Asa is an unwilling sensitive with a fear of mirrors and anything reflective.
Amy is an unwitting empath.
Together they are responsible for murder.
THE SHIPPY SIBLINGS are rarely alone, despite living as secluded orphans on the remains of...
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I FIRST MET DEATH at the indecisive age of eleven when the world consisted of back-porch peanut butter and jelly and sticky bus rides to school. Back then, Death came in the pint-sized, near-weightless form of a chicken.
One of our layer hens (because chickens were the only farm animal Ma approved of, they paid their way) died. She died blandly. We didn't even know she was sick until I found her, late in the afternoon, a pile of feathers nestled against the corner of the barn, ruffling gently in the breeze. She'd been egg-bound. Her regular giving routine had gummed up somehow inside her and ripped her intestines to shreds. When I turned her over with a shovel, black filth leaked from her vent, attracting flies.
That stuck with me, no pun intended. The idea of dying because something plugged up your inner works so bad that it couldn't even explode out of your ass has meant different things to me throughout the years. But mostly, it just reminded me of Amy.
I didn't feel as mad about our conversation as the slammed door foretold. Amy was right. She usually was. It was true; the thought of leaving the house did churn my stomach like a butter paddle; people, especially in crowds, touched too close to my nighttime visitors, and I couldn't breathe with their energetic stench; and then there was the thingthathung on my back like a lead slab keeping me from running, the thing I couldn't face in the mirror.
It was all true.
But so were the ghosts and the invisible hands combing Amy's body like shoppers pinching for the ripest fruit. So was her denial, strong as a stonewall. It affected her, too, dead energy, live energy, the effervescent current of wants and needs unknown to her, like foreign cells in her bloodstream. The constant static-snow hum of voices in the background was a shared experience. The difference between us was an open channel. I repeatedly took my thumb off the CB button to let them, they, those—the dead—radio through. Amy unplugged the whole damned jack. But the day was coming when the fate of that egg-bound chicken was doomed to repeat itself.
(Ask me how I knew.)
I met Death twice in my lifetime. Our second introduction was on the eve of my eighteenth birthday, when, for the first time in my bland history, I'd seen a glimmer of light behind the fringes of the Shadow and followed it. Amy talked me out of my nighttime routine of covering the windows and glassware, the toaster, and the tv. She'd talked me down from the mirror that only black paint could dissuade and into a bus ride to town instead. The proposition was simple: live a little. An evening of fun, fries, and the viciously beautiful flatlined thoughts that only alcohol could bring. It was supposed to be a celebration, but Death came in the burnt, skin-blistered form of a cuckquean that night. A fifty-year-old woman whose husband had adulterated with seedy eternity eighteen years earlier.
Death met me as my mother, cooked to a crisp in her bed.
And it was my fault.
The lit cigarette was a proxy. The mirror, fastened to the wall untouched, was the real weapon, and I'd left it uncovered. I killed her, not Amy. I knew this like I knew I wouldn't be changing who I was anytime soon, despite Amy's disappointment.
She wasn't to blame, though, for her words. No one would ever understand what it was like inside my head, except perhaps, the Shadow.
That day with the chicken, Amy was there. She watched me turn over the pile of feathers, a familiar sadness in her eye—The imprint of our father hung out to dry like laundry in the barn. She'd been eleven years old, too, when Death first met her under dusty beams with old hay underfoot.
