princess Miriam
of House Ieshan
of House Ieshan
I told my soul to sing
she said her strings were snapt
S
ome living things can only be honest. Plants, I think: a plant will never lie, simply because it gains nothing from being dishonest about whether it needs sun or water or something else entirely. But for most of us—for conscious creature’s—I’m not convinced it’s a question of whether you are or aren’t a liar. Honest, in my mind, is not a personality trait. In my mind, very little is a personality trait. I look at myself, and my siblings, and I cannot help thinking that we are less ourselves than mirrors of the way we feel about each other: Pilate is only jealous when he talks to Adonai, and Hagar is only bitter when she talks to Delilah. It’s not what they are. It’s just what they look like.
Sometimes I wonder whether anything at all, about anyone, is permanent. I have changed too much too quickly to sit comfortably in words like honest or liar or anything else lazy enough to remain black-and-white. I am mostly honest. Sometimes I’m a liar. I’d feel guilty forever if I had to pick just one.
(Picking just one—it doesn’t matter which—wouldn’t be… real.)
My mother did not raise liars for the simple fact that she did not “raise” anything. I am nothing. No one. There is not a part of me that would not bend to the will of the world, if it were to push hard enough.
It only makes sense that my siblings would be the same.
If I ever had the energy to think about it, I might have realized by now that, of all of us, it is Ruth that must be the most practiced at lying. I’m not sure whether she does it for her comfort or for ours; I’m not sure that it matters. The outcome is the same.
I love her as much as I love any of them. In some ways I might even love her a little more. She doesn’t love me nearly as much, if at all, and—I know that. (I comfort myself sometimes by remembering that if she doesn’t love me, she probably doesn’t love any of us; at least it’s not me in specific that she’s withdrawn from.) But she’s been lying since she was a little kid. Almost since the minute she was born. I saw it in her from the beginning; I have the same nose for trouble in my siblings that a mother would in her children.
I saw it at the funeral—before that, when the news broke—before that, when I took her down to look at the bodies in the basement, when I signed myself over to be used for her science after I died—before that, too many times to count. My sister has been living a falsehood since the day she entered this world; and if there is a light in her eyes at all, then it is the light of an electric pulse—cold, purposeful, carefully contained—and not a candle.
When I look at her, I can only think of how exhausting it must be.
How are you feeling?
Ruth looks at me. I can’t look back at her. Instead I blink, disconcerted, and bat away the glare in my eyes of the too bright-hallway, turning my head away from the lights as I shoulder the door closed.
Dark. And it’s cold in here, too cold—I realized I’ve left the windows open. But my room is... not as bad as it could have been. There are no dirty dishes, no empty glasses. The stacks of books on the floor almost make it look as though I've been reading. My bed is rumpled, the laboriously knit blanked bunched up in one corner, and my all my candles are burnt out, but otherwise it—and I, hopefully—look almost normal. Finally, I relax. The door creaks as I lean my weight against it.
"Fine," I say. (My mother did not "raise" anything.) Then I add, with painful effort: "...Tired. How're you? The hospital? What have you been working on?"
I hope, if she is talking about her own life, it will keep her from asking anything else of me. I want to reach out and touch her.
I want to kiss her cheek and braid her hair, like I did when she was little and would amuse herself while I made the plaits by peeling apart the wings of butterflies.
