nine years' wonder; cole

My sister has been dead for nine years and counting.

There are days when the figure slips from my mind. Those are the days I am but a boy of fourteen still, frozen in the framed picture of a boy and girl that is propped up against the wall on the mantle. Once freestanding, the supports gave way and now even memories of her rely on something else to remain known.

I do not know if I am to feel guilty on the days that I forget.

On those days, loss is but something that happens to the moon at sunrise, the sun at dusk, and the passing of time in between. I am lucky to remember if she has ever existed at all, but there is always some notion that reminds me that I am not living the life of narcissistic solitude I have so created.

Perhaps family was an addiction from which I was now suffering withdrawals.

My mother had passed six years to the day Cassie had, and on the anniversary of her daughter’s death we mourned by burying the one who bore her too. The two were buried in close proximity, but not near enough that the names and dates could be correlated unless you knew what you were looking for.

She would have been twenty this year; I turned twenty that year.

At the time when we were supposed to step off the cliff from adolescence to adulthood together, I instead placed flowers on her grave and talked to her tombstone until the sun sunk behind the last memory of her.

I relieved that memory at every sunset— that lost goddamn memory of watching her realize that the end was no longer the thing of myths she had believed it to be.

I like to believe that at times she had not been so naïve, so childlike and innocent. I have convinced myself that when she wrapped her arms around my neck that afternoon in the justice building, she had not whispered that she would be back soon, because I had now been waiting ever since. She was optimism in the eye of the hurricane and I the storm chaser.

How many birthdays must I celebrate with her and realize that only one of us is aging?

The next year, when we turned twenty-one I told her that she would not believe how our father was spiraling. I made her aware of the early mornings when he would bust through the front door that I now never bothered to lock; of the sound of glass shattering when he would carelessly break anything that would allow him to display his own strength.

How weak of a man I watched attempt to hold a home together with shaking hands.

Perhaps he twitched; perhaps he had loaded the gun with purpose.

All I knew was that simply hours before what would have been his and my mother’s thirtieth anniversary, he was lying dead behind their closed door and leaving me to ask the neighbor how to remove bloodstains from white carpet.

In my opinion, he had been irresponsible.

If I had been in his position and standing on the threshold of being desperate enough to end it all, I would have left behind instructions for whatever poor bastard would have the task of taking my body and dumping it into a grave beside my sister’s. I would have told them how to get the stains out of whatever material I had taken my last breath upon; I would have given them all of the advice I have amassed on how to cope with a loss you cannot accept no matter how many times you prod at the hole in your heart to see if some miracle has left it full.

A piece of advice: your heart will never be whole again, so do not bother with checking to see if the wounds have closed— you will only be prying them open and leaving them vulnerable to the salt of bitterness burning through whatever flesh you have left.

I had not contacted any distant family, past colleagues, or acquaintances to make his passing known— I figured a man that committed suicide because the burden of a wife and daughter gone did not need to be on the delivering or receiving end of any more grief.

I did not think about him after the day I had his tombstone placed.

Seventy-five percent of a family lost to misfortune, illness, and desperation and I was left to sweep up the broken shards and pray that I did not get injured in the process. Besides, who was there now left to tend to my wounds and pick the glass from my skin?

She has been dead nine days to this day and we just turned twenty-three last week.

I spent the afternoon with her, but I do not tell her all of the things that she has missed in the time she has been buried here. She does not respond, but I know that she has heard, because it seems that there is once again life in such a place dedicated to death.

I then asked her if she would be coming home soon— I told her how empty the house was with broken windows and silent walls, with pictures that had to be propped up against the mantle and memories that had to be physically seen to be remembered.

She did not respond, but I knew that she heard because the sky began to weep and with it, so did I, for there are some questions in this mind that need not be answered to be known.