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BEFORE
I'M NOT A good sister.
You may think this is a generalising statement, a very strong, poorly-founded opinion. Surely you're not that bad, a half-hearted, non-committal, eh? kind of thought. Nobody's perfect. Room for improvement.
No. I am, very plainly, what one would define as bad. A Bad sister with a capital B. And I'm a bad sister because I broke a promise to my baby brother, and surely breaking such a promise would deposit me in that realm, the Bad Sister realm? That sliver in Hell, the tiny circle of flimsy promise-breakers. That's where I'm headed.
I'll indulge you anyway, rile you up and give you a real reason to believe me. Maybe you'll walk away from this double-sure that I'm wrong, or maybe you'll think I'm mean and bitter and that I'm absolutely damn right, that I am a bad sister.
Maybe you'll like me and maybe you won't. I would've cared then, back when I was consumed by thoughts of like and dislike. I was like an atom with a high-strung nucleus. My like-dislike electrons swinging around me, darting nervously, constantly interchangeable. Every person I met swapped those pinchy electrons with me. Every time it was either like or dislike. I was a big swell of atomic shells. Reactive-metal me.
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It was a hasty, moonless Halloween in '82, the night of my younger brother's prophetic birth, and I was miserable. The moon was there, obviously, but it was pale and smudgy. I pictured attacking it with a piece of art gum and lancing its blister-stain from the sky.
The air had swirled hotly as it nurtured an oncoming storm, the rain threat-less and lazy; its arrival would go unnoticed in the hollow hours of the morning. You could still hear the sky splitting with thunder, like a big cracked china bowl.
