D8 // Andorra Konstantine

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¹Somewhere in my past there is a small girl walking across a two-day field of untouched snow. She is trying not to break the surface, leaving the canvas of winter unspoken. To accomplish this, she is holding her breath, as if that will make her lighter, as if that will pull her into the air. I am not a child of god, but I know how to walk across the surface of snow without leaving any tracks. i cannot teach you how to do this, but I'll tell you a secret: "It has nothing to do with weight."<sup>12

2</sup>See Travelogue.

³I've always liked living above the library. The way my father smells like dusty encyclopedias; how my mother smiles as if her mouth were a cracked book spine, little wrinkles creasing around the corners of her lips; teasing my brother about how he gets so many paper cuts that it looks like he has a second set of fingerprints; and watching my sister when she thinks no one is looking as she writes her secrets in between the lines of the most neglected, forgotten books she can find, even though it makes me sad that she trusts me less than those softly whispering pages. It's just that the bedrooms and bathrooms of our living quarters seem so boring when thinking about floor to ceilings stacks of stories, a gathering of the world's greatest imaginations brought together as the infinite-infinite of human possibility. White painted hallway walls and windows with pretty patterned curtains can't even begin to compare.

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( M O R N I N G )
It appears that actual flowers have begun sprouting from the floral wallpaper in the northern-most bedroom of the second floor.⁴ Upon closer inspection, it would also seem that the paint is flaking from the baseboard where the woodgrain is beginning to push out like tree bark. I can't say I oppose the changes in decor, but still, I should have liked to be consulted.

( N O O N )
The wood floors of several rooms seem to be disappearing and leaving naught but sky in their wake.⁵ This is a tricky situation; we have opted to wait it out while initiating plans for containment. It is to be noted that research is proved difficult when there is a distinct lack of floor upon which to investigate. On the other hand, it has become an extremely convenient means of observing the lower story.

( A F T E R N O O N )
While investigating the fading floorboards, for a moment I swore I glimpsed an immense webwork of threads within them. It was as if the very structure of the house were being revealed, magnifying the way each particle was braided together. I cannot escape the feeling that the house isn't simply disappearing, but is being absconded with.⁶

( E V E N I N G )
After becoming stranded on the bad end of a vanishing hallway, we narrowly escaped danger through a window and have taken refuge in the arms of a tree. Thus far, its branches appear significantly more stable than the house.

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⁴My brother Nikolai called me a liar when I tried to tell him, but it's just because he doesn't know any better. I don't think his eyes are very good, so he can't see secrets as well as I can. That must be why he hardly ever seems to look at me, staring off into space when I'm around as if everything outside the tick tick tick of seconds within his mind is blurry and he doesn't know which way to go next. If I speak loud enough, I know he hears me, so I must just be hard to look at...

⁵I can't remember the last time I looked at the sky. Then again, I don't think I've ever really looked at it. Why should I care about the sky? It moves when I try to touch it, like I'm a child with dirty hands about to press my palms to its new dress. How do you love something you can never touch?<sup>13

6</sup>I dreamt I was being hunted by a seamstress. Each revolution of her sewing machine echoed throughout the house until her omnipotence felt as infinite as my fear. I never saw her, but I knew what she wanted from me.¹⁴ Her fingers were needles and they coveted my heartstrings and the threads of my veins. She sought to unwind them from the spool of my thin body and and stitch them into some grotesque tapestry that mimicked life, but would never achieve it.

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⁷All out of breath, she came rushing in, rushing in, rushing in.¹⁵ She carried stars like kites and had yesterday's memoir written across her skin, the ink still damp. It was a preamble for homelessness,¹⁶ a reminder of realizations yet to come.

⁸When I look at myself, I see a moon-wide face with a nose so incredibly small that it's as if you're looking at it from an impossible distance of thousands or maybe even millions of miles away. Yet my lips are full enough — like the (PUFF!) of a cloud passing across face — to give me a persistent sort of presence. My mouth is such an adamant feature that I cannot be denied, despite my reflection-pale skin, magic trick smooth and brightbright where the light hits it, making me seem like I am not all there from time to time. I could be the daughter of a hallucination, a pair of sparse eyebrows like twin grins of a Cheshire cat caught in an upside-down disappearing act. Sometimes I worry that I might just faadddeee awwaaayyy...

Yet I have faith that I will grow into myself and as my years pass I will become more and more solid. For now I am tiny and slight of frame, someone who is all too easy to overlook when everyone towers so far above me. I have to crane my head back uncomfortably when I look upupup at Nikolai and even then it's so hard to catch his eye! Someday this all will change, but so long as I am thirteen and unluckily young I suppose I am doomed to be a faraway kind of small, distant and uncertain as a star. It is not such a hard thing to pretend myself into a galactic being with so much night-black hair growing thick and endless as space, a theatrical backdrop for a young girl whose eyes were already dark enough to be celestial voids, physical proof that I was born to be a Moonwife.

⁹There is a distance between my arms and it tells me to spend less time with myself. Tells me:

"—don't woolgather reverie.
—don't Midwest make-believe.
—don't sidewalk map without somewhere to go.
—don't imagine my nothingness as Someone's existence."

The distance longs to be filled. It likes feeling close to people who surround it with their skin and compress it between their bodies. It aspires to be human and those moments of being clothed in us promise it this is possible.

Attaining fulfillment in the cradle-lull of our entwinement, the touch-drunk distance tells me:

"—I occupy space like endless whale bones.
—bodies exist to make motion into medicine.
—the weight of my importance is dependent upon your memory.
—inhaling me into your lungs feels like coming home."

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¹⁰However she soon made out that she was in a pool of her own tears which she had wept when she was nine feet high. "I wish I hadn't cried so much!" said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. "I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer to-day!"<sup>17

11</sup>It was a kind of fairy tale happily ever after, but it was no ending. Even Andorra knew better than to believe in those.

¹²See Appendix One: A.

¹³The doctor says my big sister Charlotte is "fragile" — like she might break — and that I need to be careful around her. Her eyes are so pretty, even bigger and browner than mine, but always seem sad and I don't understand why I get in trouble for hugging her too tightly when I just want to make her feel better.

¹⁴ Dear Mr. & Mrs. Konstantine,

I am pleased to inform you that blood test results have confirmed Andorra Konstantine as a positive antibody match for Charlotte Konstantine. Please contact my office at your earliest convenience to schedule the date for transfusion.

Respectfully,
Dr. J.R. Rubinstein

¹⁵See Appendix One: B.

¹⁶You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of a sudden, even though you have some place where you put your things, that idea of home is gone. One day when you move out it just sort of happens and you feel like you can never get it back. It's like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist.<sup>18

17</sup>See Appendix One: C.

¹⁸See Appendix One: D.