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at a distance | {orion three}
Jul 7, 2017 17:23:45 GMT -5
Post by umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars] on Jul 7, 2017 17:23:45 GMT -5
Flowers covering empty graves, my mother and father's names were not carved out of stone. There were no headstones that belonged to them here, or anywhere, because their disappearance remained a secret. It was hard to pretend they were gone when I knew they weren't, and it was hard to decipher if I hated my parents or if I loved them. It was hard to decide what I was feeling, period.
But there was one thing I was certain of: regardless of their pulse status, my parents were dead to me, and to my siblings. The surest thing I could make out of all of this mess was that they intended for us to take the fall for their crimes when they left us to raise a little girl barely out of diapers and enough secrets to bury ourselves decades before our time.
Fingers and lips numb and canons calling soldier souls home, and I sat quietly at their grave site, ignoring the crowds as they came to bid farewell to their loved ones. Some nodded to me as they passed, gave me looks I hated receiving.
He is here too. He understands what we are going through. He is in the same boat as us.
I was not like them, though.
My sketchpad in my lap, pencil hard at work, drawing myself, wet from rain.
("They faked their deaths.
They faked their deaths to keep us quiet.")
They faked their deaths to keep us quiet.")
Meela ran about the grave site, plucking wildflowers and throwing them on the area of earth in which I had scribbled their names with a stick. "Meela," I called to the preschooler, "Don't take those from other people's graves, okay?"
"Yes, sir."
She had grown so much taller since they left, and she now treated her own parents more like dreams she'd had once: fuzzy edges and foggy memories, faces she thought she remembered when she looked at their pictures.
"Are you my Momma?" She had asked Breena at breakfast. She had been so stunned into silence, that it was me who patted Meela on the back and said "Close enough, huh?"
Her dark hair fell in ringlets. A fourth member to the Orion three, slowly rising taller, cheeks filling out and blue eyes becoming wiser. She tucked a tiny pink flower behind her ear. I looked down at the drawing: sad, cold, broken. Meela was still so full of life, wasn't she? She was still so hopeful and whole.
I ripped the page out, crumbled it, and tossed it into my bag, then began sketching the lines of her long, willowy arms and that ridiculously curly hair. I didn't hear the footsteps, but I saw the feet in my peripheral vision. They stopped just short of me, tapping impatiently while I added the finishing touches to the flower in Meela's hair.
Two pairs of feet.
We, the Orion Three.
"I just needed to get out of the house," I grumbled to my brother and sister. "Don't be mad." I wiped away a few stray eraser shavings, and finally looked up at them.
Siberia, the physical perfection, the one who had taken the tall height and the broad shoulders while we were divvying up traits in our mother's womb. He was the tragic kind of beautiful, like a sculptor had carved his features from a fantasy. The beauty. And Breena, dancer's body and kind eyes and a warm smile. She had been a voice of reason since I could remember. The heart. Meela, with her wonder and her dreams. The hope.
And me, with my anxiety and my fickle soul and teary eyes. The burden.
"Besides," I mused, "It isn't healthy for Meech to stay cooped up all of the time."
As if on cue, our youngest sister caught sight of the other two thirds of her parent unit.
"Si! Look what I can do!" Laughing, she turned a cartwheel. My parents might have been smart to leave us behind. But they had been damn fools to leave Meela. I couldn't stop myself from smiling at her.
"Looks like she's having fun to me. How about you two?"
