when you're born in a burning house,
you think the whole world is on fire.
you think the whole world is on fire.
I am trying very hard not to breathe. Whatever this girl is painting on me, I’d like to see it the way she meant it to be done. Her focus is inspiring; endearing, even, and as I look at her I think grimly: I don’t want to mess this up.
Like I’ve done with everything else. I wonder at times whether it is my parents’ fault we turned out like this or mine. I was supposed to be my siblings’ guide, their good influence: there is reason the term is my brother’s keeper. Perhaps, I think—and in thinking this I can’t help but grit my teeth, because it is a thought that puts me in real, physical pain—if I had not been so preoccupied with Sofia, her introduction into my life and her abrupt departure from it, I would have been a better sister.
I would have been there. All there. When the news broke, and at the funeral. When Adonai collapsed. I should have been the one to see it first, the one to take him to our doctor—I am his twin, after all, and the oldest sister. I should have been there—all there—when Ruth started her doctor’s training, when Hagar discovered her powers; when Pilate donned my father’s diadem and sent out letters so that everyone knew he was now the first prince.
I don’t know where I was. I don’t quite know where I am now. I just know that it’s not where I’m supposed to be.
Hagar turns toward me, as soon as she hears me call. My chest hurts. My heart aches: I think it might be bleeding. How long has it been since we’ve talked? And still she looks right toward me when I ask for her, no thought, just feeling—my sister is calling me.
I don’t deserve her. I’m reasonably sure I don’t deserve any of them.
What a beautiful girl she is, my sister. I watch her as she comes toward me. Sometime in these dark and hazy past few years she became a woman, not a girl, and the realization sparks both fear and awe: she is so beautiful, and I am so old. I swear my bones would creak if I walked the way she does, if I swayed my hips like that. In the low blue light she is like a doll, so perfectly made—russet and amber, slim and slender with her little neat socks and her eyes a bug-trap yellow.
How’s this going, she asks? “You tell me,” I respond, almost wry, almost smiling. “I have no idea what she’s painting. I don’t think we understand each other.”
At that the girl’s eyes flicker up to Hagar briefly, then drop back down in quick reticence. She returns to painting without a word.
Without really thinking about it, I rest my forehead against the flat of Hagar’s shoulder.
