“[T]he best apology is changed behavior” – Franchesca Ramsey
I don’t know what my oldest sister Maria would tell us so we’d appear in these rituals and I can’t fathom why she would have us repeat these sacraments. Yet, there I was, a child sitting on her oldest sister’s lap with an arm around my waist to keep me seated comfortably—or maybe just to keep me seated period. There were no words to lead us, my siblings and I, like a mollified herd, in front of the Gateway computer in the living room. Not for this.
I can’t hear the steady stream of conversation she would inundate us with, but her voice was soothing, not malicious. Like she knew her words had to be a far cry from the page, something to settle, not startle.
The Green Woman was her favorite. She was a punishment and a treat: in her 70’s, the Green Woman was a natural-cause death. She was rot in a bathtub, viscous and festered. She was multiple angles of the same death: here, a top-ish view, where her breasts were floating in the bio hazardous waters, partially blood and floating flesh. Here, she was a side view, where you could see the flesh almost melting off. Like a candle that was unlit, but in the presence of heat anyway; yes, she was waxy and oily, and her unseeing eyes were clouded with rigor mortis.
Again. Again.
She would scroll down leisurely, make a comment here and there. She would click on some images without giving us a chance to think, to read.
Suicides were her favorite. Something about the close-ups on bloodied wrists. The street-graffiti style of the murals painted by brain matter and skull and hair on the walls, the floor. Something about the look of abject fear frozen on a person’s face as they realized I did it there’s no turning back I made a mistake—. The close-up on their injection sites. Something about suicides that she just—
The computer was a Gateway, and when it turned on the screen would fill with cow prints. Our mouse, then, was cream-colored, resting on top of the cow-print mouse pad that came with the computer. It was an old mouse, too, bulky with the ball in the bottom that allowed the mouse to move.
They were my focus, most times, unless she threatened me with the Green Woman, and they would silently watch as we were herded into the living room, standing or seated around the screen as she scrolled and talked and scrolled and talked. They only did as they were told. I felt a kinship to that.
I shower damn near religiously, and one day realized I’d never settled for a bath. Maybe it was the Green Woman that put me off, and in honor of her death, I refuse to lay in warm waters. Perhaps it is age, or that I had been so young when this happened, that I hadn’t looked away some of the times when presented with these exploited dead. I had only looked on at bloated skin and puckered wounds, at the blood and bone, and wondered why.
Why is she showing us this?
And it is the dead that look at me through hollowed sockets, through cloudy irises, through the sawed and hacked arteries and skin where their heads have been, haunting me, demanding to know why.
And I tell them when I shower, and my eyes refuse to close even when soap stings them, even as I’m drowning with the torrent from the shower head: I’m so sorry but almost twenty years later and I still don’t know.
⸙
It is said that writers are good at introspection; that part of writing a jolly good yarn is being able to hold a magnifying glass to our inner-most-selves, to poke and prod at all the tender spots to find the rot underneath.
I don’t know who “they” are, but they are wrong. I am a coward.
I let those questions keep festering, let them haunt me. I ignored the dead eyes that stared blandly at a world that could not keep them, failed to. It started young; quick flashes of some death. Not from a movie, not from the photos she would present on our Gateway altar with the ancient modem whirring a hymn beneath it. I was bombarded by images of death from all angles, every minute of the day.
I wondered what was wrong with me. Wondered, but never asked.
Like I said: coward.
But they were there, like muted background cutaways to gore and what boiled down to comic book physics. Cars, split minute decisions. I’d seen enough crime scene photos that they looked clearly enough: glass through the eye, shattered by a car; bloated, falling apart. Melting, more liquid than body. But there they were, these intense flashes of death depending on the place, on a split decision somewhere down the road before—oopsie, burnt lap. Not looking. A car swerves, hello, curve. Goodbye, ribs.
They tell me these are called intrusive thoughts. L’appel du vide, they say, the call of the void.
It happened enough, and I’d gotten so used to not asking why that I’d just kept imagining every conceivable way I could die in a few seconds between real life. Functioning, a bit, like I hadn’t seen my own death a thousand times over already.
A coward: I’d translated these thoughts and these memories into a hundred stories since I wrote my first poorly written draft of a story in the sixth grade. I wrote them out through characters: old men, young women, the spirit of the bat Ozzie Osbourne ate on January 20th, 1982. I explained my confusion in plots that revolved around questions, on ghosts. The questions I refused to ask were resurfacing through stories, haunting my poetry and possessing my prose. All that time I’d been recycling my confusion and spilling my chaos in between pages of texts.
But that’s the beauty of fiction: I could write something that haunted me to someone else and they would either find resolution or stagnation. These became their crosses to bear, not mine.
I finally asked why. I got tired of the questions that followed me, that kept my eyes open no matter how hard they stung in the shower. The questions whispered from bruised, bloated lips.
She ran into my sister Maribel’s room when she found out I was staying the night at my parent’s house. I was fresh out of my semester, high on the uncertainty of what comes after a life filled and defined by school. She demanded, forthright and righteous in her anger, why it seemed I didn’t like her. Didn’t want her around.
It snapped me into a place between apathy and numbness. I knew her game, how she played her fights. I cleared my voice of all emotion, made sure to keep my face passive.
Altogether, I felt strangely detached. I asked if she was sure she wanted to know the truth and she, red-faced, taking up all the light in the room, demanded it.
Perhaps in that moment, all the iterations of what she could possibly reason had already written themselves out already. So, I told her all of it: sitting on her lap in front of the computer, the sound of her saccharine-sweet voice cajoling me to buy my first movie (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974), all the ways she had tried and kept influence over me for so long. And then, at last, I asked her why. Why she would do that to us, to me as the youngest sister she had claimed and lied about raising herself.
Maria had smiled vaguely, unaware of how I imagined her face as she slammed my head into the wall over and over at that same moment, and said, “I don’t know.”
I blinked once, slowly, and shifted to lay on my back on my nephew’s bed. My other sister Maribel was laying on the bed a few feet away, listening avidly and watching us both. She hadn’t spoken when my oldest sister walked in to fight with me. She hadn’t even spoken when I started prodding those rotten bits.
The call of the void: L’appel du vide.
“I don’t know,” Maria had said, and I looked at the chalk ceiling to avoid that faint not-smile. The door was open, and the light of the hallway was shining on the scattered flakes of silver on the ceiling. My eyes traced the flashing cluster near the doorway into the hall remembering when that very same sister with that same non-smile traced shapes into them, guiding my finger while whispering Libra, Taurus, Virgo...
I told her about the Green Woman. The threats—you must have known what you were doing, you used to threaten, remember—?
A giggle, a sound too defined to be just a breath. She smiled, then, again, always rewriting her lines to see how they tasted on her lips, “oh yeah, I guess I was just into that, you know, I wanted to be a mortician.”
Another reason. Another half-truth. Again, finger ready over another abscess, I asked why.
I’ve thought about this, have taken so many stories into consideration to try to find a motivation. No one becomes a villain for no reason, right? We tell writers to look towards motivations. Other forms of characterization. Read more scenes. Get internal thoughts. Dialogue. Characters must be multi-faceted to be interesting, three-dimensional.
I took it into consideration, scanning for the Big Dipper above my head.
There’s a joke that writers like about a teacher analyzing a text and the author that wrote it. The teacher says: the curtains are blue to represent the character’s deep melancholy. The author says, well. I guess? Sometimes the curtains are just blue.
Occam’s Razor: lex parsimoniae. Sometimes the most reasonable explanation is the easiest to come by.
That half-smile. The breathy laugh. There was no remorse in her, no regrets. My other sister caught my eye from where she was laying only three feet away. It felt like reassurance: like she was catching my eye to let me know that she was there, she was a witness. But this isn’t hers, she isn’t the one trying to write out the scene, trying to understand.
I tell Maria, I think you did it because you wanted to see what would happen to us. You wanted to know what we’d do, how we would react.
Occam’s Razor: lex parsimoniae.
I rewrote these thirty-seven different times, according to Microsoft Word. Wondered, for years, if there was a point in even typing the introduction. I fancy myself a fiction writer, an occasional poet, but never a nonfiction writer. It always felt so raw, too real. My intrusive thoughts had started so long ago it felt easier to just keep them as thoughts, intangibles.
She had tried crying halfway through flimsy excuses and I waited her out. Seeing that she wasn’t getting her desired reaction, Maria straightened up, tears still streaming. Patiently, I told her it wasn’t going to work. Stop crying.
She did.
I told her what it had done to me. The fear that my mind was betraying me every second, that I was somehow broken. Despite all the lies, despite the rot and the trauma— because, later, on that same desktop with a different monitor, I had searched what it all meant, and Google read twenty-three different takes on trauma to me and it made sense— she was. Is. My sister.
The way we sat together on the couch watching Leatherface disembowel half-naked teenagers lies juxtaposed with sitting in our respective corners of the couch talking about Anne Rice. The mundane with the morbid.
I told her about how she, as a bare minimum, gave me books. Not on purpose, I reminded her, but even through negligence literature was what saved me all those years. Saves me now, still. But saying that gave her a new slate to manipulate: forgetting all the traumas I had relived, she held onto the lifeline I had put out.
I wonder, now, what it says about me. To try to salvage something—what? I can’t say. Not a sister, no. Maybe to save me from those unfeeling smiles. To preserve the memory of those fake stars on the ceiling of our parent’s house. The shape of the astrological patterns.
⸙
Maria tries to talk to me as if all of this is water under the bridge. I’ve come to terms with the violence I imagine daily, but not with her. Not the ghost of a smile while she tried to see what angle she could hit to end our conversation that day. The last time she tried to broach the subject was to tell me she was sorry. She said that she didn’t want the only things people remembered her by to be the awful things she did.
I wondered, bitterly, the hypocrisy of that. To want to be remembered for something else other than the things you did. If you want to be remembered for something else, then you probably should have done something else. She said, “I’m trying to do better, for my kids,” but my oldest nephew watched the same movies I watched, barring some now-out-of-style flicks. My younger nephew walks around without clothes no matter how many my sisters and mother buy him.
I told her, well. That’s not entirely true, is it? Last I talked to Michael, he feared the dark because serial killers get you in the dark. She snorted. Laughed.
Yeah, I know, she told me, it’s so bad. Nathan’s favorite movie is Deadpool. He’s not even two yet. I thought to myself, not today, Satan. She says, “I love you,” with a sideways hug I do not return and when she walked away, she left behind her fake-apology and excuses with her human façade. She said, “I’m sorry” and, “I love you” four times each. I never responded besides to point out the flaws in her dialogue.
I text my boyfriend immediately, anxiety rising in my chest. Heart beating like I can picture a grotesque, bloated hand on my shoulder, a rotting face looking at my phone from over my shoulder, I sent a shaky text to my boyfriend about the encounter: always with pretty words without substance. The devil can compose poetry, but he can’t infuse it with truth. The Green Woman asks me why, why, why.
I tell her: sometimes, the truth is messy. Sometimes, there are no pretty endings. We are, after all, not works of fiction.
Maritza Mora hails from East Los Angeles. She works as a translation editor for Cubanabooks Press, a bilingual press focused on female Cuban authors. She recently completed translation editing for the bilingual short-story collection “Universo Y La Lista / Universe and the List” by Laidi Fernández de Juan. She has also recently published poetry in Third Point Press's Issue 11 and is slated to publish more poetry through honey& lime's first Issue in February of 2019.