(Story excerpt below)

1958

My sisters Shelby and Cleo came with me the day I got lost in the woods. It had rained for three consecutive weeks; everything gray, everything the same. As we scattered rampant over the pulpy ground and through leafy knobs of sycamore, the sky started to break up. Beneath a barely visible, fuzzy moon, our fleeing shadows resembled naked souls in a state of unrest. I hurried, like this, through my entire childhood. By the time I left home, each day seemed cloaked by a routine state of panic.

The summer I turned eight, Cleo and I burned down the living room. It started out as nothing at all: an accident, a spark, really, from a modest heap of Mama’s cigarette droppings. Despite her acrimonious threats, we’d been smoking again on the windowsill behind the living room curtains. From the beginning, Mama blamed me for being a bad influence on Cleo, two years younger. By peeking through the spokes in the railing, Cleo and I used to watch her suck down cigarettes one after the other. Something innately sexual about how she did it intrigued us. She seemed to understand the power of her own beauty. While leaning against the kitchen table, she arched her head back with her chest out and elbows on the tablecloth. We never knew who she was showing off to. Maybe she’s practicing, I suggested.

"For what?" Cleo asked, unprepared for the answer.

We’d creep up to our room after and pretend to smoke Ticonderoga pencils. Then one day we tried it for real.

In the tiniest fraction of time, flames lunged from the tops of the curtains to the ceiling and then down again to the china cabinet. As a collective reflex, Cleo and I dropped down onto the shag carpet and lay on our stomachs with our hands over our hair. Oh God, don’t let me die, I said to myself. I haven’t been kissed yet. Not more than ten seconds later, the room filled with smoke and our bodies became blocks of lead. In lumbering pulls, I tried my best to drag Cleo behind me through the dense fumes. But time seemed reduced to half speed and gravity had doubled. Each step left me trembling with terror and exhaustion.

"Mama," I wailed as loud as I could. "Mama!!!" But she wasn’t listening for my voice, that day or any day.

And by the time I reached the back porch, I discovered I was alone.

Our older sister Shelby tried to help. She was ten that year, at a time in my life when thirteen seemed as old as one could get. Much taller than all the other girls her age, Shelby stood on the coffee table, yanked the curtains off the rod and began stomping out flames with her new birthday boots. Shelby possessed courage like Hercules had strength. I’ll never forget the steel look upon her face as she dragged Cleo’s limp body through the foggy living room. That was supposed to be my job. I cried when they reached the back porch.

Cleo looked shrunken in her long hospital bed, like the size of her Penny doll. She was shrouded in a wash of white curtains, white sheets, and nurses in white smocks and shoes. Sickness burrowed through her tiny body like microscopic moles, and for two weeks we thought she might die. Mama refused to look at me in the hospital waiting room. While the doctor relayed to us the miserable condition of Cleo’s lungs, Mama could scarcely breathe. Cleo had always been her favorite. We all knew. Three weeks later Belle, the friendly nurse, put Cleo in a wheelchair and took her for a spin around the fifth floor. By suppertime that night, she’d contracted viral pneumonia. She didn’t leave the hospital for three months.

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TO READ THE REST OF THIS STORY, PLEASE LOG ONTO CARVE MAGAZINE'S WEBSITE AND FIND MY STORY IN THE ARCHIVES for volume 3 Number 1, January, 2002, or click the link below. THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST IN MY FICTION.