortless for Navillera to find her missing sister as it would be for her parents to find her, if only they weren't too afraid of those streets with their memories of bloody machetes and death threats.

Unlike before the night their family ran for their lives, Noe and Navillera's father only has one hand now. The loansharks let him choose which one he would lose. They named that choice Kindness and put the hand they stole into a jar of formaldehyde so that it could be taken home to live on a long shelf decorated with many other jars of severed hands, fingers, and other trophies of dismembered flesh. Each of those bloated bodily horrors belongs to someone too poor and unlucky for the white coats to care about.

Long before anyone ever came to collect upon their sins, their parents met in a gambling hall, flirting over cans of watery beer and a shared mahjong addiction. It was easier to forget how much money they were both losing when they focused on each others' nicotine-stained smiles and drunken lust-struck stares. Instead of the one night stand it should have been, they made a habit of crashing on the same naked mattress and nursing their hangovers together. They gave birth to two daughters — one mistake after another — who might as well have sprung from a void for all of the care they received upon entering the world. Every triumphant win of their little lotteries was quickly lost two-fold and over the years their debts grew taller than both of their daughters put together.

Unlike so many similar stories, Navillera lacked a motherly instinct for her younger sister. They both figured out what they had to, but despite the shared desperation for survival, it was still everyone for themselves. When someone stole a sandwich from the corner bodega, that person ate the whole thing in a greedy fit and made sure to hide any crumbs. This was what they had been taught was the way of things.

When Noe fled in the opposite direction of her family that night, Navillera wonders if it was on purpose. Then she wonders why she looked both ways and chased after their parents instead, regret festering in her soles as she ran the wrong way. She could have followed in her sister's footsteps instead and she doesn't know why she didn't. Obviously, she should have. Life would be better without the burden of her mother and father.

The truth is that there were so many unshared sandwiches between her and Noe, so many nights when Navillera tugged the blanket off of her little sister's shivering body in an attempt to warm her own, and too many times when one of them cried and the other looked away and pretended it wasn't happening. She didn't know what would happen when the two of them got tired of running and looked each other in the face. Would they have stuck together? Or would Noe have walked away from her the same way Navillera silently walked away after tracking Noe down just to make sure she was still alive enough to relieve her itch of worry.

She guesses that sharing a dysfunctional home with her parents is better than being alone, but she doesn't know.

What's certain is that she could tattle on her sister easily, sending her parents searching for her to tug her back into the horrible Fear family fold and ruining all of their lives. It's only Noe's absence that stops their parents from finding a new gambling hall to haunt. It's only their unexpected mourning of a child they never bothered to pretend to love until she was gone that instills them with enough guilt to delay their inevitable relapse into addiction for this small, baffling handful of days into weeks into unknown time.

Some time after That Night, her mother made dinner for the family. Grilled cheese. That had never happened before. Navillera cried while she ate it, almost choking on the stale bread as she used every bit of her effort to stay quiet enough about the embarrassing onslaught of emotion that no one would notice. So she stayed, despite a constant newfound preoccupation with the idea of leaving. Because of a fucking sandwich. It tasted terrible and she has never cherished anything in life more.

Maybe if Navillera had given Noe a sandwich, just once, then her sister would still be around. Maybe if she hadn't been such a selfish bitch then she wouldn't be so lonely, living in a dilapidated one room apartment of hollowed out humans with stumps for hands and grime-crusted mahjong tiles for hearts.

Noe cut her hair. That's it, that's all the effort she bothered to put into hiding herself in plain sight. Navillera obsesses over this for three weeks before stealing a jug of bleach and a bottle of fruit juice from the grocery store to dye her own hair pink. It dares everyone she passes by to look at her.

Afterwards she sits on Noe's favorite bench in Noe's favorite park for five hours, fluorescent in the sunshine. She lies to herself on the friendless walk home that, like her "lost" sister, it's for the best that she isn't found.

you better know, you better know
you can't escape from me
shout out la-la-la-la-louder
in a lost world



^{ponzona by purple kiss.}