I Had a Sister

“What year was it?” 

Hands had been raised, then lowered after this question.  Blank stares all around; from them to me and from me to them.  

“Does it matter?”  My voice sounded like dead gravel, even to me.  The gravel gave way to an avalanche of stony impatience as I continued in my reading to these clean young beings seated in front of me.  What would they ever know?

“It was one of them.  I can tell you that it was just one of those years.”  I paused, wiping my face and neck.  Did they not recollect anything I’d taught them?   “I don’t know.  It was one of them.  

All of you here already know this,” I gritted through my teeth.  “You know, we thought there were giant black cockroaches scuttling toward us – we were running, running, running too fast to look over our shoulders to really see them – and when we looked up toward the heavens, all we saw there too was darkness and it was all so loud some of us started screaming how we could not hear God Himself.”

We were running, running, running in the dark and the crying and the wet.”

I paused again and coughed, trying to dislodge the blockage in my throat.  

“It’s when I was running that I remembered my sister.”

I remembered, I did remember.  But my mouth would not open.  My memories did.  

My sister wore her long blond hair tied behind her head.  I think she was nine years old when I last saw her.  I had lost her while we all started running.

I don’t have any idea if she ever saw another birthday.  I don’t know that I ever will.  

But she was there, once, during my time; so different than now.  If I saw her now, would I taste the salt like the salt on our skin when we were sweaty in our summer skivvies and running, running, running?  Always running.

That night, the terroir’s dark liquid softness cradled all the bodies straggled around me as I navigated around them as I was running.  

I remember when I realized what exactly was splashing against my feet in my mushy boots.  I knew the color of the splash on my feet matched the wetness I sloshed through on the ground.  

Is blood thicker than water?  Did it matter? Does it matter?  Then, I had to keep running in the wet.  Now, I had to keep talking.  

“I will run,” I had said to the crying heavens.  To the white blank beings facing me, I finished my lecture, “and I remember that I did and always will have a sister.”