There was nothing before me, only a gray wall with soft lines and a few pencil markings. And if I looked up, there would be a soft light making its way through the window. A soft yellow that left a fraction of itself on everything it touched. The curtain, pressed up against the window by my hand, hid the sky behind it.
It had been five hours, maybe more, since I’d woken up. Five hours of trying to return to dreams of fingers, making their way down my back. A mouth, biting into my collarbone, teeth tearing away at the flesh found underneath. A tongue, making its way over the injury. The feeling of nails digging into my side making me want to run away, but arms holding me down and so I stayed. In those dreams, it was always someone I didn’t know. They might have blonde hair, curls falling against my collarbone. Brown hair, like melted chocolate. Or dark locks, pouring down from the night sky. I often liked to imagine myself with a strand of golden hair caught between my fingertips and me pulling at it. And then, when I opened my eyes and saw the gray wall and the pencil sketches, I tried to think of the time and how much of it had passed. If I could fall asleep again.
I never quite managed to make it out of bed. Sometimes, out of boredom, I dragged myself out from underneath the sheets and into the shower. Mostly, I would lie down and struggle to fall back asleep, and by the time I was finally able to pull myself out of my bedsheets, the day had passed me by. I had become familiar with the night sky, the way it rose above the city like a parachute.
Now I pressed the curtain against the wall, then let go of it. I curled my palm against my chest and closed my eyes. I thought of the dreams and pressed my cheek against the pillows. I let it swallow me.
I decided to give the man a name, but I couldn’t think of one. So I gave him a nose, a mouth, and hair. A sharp jawline. Hazel eyes. No, gray. Eyes like a stormy night. And I thought of him as a celebrity because it seemed like the thing to do. He would be standing at an airport, surrounded by flashing lights and screaming fans, and in between it all there would be me. My hair would sway in the breeze. My face would not be plain. The camera, documenting our meeting, would zoom in on my features. It would pan down. My eyes, framed in the screen. And for a moment, he would forget to breathe.
Then the thought strayed away from me. It gave him an identity, gave us a story. It made a book, followed by a biopic. It offered up an actress that could play me on screen. She would be beautiful. So beautiful it hurt. It made me a cruel lover and him worse than me. It made us a warning. A warning for the men and women who would be watching us, and they would say, “Why did he choose her? Out of everyone.” It made me selfish. And then, as the credits rolled up against my eyebrows, it occurred to me that for this biopic to be made, I would have to die. We would have to. Him and me.
And if I was dead, what would my eyes see, when the world only lived through my eyes? Would my mind be ripples in the water and my thoughts shapeless whispers in the wind? I would be unable to think, to make sound. I thought of my body aging before my eyes. The skin of my hands and fingers stretching out and sagging when it had once been soft and gentle. What would it look like when I turned fifty, sixty, ninety?
I thought of my body growing indifferent of me, uncaring. Its ears deaf to my pleas. The flesh around my belly pooling over itself, until it rolled off my hips and down to my thighs. My back, unable to hold me upright, leaving me stranded on the floor beneath me. I thought of my childhood, of all the moments I could remember and the ones that I could no longer conjure. I thought of what had been of me before I’d been born and if death would be just like it.
Nothing.
I thought of not waking up. Trapped in shapeless dreams, with mouths digging into my skin until they ate me whole.
The light of my room turned on. I remained still, breathing slowly. I heard my younger sister walk in, her feet thumping against the carpet. She stood beside my bed. In a whisper, she asked if I could walk with her to the library. “No,” I muttered, but she asked again, in that voice that seemed to say that she needed me. I turned in my bed and looked at her. Though only a year younger, she seemed much smaller. Shoulders hunched forward, hands nervously rubbing against each other.
“What do you want to do there?” I asked her, pulling the bedsheets over my head.
“I don’t know,” she muttered. “Read a book?” The suggestion made me laugh, and she shrank back.
My younger sister was a fool. My father often joked he’d buy her a hat with bells attached to it and a big red nose you could see from afar. When she cried, he laughed. “See,” he said. “You even cry weird.” When she looked at me, I merely nodded in agreement. It would be wrong to lie to her. Our father said it, and so did our mother, so I did my best to tell her the truth. Besides, she was odd. Her crying was weird, her laughter was loud and shrill, her voice pitched just a little too high. At school, she barely made the grades necessary to pass, and had the government not asked for children not to be left behind, she likely would have been.
In the afternoon, she often stood by the window, dressed in white from head to toe as though she were a bride, and watched people pass. She judged them by the way they dressed, walked, and held themselves. She stood there, not caring if they noticed her or not. If they did, she waved, then followed them with her gaze until their figure disappeared off the edge of the street.
“Come with me to the library,” she muttered. “Please.” Her voice was awkward, her tongue not quite comfortable with the way syllables formed against her tongue.
The library was too far. Impossible to access without taking the bus, and she could not stand being on it. I buried myself deep within the covers. I looked at my hands, at the lines on my knuckles and the little hairs.
“Please,” she begged. “I’ll buy you a snack.”
Without me there wasn’t much she could do, so I pulled myself out of bed. Besides, I knew she would grow tired before we got too far.
We stopped at the store a few streets from our home. Usually, my sister preferred to simply stand outside, but on that day, for some reason, she wanted to go inside. She took notes on a small pack of Post-it notes. Wrote down in neat handwriting the price for every item she picked up. She marked a little “x” beside the price when she put the item back. I bought my snacks and waited for her, watching the way she meandered. She kept thinking it over, turning objects around in her hands to look at the ingredient list, double-checking the price, wondering if she had enjoyed it before and would enjoy it again. Eventually, she had laid out on the floor between us a couple of items she managed to convince herself were fine, carefully hidden between her feet, and she rummaged through a small bag.
“1.90 and 1.75 and 1.60,” she muttered to herself, her hands attempting to add up the numbers. Her eyes flickered toward the ceiling, crossing out and circling numbers in an imaginary table before her eyes. “Four and one is five. So five, that’s ten.” Her pen scratched against the paper. Sweat pooled against her palm, making its way down her forearm and dripping onto the store’s floor. The paper folded beneath the weight of her palm.
When she saw me looking, she brushed her arm against her jeans and cleaned up the sweat from her fingers with her sleeve. However, the water continued to make its way down her fingertips, making rivers out of the ridges and curves of her palm.
“It’s five and twenty-five cents,” I told her, and she froze in place.
“I knew that,” she whispered, pulling out the coins from her bag. One silver coin after another, and a few golden ones. Some big enough to fit on her thumb and others no bigger than her thumbprint. Some euros, some pounds, a couple of American cents from our cousin’s travels—Cousin Vera, with her black hair and her impossibly good looks, smarts, and life that made you certain God had favorites. I frowned and bit down on the inside of my cheek. “Do you have ten pence?” she asked.
“I don’t,” I lied. “Are you sure you don’t have any?”
The coins in the bag rustled as she looked them over, the ones in her hand hidden within her curled fingers. I imagined they would be coated now with a thin layer of sweat, the liquid making its way into the markings.
I reached out and took her bag. Her cheeks turned a bright red, and she looked down at her palms, small lakes forming as she cupped them, bringing them close to her chest. She mumbled something, but I couldn’t quite hear it. And when I asked her to elaborate, she simply shook her head and left the store, leaving me behind with a bag filled with change and items laid out on the floor. A drink, a bag of chips, and a pair of biscuits. She didn’t even bother to turn back around with the coins she’d already plucked out.
I set everything on the counter. As the man at the counter scanned her items, I took two lollipops from the small plastic carousel container they had at the front.
My sister was by the edge of the road when I left the store, her weight resting on her toes as she looked down. She had her arms against her chest and looked small, hunched over. Little by little she pushed herself further inside her body. My mother worried that her head might disappear inside her belly, but each time she said it, my sister’s head hung a little further away from her shoulders.
I took the lollipops and put them between my fingers before reaching out. “Pick one,” I told her. She looked up from a cat, small and no bigger than my palm, pressed against the side of the road and trembling within an inch of its life. It was dark, with a single white spot on its nose. My sister reached out for a lollipop but stopped herself short. “Which one did you pick?” she asked, her eyes narrowed.
I answered by simply moving my arms toward her. My eyes focused on the small thing by the road, with its own eyes shut together by what seemed to be yellow boogers stuck over the corners. My sister picked a lollipop and tried to take it from me, but I held onto it. “Not that one,” I said. “That one’s mine.”
“You don’t even know which one it is.”
“I don’t care,” I said, watching the cat shift as it opened its mouth. “It’s mine.”
She let out a sigh, and her hand fell back to her side.
“I don’t get what’s so fun about it,” she muttered, reaching for the other lollipop and struggling to pull it from my grasp before I finally let it go. She turned to the cat. “I want to pick it up.”
“What are you going to do with it?” I asked.
“You’re not supposed to do anything with it,” she said. “It’s a cat.”
“Father won’t like it,” I muttered. I thought of my sister as a young child, chasing after small paws. That was a long time ago. Back when she was too young to be called a fool and was merely naïve. Too young to know better. “He won’t let you.”
She twisted the lollipop between her fingertips and whispered, “Then we won’t tell him.”
I looked down at the cat and the way it couldn’t tell where it was. “It needs a vet,” I muttered, biting on the lollipop. “How are you going to pay for it?”
My sister reached out, plucking the cat up from the ground as gently as she could. The creature moved, letting out small cries that my sister attempted to soften with her tongue pressing against her teeth, pushing out the air through the gaps in a gentle whisper. “I’ll find a way,” she whispered, holding the kitten against her body. It was cupped in a palm, her other hand making its way down its back in an attempt to soothe it.
“What will you do when Mother asks about it?”
She thought it over, the small creature shivering against her belly, and said, “Won’t it die if I leave it here?” In Chihuahua, the sun could often be suffocating as it worked its way through the city. Though cars were not common in the street where the cat was, there were often stray dogs.
“Possibly,” I said. I reached out, my fingertip landing on the cat’s head. Its fur was dirty yet soft. “Or someone else will come, and they’ll take it with them. Someone that will take good care of it, better than we could.” Her fingertips brushed over its back.
“What about a cat rescue?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know any.”
“We can look it up at the library.”
“The library is too far to get to on foot,” I told her.
“We are on the way to the library,” she stated, a frown pulling at her brows, forcing her face into an expression that made my stomach twist.
“Right,” I muttered. “Let’s drop it off somewhere closer to home. Where someone will see it.” I took the cat from her, picking it up from its belly and letting its legs flail. Its nails caught against my shirt as I tried to pool it against me. It cried out, its teeth sharp and its head turning from side to side, eyes tightly closed.
“You’re scaring it,” my sister said, dropping the lollipop as she tried to help remove its claws from the fabric. “Be careful.”
We walked, the cat curled up against me. It eventually grew quiet, its tail draping over my forearm. We kept walking, moving little by little through our neighborhood. We came across an older woman, leaving her home with a young girl. She had warm eyes and dark hair. Her smile was gentle as she spoke to us, her hands writing down on a piece of paper what we would need to take care of it, and where we could go. She wrote it with a broken pencil on a flyer, using her bag for support.
I thought of my mother, and the small creature that nipped at her ankles. Its fur was golden, or maybe a dark brown. I saw the way the child cooed over the cat. “We can’t keep it,” I muttered, feeling the small body against my own. The way it trembled in my grasp. “So, if you could take it for us?” The little girl perked up, her eyes wide and full of excitement.
“Are you sure?” the woman asked. She plucked it out from in between my arms. The cat cried out, but soon settled down against the woman’s embrace. They seemed like they belonged together. Like we wouldn’t have had the shot even if we had wished to do so. My sister leaned in and smiled, tears in her eyes. “Take care,” my sister whispered.
They left in a small car. A deep gray. The little girl waved out of the window as they went on their way down the street. When I could no longer see the car, I said, “She seemed nice. Kind. The cat will be fine with her.”
My sister nodded, her eyes glazed over. Her lips parted slightly, saliva stretching out from lip to lip, forcing it to close. When she finally spoke, she did so calmly, though her voice was no louder than a whisper. “I would’ve liked to have kept the cat.”
We stood there, our snacks in their plastic bags, dangling from my sister’s fingertips. I thought of pulling her away towards some park where we could sit beneath the shade of a tree. I thought of telling her stories, how our grandmother used to do when she was alive. All of which would give her a little bit more. More than a life of looking out the window or laying down in bed, a gray wall before her. But I did not pull her away. I laid my head against her shoulder and waited, until her eyes could stray away from the street.
Elia Del Rosal is an aspiring author from the north of Mexico. She moved to the UK at seventeen to do her A Levels and now lives in Sussex with family.
Featured image by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash.
