Jockey
Sarah Norek
My sister’s face remained flat. Where I’d before known anomalies to cause in her hysteria – an albino skunk, a grinning, limbless child, one eyeless horse sneezing its lips to flutters, empty sockets pulsing – now there wasn’t a pinch, not one blanch. All afternoon, story unfolding, her unfamiliar calm prevailed.
Finished speaking, she set her cup of cold yellow tea down to the table top, the cork coaster, and remained in this position for several minutes: leaned into her thighs, holding the table’s edge with its fine detail work, copper gladiola stalks inlaid. She looked down and spoke to herself, lips moving, silent.
Had she been just a friend, her story would have been a chore – its telling, my judgment – and so would she, gently pitching now on the middle sofa cushion. However, as she was my sister, I believed it was my duty to listen, withhold opinion. This was the first we’d spoken in years, the first we’d seen each other in more than a decade. Her call and my visit meant something, were steps, perhaps, towards some kinder, gentler place. Any understanding we’d reached as children and young adults had disassembled itself. Old roles of cruelty, thoughtlessness, guilt, now felt false.
My sister’s waist was thicker than her skirt wanted it to be, creating a fatty bump. Down her legs snaked varicose veins, dark purple in her strange tan that looked like she’d bathed in dirty orange juice and had yet to wash off. Where was her true cream color? And she’d been dyeing her hair, which I wasn’t expecting, red-wine headed when I knew she should be gray; we were a family of early onset grays. I’d turned so in my thirties. Our mother’s photo albums showed our father with a gunmetal head at twenty-four, full silver by twenty-six.
Since lunch we’d sat in this room with its drapes pulled open, a single, large window looking out on her well kempt backyard: magnolia tree, blush-berried yews, lilies crowning through the hard winter’s dirt. Now, before us, the fireplace is dead with ash. Along the mantelpiece my sister’s child sits in frames: my niece with our mother’s pillow breasts, mounting a downed tree trunk for a senior high school photo, jeans too tight and the seam of her underwear showing through. Another of her floating just beneath the swimming pool’s water, eyes opened, skin a dead milky blue. Not a single photo of what she's now become, ten years older at least.
When my niece was a child, I brought her trinkets: snow globes from airports, a marching baton with gold glitter liquid inside that surged up and down like a school of sparkling tiny fish. Once, a book of cut-out dolls in ornate period clothing, bustle skirts and high feathered hats: my sister cut free these intricate edges for an entire afternoon, sighing and sighing, glaring.
On those early visits to my sister’s family, my niece would grab greedily my wrist, pull me into the entry’s cavity, demand her souvenir. She’d yank my satchel to the floor and shatter delicate gifts placed intentionally at the bag’s bottom. I believed then, and do still, in manners. Visit after visit, we’d listen to tinkling shards. Her face would crumple, ready for the wastebasket. In whimpers, I’d be told to remove my shoes, please, so as not to ruin completely what lay beyond.
While our visit was still young, my sister began:
I believe I am an alien.
She took measured sips of her lukewarm tea before starting again, quiet and evenly toned.
I believe, she said, that I was abducted while unconscious. Perhaps as early as my daughter’s birth, during the stay in the hospital and the after-effects of labor drugs. Perhaps it was later than this. I could have blacked out for some reason, at some point, been stolen and returned. This inability to identify the time is, I think, a plausible repercussion of aliens tampering with my synapses, my whole then-working body.
I was taken to a holding tank not unlike those which aquariums use for larger specimens, their killer whales and dolphins. It had no water. It was very cold and bright and I understood it to feel the way I had always imagined the North Pole to feel. Still, nothing was unkind to me. I don’t remember being hungry, or having any pain in my shoulder or knee, both of which would normally flare up under such chilly circumstances.
The aliens, when I saw them, had no human likeness. They fluffed along the ground like centipedes. Their bodies pulsed colors, rainbows beyond rainbows. The most expansive box of crayons. If they had eyes, I couldn’t tell. When they touched me, there was no physical contact, only a warming of parts as my heart, my organs, all spun deeper within.
My sister stopped, briefly caught my eye. Began again: Obviously I look nothing like these creatures. They didn’t alter my outward appearance whatsoever. Also, my shoulder and knee continue to bother me in inclement weather, and I am no less desirous of my husband. So far as he goes, there is nothing of me that appears in any way different. But I have changed.
She took a deep breath, held it, let go.
She said: My hearing is unbearable. Over the past year it has reached this – she made her hands into claws, shook them tensely at her ears, clenched her jaw so the knob of it throbbed. Said: Once a single sound focuses for me it piggybacks a picture that blurs my sight. When it first occurred I rubbed my eyes like a maniac. I took myself to the hospital where they treated me as a psychiatric case. It was humiliating. My husband was called to take me home. They gave me eye drops to soothe what irritation I’d caused.
Now that I’ve grown accustomed, when the sounds and sights come they aren’t so much a shock as an inconvenience, a diversion. I drop off in conversations if I’m not careful. I’ve been asked before whether or not I might be seizing.
Across town, she sighed, is a toenail peeling up beneath the bottom edge of a heavy wooden door, snagged. The door, slowing slightly, changes in pitch from a whistle to a moan. Then the nail, disengaging from flesh, makes a clatter like the beginnings of a rockslide a mile or two up.
There is the steadiness of the earth cracking, new plant growth like the sound of newspaper continuously crumpled. When a bud finally pulls its chin from a stem’s cradle, it is what roar a pestle makes in the basin of a mortar, around and around. This growth is so prevalent these days, the sound so incessant that the inside of my skull is like a TV without reception, filled with the speakers’ rasp.
Yesterday held a pear’s skin cracking, its meat crushing. The first sound was cellophane, the kind used for gift baskets, stiff and tightened down with a hair blower. The second, all the sugars being flattened, was similar to the ground on a day of rain and then, suddenly, a clearing, the soil able to breathe, tiny caves of air opening across the loam.
