Three days after my sister left him
she named the bottomed-out growl
in the pit of her stomach hunger
and went cross-country skiing.
Gamely, cheerfully, even
she borrowed my boots
and locked into the skis
I’d barely used since moving home.
The rental shop had closed early for
the big game, so we took turns with
the single pair of narrow planks, front ends
raised optimistically, side-by-side
like two bodies in a bed
untouching.
This sister,
my only. In photos from our childhood,
she looms over my shoulder
in a matching dress. I am picturing
our blue plaid with red cherries. (“No, I think
red with blue flowers,” she says, in our daily
e-mail conversation. “The cherries?
Grandma’s tablecloths.”)
I do remember my arms are folded lightly
Atop the fake wood fence at Olan Mills.
Defying odds and our mother’s spit
my cowlick has sprung up again
between the car and the photo studio.
No one has to ask: my sister unclasps her white
vinyl purse, removes a comb. Her small hand
tames me. Little sisters of sisters
live lives twice-mothered.
When she told him, he screamed abandonment.
Stepped out of the apartment as if to smoke
a cigarette. The world’s longest cigarette:
three years later he’s still out smoking, somewhere.
This morning she declined pancakes,
nibbled at a triangle of toast. She shrinks
with refusals when I pass a plate.
In my late twenties I’m exactly one inch taller,
a linebacker to her drum major. I keep trying to feed
her. She will only say No, I’ve had enough.
In these ski boots she gains height, hovering again
before setting off in the thin slush.
Winters in Indiana, we take
what we can. Wobbling once,
she turned to see if I’d seen. Mostly I
watched her back and wondered
what her face looked like.
Her first attempt
and she did not fall
until I remarked on her stability.
The graying snow held her. Green grass
peeked through the tracks. Jeans soaked
like an accident, laughing too hard
to stand. A pretty beetle on its back.
Take off the skis, she cried into the still air.
I went to her, my cold and stiff fingers
fumbling to unlock the bindings.
Sarah Layden’s fiction appears or is forthcoming in The Evansville Review, Artful Dodge, Vestal Review, Contrary, Diet Soap, Hecale and 42opus. Her most recent nonfiction was published in Opium Magazine, flashquake and Indianapolis Monthly, and her poetry also can be found in the upcoming anthology Just Like a Girl. She is working on a novel and teaches writing at IUPUI and Marian College in Indianapolis.