Immaculata whistles in her sleep. If she sleeps. Of this, I have never been sure. She does not whistle songs, but whistles as though she is calling for something, for someone. Probably the dead. So marooned is she on the other side of the River Styx. The summoner. I crash mercifully against the rocks. I am whistled awake.  

With her call, the sun rises, swelling the room and wresting my eyes open. They are hard boiled eggs. I have not really slept for a year with you always shaking me out of it, your fresh tobacco breath, secret. “Secret,” I would repeat touching my heart or my throat; fingers a cuff.  

“Good morning, Eugenia.”

“Good morning.” 

Immaculata sits beside me, upright, pew posture. She watched me through the night, the bitten edges of my sleep, the hum of my breath, my stiff body an ache, having broken through the quiet of our world, taking floorboards, stained carpets, and set tables with me, a wig, false teeth, and a note duct-taped to a door. A skydiver falling fast. If I asked Immaculata, she would tell me what I had dreamed about. But I don’t. I already know. In four days, I have become a person with only one dream.  

We get up, look for Mink, knowing that she is gone, the world: her pageant. Still, there is effort in our search. We scream her name loud like our house is a black ocean, and she is adrift within it. We look in closets. In the basement. We pull back curtains and covers. We open and close doors, the refrigerator. We check underneath beds; every moment, a Jack-in-the-Box. She took nothing with her. Save the fur coat, the pink toque and the car.  

“She didn’t leave a note,” says Immaculata, deflating.

“I wonder if she has already forgotten our names.”

“I wonder if she has already forgotten her name too.”

“Maybe this is why she won’t answer our screams.”

“Maybe.”

“Because she’s forgotten who she is.”

“Maybe she’s still here somewhere and we’re scaring her silly.”

“Mink doesn’t get scared.”

“True.”

“She wouldn’t forget that.” 

All the lights are off. It is as though Marta came over in her cinched pantsuit, her sunken eyes, and her too rouged cheeks, and spread her remedy for grief, throwing us into darkness. We enter the bathroom, its surfaces still in a sweat from the night before. We flick on the overhead light; it twitches into brightness. We bend into the sink together, scrub our faces, and it is then that the mirror delivers the final evolutionary feat. In the night, we have doubled in age. We are eighteen. Instantly and thoroughly, eighteen. Our mouths are crowded with teeth, my black eyes, and bruised neck healed. We lean into our reflections and trace our new faces, the old ones tucked inside of them, like smaller Russian nesting dolls. Our jaws are strong, our cheeks less full. Faint lines have formed, shading, around our eyes and our lips, our loose grip on childhood now gone. Were we asleep for nine years? We turn on the radio. No. It confirms that this is the fourth day, the fourth day since you disappeared. June 10, 1981. The fourth day of Sheb Departed. The world remains the same. We are the ones changed. 

We examine our shapes. With Immaculata’s height came curves. She stands sideways to the mirror and then spins slowly, a figurine on a cake. “Woah.” She is impressed. I am too. If I had a glass of something, I would spill it. She has breasts that bounce like she is riding in an apple cart, and a bottom like a down bustle. It is as though the magi were here and they were erotic-minded, visiting her, their eastern star, with curves hidden in their bulky coats, bestowing them to those willing eyes in the hay. I am still the shape of a coffin. Sawed straight. Standard Eugenia. My magi, my heat lamp, a thousand miles gone. I drop my glasses frames, the lenses punched out, square and large. They hit the tile floor and like everything around them, they are instantly remnants of a previous life. It smells like storage unit.  

We eat cake left over from the funeral. Nuts and cherries. Care went into its making. Yufeng, in her printed smock, with her headphones on, nodding to the music, yes, yes, yes.

“I bet they went in opposite directions,” Immaculata says gravely, a beginner detective. We peer through the kitchen window.

“I bet you’re right.”

“I bet they don’t intend to reunite.”

“No.”

“Their only true commonality was love making.”

“And in turn, us.”

“They packed hastily and badly which reflects a lack of forethought, and which tells us that this was not a plan long in the hatching, rather the directionless instincts of lunatics suddenly freed from an asylum.”

“Not that we were an asylum,” I remind her.

“No. Not that we were an asylum. They loved us Eugenia.”

“If that’s what that was.”

“That’s what that was.”

My jaw hurts. Immaculata grips it in one of her hands, which is now more like a paw; a paw that could catch salmon and break necks.

“Though they have forsaken this love.” She softens, “and we are not going to live in the hopes that this love, like them, will come back. If we do, we too, will be barefoot and walking the streets without identification. We must agree to belong only to each other, to never speak their names, and in so doing, to do what they have done to us – to root them out from behind our eyes. Promise, Eugenia. Promise.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No. I’m too old for that.”  

We cover the funeral cake we cannot finish and put it back in the fridge, wash our dishes, free the rabbits, and leave by the front door, Immaculata tripping over her feet and hitting her head on the frame. I tuck the box of matches you gave to me into my pocket and I sling Marta’s rope around my shoulder.  

But first, we spend a moment looking at Mink’s wig. It is very fine. Like an expensive cat. We stroke it. Its black is a finality. An ending. Precisely what you, even after Mink’s toothbrush, even after being bone-licked clean, will not give over. But, this was Mink’s way. As she was haunted by nothing, she does not haunt. Whereas, you lurk here; your presence: a gauze that has draped itself over everything. Our life, like a cottage closed for the winter. Water turned off. White sheets on the furniture, shut eyes.  

And you could walk through the door at any moment, before I could walk out of it and say, “Where have you been?” And dipping me, I would answer, dumb, “I don’t know.”  

I read your note one last time. Is there something I missed? The letters are short and shaken. You pressed down so hard, bits of pencil fleck the page silver. You wrote it on a scrap of newsprint. The Birth and Deaths section. I love beginnings! I lift it to my nose. It erupts. Unwashed man skin, old smoke, wet wool, apple.  

gone to save the world

sorry mink, immaculata,

sorry

yours

sheb wooly ledoux

asshole 

You did not write my name because you did not want to distract me with it. You wanted me to study the drawing. The drawing is what counts. The drawing is the clue. The flying monk is not St. Joseph of Cupertino as I had thought, but Finbar. II Finbar Me the Three Handsome Funambulist and Colossal Menagerie. Finbar in his black tights and his leather shoes. Finbar who could not fall.  

I hear the slam of our mailbox. Look out the window. The postman. He wears postman shorts now. His legs are wishbones. His face is the face of a man who has just learned that there are no faeries. He lost two teeth in the night, wrapped them carefully in tissue, placed them under his pillow, and found them still there in the morning, brown and broken. To him, they looked like droppings. He flushed them down the toilet. 

“Just a minute,” I say to Immaculata and I sprint to the door panther-fast. She cannot, with her new limbs, keep up. “Wait. Wait,” she pleads, collapsing in a lanky pile near the stairs.  

It is a letter. Addressed to me. My first. MS. EUGENIA LEDOUX. The handwriting, not yours. 

I hear Immaculata come to her feet in her too-small white slippers and lumber along the hallway; using the walls for balance as though battling smoke and fog. I stuff the letter into my suit pocket just as she arrives beside me. In the doorway, she looks trapped; too exotic for this place.

“What? What did you find?”

Almost telling her everything; the nights by the lake, my feats, the flying monk, Finbar in photographs flashing his white teeth like sticks of dynamite, the air picking him clean, I say, reaching only her waist now, “Nothing.” In that small utterance, that single word, I see for the first time, how much I need, how much I love a secret. And with it, I look up and I begin to memorize my sister’s aging face. 

“Let’s go.” The letter thumps, in my pocket, a tantrum; I have everything I need. Immaculata stalls. “Let’s go,” I say it again, insistent, our house now taking on the sonority of a cave. I lean into my sister. Her hipbone points sharp like an arrow, north. And then, like you and Mink did before us, we leave. Only, we leave together. And we, white dress and black suit, look newlywed.  
 
 
 
 

The house next door is burned down. Its black frame stands naked and quivering, a thing shorn. No walls. No doors. There is a hole in the roof.  Inside, embers sputter and hiss. If it rained, it would sound like a den of snakes. A spoon. A child’s purple sweater. A television slurred across a table. The first aid kit. This is all that is left. The rest is charred ruins. Coal sand castles, black hoodoos still smoking. They slope and point like broken teeth, the twins’ faces carved into every surface. It is now, in disaster, that god is an artist. There is a small crowd gathered beyond the yellow tape, taking photographs, the cuffs of their pants blackening with ash. They don’t even speak to each other. Mink would have studied the wreckage too.  

The twins decided, “against good judgment”, to make pastry for us in the middle of the night. Now they have to wear tight white nets to keep their skin on and they have to live in the suburbs. When they heal, their faces will look pulled and uneven as though smeared with egg whites – left there by a cook, half-asleep, to glaze and congeal. Mister and Mrs. Next Door “have had it.” So the twins have been sent to live with their grandmother who cannot tell them apart so she uses only one name for both of them. Eventually, they do too.  

Their grandmother, cheeks coming out sharp counter tops, brown lipstick, gold teeth, wearing loneliness like a scab, has a one-bedroom apartment, thirty-five storeys up, that looks over a highway and then onto a graveyard. By nighttime, she jokes about the graveyard. In her medicine cabinet, bottles are lined up like a front line in an old war. Her bed has a lever system, turning her bedroom into a chamber for a junior masochist. The apartment has a small balcony where she has put a television and hung a flag. So weather-ruined, the country is unreadable.  

There, she watches “her shows”, in a nightgown, diaper, and coat covered in fox heads, her face beset by foundation that matches, orange to orange, purse clutched to her breast so that she won’t be robbed by “scoundrels.” She gurgles there, falling asleep, head hanging down as though she has been hit, slapstick, from behind with a bottle. Back, a calcified mound. Hair, cobwebs. When the twins wake her, to carry her to her bed, their favourite activity, the fur coat slippery, the ankles and wrists too, she pulls them close – soup, baby powder - and whispers, “When can I go?” “Never,” they whisper. “You have to stay here with me,” convincing her that there is only one of them and that she is seeing double. 

We meet the twins’ father in the driveway. His eyebrows and eyelashes are singed hay-yellow. He is wearing blue pajamas. They are threadbare and need mending. His hair pokes through them. It is thick like quills. Mister Next Door coughs a bit, and then he asks, “What will become of the house?” It is the first time he has ever spoken to us. His voice is mellifluous, pure as though it has never been used. If he wanted to read to me for an entire day, in the dark corner of a strange room with nothing else in it but a hobby horse, I would let him. “We don’t know,” says Immaculata. “We haven’t decided.” I am too busy to answer, hoping that he will speak again.  

Mister Next Door motions for us to follow. We do. To his hatchback. A peeling dwarf beside him. He opens the trunk. Pop. Will he throw me inside of it and lay a tarp over me and tell me to shush it? Will he make me his slave-companion and squeal out of the driveway before Immaculata, too clumsy to fight, can stop him? Will he carve a hole through the backseat with a hunting knife so that he can tell me touchdown stories while he drives too slowly through small towns and into sunsets? Will he park the car in an abandoned campsite, reach through the hole, with food and water and eventually, with his hand, to hold mine, and cry a bit when I fall asleep, his mouth pressed there, unanswered?  

No. Mister Next Door pulls out a black suitcase. He flicks it open, covertly, like it is a music box, full of uproar, full of dancing girls. It is full of money. Neat stacks of it. So much, it must be fake. 

“Is it real?”, I ask, recalling his photocopier scent, seeing him alone in a dank basement, making money, photocopier light rolling over his face all day like flashbulbs, and he is famous. “It is,” he says, not lying. He is a man whose failure came for him too young. It hunted him and it shot him down. He blinks, full of dusted over fantasies. “I keep my valuables in the trunk,” he adds, flicking the suitcase closed and handing it to us. There is nothing else there. No ruby pinkie rings, no yearbooks. No wife and no twins. Immaculata takes the suitcase. Surprised by the weight of it, she steadies herself. The bricks of money, too much to tuck into her bobby sock.  

“You’ll find it spotless.”

“Thank you.”

“There’s leftover cake in the fridge.”

“Great.”

“It’s got nuts in it.”

“No problem.”

“And the bathroom light works, just give it some time.”

“Every house has its quirks.”

“That’s our only one.” 

I hear a dull chatter. I look back at the house. Termites. They are taking to the wood. They waited for us to leave and now that we are gone, generations of them are building nests and tunnels. Termites have a king and a queen and they have workers. The workers can feed each other, freeing the parents from this task, allowing the colony to grow, to grow so vastly that it can devour an entire house, slowly winning it over, like children desperate to impress.  

Immaculata, not turning around says, mouth suddenly full of shelves and sharp turns,  “I won’t miss it.”

“I will,” I say. The dunce. 

Just then, a telephone rings. We listen to its wail. Cocking her ear, Mrs. Next Door follows the call. She loses her footing, walking through the debris of her home, too quickly, tripping on the ends of her housecoat, her flimsy beige sandals fusing to her skin. The ground: bars of soap. She and Mister Next Door appear to be uninjured. The twins carried the brunt of the accident, like a superhuman power between them. Picking herself up, Mrs. Next Door kicks away a mound of pots and pans, silver spills, everything to her: the mercury of melted thermometers. Hand on her hip, a woman in her kitchen, she lifts the pink receiver to her ear. “Ow.” It is still hot. She holds it at bay, the white outlines of her daughters set in their beds, they have come for her. “Hello,” she says too loud, like a bad puppet, and then, listening, she flits her eyes over me, as though I too will explode into flame, and jump and grab everything that was once hers. I feel Immaculata’s hair tighten around my wrist.  

Mrs. Next Door says, wheezing, “It is not a good time.” She hangs up so hard that her hand sticks to the receiver, and, then like a crumpling robot with one final surge, she says to us, shooing, hands full of telephone, “Hurry along now. Hurry along.”  

And we do.  Two heartbeats. Out into the morning – bright as a wayward instrument. 
 
 
 
Clotilda and Yufeng’s house is for rent. The sign is speared into the grass, a javelin. So is skinny Selene Rodriguez’s. So is Tuberculosis Flo’s. So is our neighbour, Shayenne’s, her line of giant underwear, (nothing else, no slacks, no tops, no sheets, just underwear, and as she was broad, they were broad, plains of cotton and nylon) pulled down and with her dog, disappeared. The houses are empty, their occupants long vanished, and in their stead, other people, perfect strangers, mill on their lawns. Clumped together like a garden party, a fake fruit bowl, gleaming baubles, they are prospective renters, notepads in hand, necks craned. Like the sky so blue above them, they appear to have been shined. The neighbourhood raccoons should bite their calves and pull them from their reverie.  

Did everyone bury themselves in their yards with their peanuts and their loaves of day-old bread? Do they do nothing but flick their eyes back and forth like fish in a tank and listen for your footsteps above? Even the mute’s silver car is gone, and he, somewhere, takes a turn too fast, thinks “smithereens”, his eyes part-closed, yelling out the refrain that he has finally memorized. He is proud. He wishes to be held tight. He wishes to be heard.  

There must have been moving trucks through the night, their red lights blinking, sirens without sound, conversation-less men, loads stacked on their backs and shoulders, short of breath, sweat on their foreheads like bubble wrap, tracking dirt in and out of these houses, these houses that sit like picture frames waiting to be filled again.  

Elsie is dead. Her magazine collection strains against garbage bags hoisted by distant relatives, their weak, cold arms, confused scowls on their faces, when their eyes meet ours. She has already been taken away and turned to ashes and placed in a personalized urn. But still, there is so much tidying. Like you, she was a collector. 

And Marta’s house, like the twins, has been chewed through by fire. There is nothing left of it. Only a square black imprint, cinders like ink gone wrong on a page, a messy stamp, one you would want to do over. Papers fly up like crows. I know that she was in it, because as an unemployed existentialist, she had no reason to leave. She gave me the rope and then she returned to her dark, where she lit a match and she spun with it between her bookshelves, and they spun with her, her last and most steadfast companion.  

My eyes are a vinegar sting and my jaw pulls against crying. Why does tragedy have to be so thorough? This time it does happen: my face is stuck through with sadness, it freezes, just as Mink, with her exquisite hair, warned me it would.  
 
 
 
 
 

Up the street, across from the Church, and before the Mission, at the corner of King and Dunn, lives my last slab of familiarity, Leopold of the Onions. Mink called him the malcontent of Mucusville. His house is not for sale. His house is not burned down. Though he wishes it was. He prays for it, night and day, he prays for calamity. Let the lake collect itself into a great tidal wave. Let there be a chemical spill that comes up through our drainpipes. Let me be mistaken for a whale and harpooned. He does drawings of medieval weapons in his notebook, which he keeps tucked, like a filthy magazine, under his mattress. Crossbows and daggers and spiked balls on the ends of sticks that can be whirled above heads like a ceiling fan, he dreams of them making contact.  

There are two signs in his window: “BEWARE OF DOGS” and “HELP WANTED.” While his front door opens onto our street, the rest of his house sits facing King street, a busy thoroughfare of traffic and streetcars. The streetcars clang and whine through the night. So do the prostitutes who congregate there. Their offers and grunts, Leopold’s only lullaby. He pulls open the slats of his crooked Venetian blinds and he watches them. Their movements, stiff and rehearsed, remind him of a construction site. The hoisting, the lifting, the digging, the pecking. They jerk like heavy machinery. Getting the job done. He would like to give them hard hats and safety goggles. He would like to help them form a union. They know him by name. They pinch his cheeks. Leopold’s first word was a swear word. Still, he blushes in his sleep.  

Leopold used to come by our backyard to kick rocks in his white marching boots with the red tassels and unravel his soot-smothered world with the ferocity of a forgotten veteran. His life: an ambush. We would listen to him, you and I, struck still. We were his only audience. As he spoke, you would break out into hives and you would rip your shirt open to show him the effect of his words and then you would scratch your skin as though his story was written there and it was unbearable. You would scratch your skin until it bled. Until you looked like a man who had been lashed. And you would shout vows to him, to punish those who hurt him, and to make his life right. Leopold would be jealous. His sadness was so much better worn by you. He felt almost undeserving of it.  

Other days, when he showed up, you simply shook your head and closed our door firm and tight, like a seal, leaving him to look like a specimen petrified against the glass. Once, I heard you talking to one of your special men, and you told him something that Leopold had told you, but you told it as your own. You believed that it was. You mistook everyone’s suffering for your own.  

As we walk by Leopold’s house today, without our identification, but with our shoes on, he knocks quickly. Tersely, he lifts one finger and he mouths, “wait.” We do. It is as though he has had his eyes fixed on the window for days, the four days you have been gone, and he has not blinked once. He opens his door and he emerges from a hallway black as tomb. He shuts the door quietly behind him, strides towards us, and whispers, “they’re light sleepers” as though the city should hide behind its great wing until they wake. 

He is wearing gardening gloves and a wide brim hat to protect his skin from the sun. He carries a bag of onions. That hoary voice, a teenaged seafarer, “I have a lot of onions.” He hands them to me with the delicacy of a dowry. He smells like sperm and sun block. His hair falls straight and pink-blonde as newborn mice, his teeth giant white blocks, scrubbed headstones. His eyes are intent, wet, the colour of mashed peas.  

“You’re so sad. I get sadness.”

“Thank you.”

“I am sorry for your loss.” He would have researched what to say. Read about bereavement etiquette at the library. “My deepest sympathies.”

“Thank you. We need onions.”

“I thought you might.” 

Immaculata nods in agreement. Leopold does a deep bow in her direction. It is surprisingly chivalrous and assured. Is he a knight? Does he have cavalry? A chainmail tunic? He has not met Immaculata before. She is someone he has caught glimpses of, but never spoken to. Always in her white dresses, a stray feather, and once, notedly, walking the length of our street in her nightgown, her arms full of groceries. He followed her with his telescope, the wind picking up, and pressing itself against her. He wished he was the wind. She is someone, who, up close, he cannot believe is real. She is see-through. He turns to me.

“You look the same only different.”

“We know.”

“You’ve grown old.”

“We’re eighteen.”

“How?”

“Grief.”

“I get grief. Have you read Kafka?”

“The Metamorphosis.”

“Bingo.” And then eyeballing us, “But hey, it suits you.”

“Thank you.”

“Welcome to the club of monstrous vermin.”

“Thank you.”

“It sucks.”

“You’re getting a moustache.”

“Thank you.” 

Leopold fingers his upper lip. Goose down. He smiles to himself. Finally, the magi. Just in time.  He turns to Immaculata. 

“What a night will do … So the twins, eh. They have to wear tight white nets over their bodies and faces for a whole year. Their skin will fall off if they don’t.” A green bubble bullfrogs from his left nostril. He wipes it away with his t-shirt, which reads ATLANTIS.

“They tried to make pastry, now they have to live in the suburbs with their grandmother.” He sneezes. It sounds like “hatchet.” He breaks in front of my eyes. More snot, less clean t-shirt. “Excuse me. I have a chill.” By way of explanation,

“Delicate constitution.”

“I understand.” Immaculata’s first and most miraculous words to him, the ones he has been waiting to hear his entire life.  

Emboldened, he goes on, “Well, really it’s a lung disease, but when I use the word, disease, my mother thinks I’m feeling sorry for myself so she says,  “Oh are you trying to get through to the complaint department? Oh just hold the line” and then she beeps sporadically and no one ever picks up. I’ll die young. Long before her. I’m about half way through my life. Can I move in?”

“We’ve abandoned camp.”

“Damn it. This life is a curse.”

He slams the lawn with his marching boot, barely an indentation, and draws in a thick wet breath. To himself, “I am screaming into an empty void” and then, “one moment please,” as though the trick he is performing is failing and he needs to compose himself. Then he coughs. Immaculata is transfixed, having never heard such a noise. He is a wolf, an infirm. She thinks of iron lungs and spontaneous tracheotomies. The word “tuberculosis” fireworks across her brain in ornate curly cues. Leopold’s lungs are full of sodden garbage, sand and spilled cans. They are a shoreline that has never been raked. “The air is still smoky,” he says, and with that he walks backwards – hushed, out of a nursery. He is going to get some oxygen. He has a tank in his bedroom. He told me. He calls it Leopold Junior. Because, “children are the future,” he explained and then he laughed in excited, lumpy howls.  

His nose starts to bleed. Tiny fingers crowd around its base. By the time he gets to his house, his hands are streaming with blood. He lifts one finger, “wait.” We nod. Immaculata sees him blue as the underbelly of ice, occupant of a rectangular cabinet, toe tagged, rail thin. His t-shirt says, LEOPOLD. She needs a metal bowl and a steaming cloth. She needs him all to herself.  
 
 
 
   
We watch Leopold pull out a bundle of keys, thick as a caretaker’s. He unlocks the three locks on his front door with great exertion like he is winding stubborn clocks, his arms, those of a jerking bird. His world, stuck and un-greased. He evaporates again behind the door.  

Immaculata and I swivel. Already, a new family has moved into skinny Selene Rodriguez’s house, she and her laundry pile of children gone. The new family’s skin is so black that it is blue, a metallic blue that shimmers. It is the wings of insects, fishing lures. A boy plays on a swing set. Mon fils. The air is heavy. Pollen lolls, a yolk. Dandelion heads everywhere. You told me, they are survivors. Bloated flies hovercraft. It is a new season.  

“It’s summer.” Immaculata traces the air in front of us. The boy nods and smiles. He waves at me, a slow salute, and then he jumps from the swing. It goes slack while he flies; for a moment, a phenomenon. When he lands, he nods his head, and grins. I grin back. I lift my free hand and I wave, clapping my fingers against my palm. He retrieves a pillow from the grass and he hugs it to his chest. I see that he is not particularly brave, but that he had an urge and the urge won. I urge myself towards one single action. I swear off love. 

When Leopold returns, he closes the door quickly behind him as though a fresh litter may follow. He smells like shaving cream (turquoise shower stall.) There are small cuts above his lip. Still in the wide brim hat and the gardening gloves, he has changed his t-shirt: EASTER  ISLAND. He also wears a red scarf, draped around his neck like he has decided to become a poet. And on top of that, a leather motorcycle jacket, black with heavy buckles. It hangs on him like a downpour making him the abandoned frame of an umbrella. He tugs on its cuffs.  

“Better.”

“You shaved.”

“I had to. It was ungainly. So. Do you like my jacket?”

“It’s a bit big for you.”

“I’ll fill it out. It’s my mother’s boyfriend’s, Rolf. But, I call him Lady Hips. He thinks he’s so tough because he has a pet viper but he’s got the hips of a lady, makes waffles in his underwear in the mornings, all swishes. Rolf. My mother” –  

His mother is a wrestler. She is the colour of Tang. She is built in thick swipes of beef and muscle. She smells like cancer. Her fight name is Death Trap Susie. The Death Trap is her signature move. It involves a scissor kick and the insides of her thighs. They have two pit bulls: Prince and Princess. The dogs spend most of their time chained in the bathroom, climbing each other’s hard backs, trembling and salivating. The only one they love is Leopold. They are trained to kill. Death Trap Susie used to be a body builder. Leopold says: “I hate sports, they’re just like cougars, and everyone says just play, but I’m like look at its teeth.” 

Immaculata laughs, throwing her head back. Her hair parts. A reveal. The pearl.  

Leopold goes on, “she only dates guys whose names sound like body functions. Rolf. He has a truck dealership called Rolf’s Wheels. He is all engorged digits. He keeps his particulars at the dealership. Even the viper. Didn’t want to feel domestically beholden. “I’m not your father,” he said to me the first time he came over. I know, I said, I know, and he said, “I’ll never be your father” and I said, I know, Rolf, it’s cool. Que padre, que padre. 

The only things he moved into the apartment were dirty bumper stickers. They’re everywhere. Like locusts. The mirrors, the toaster oven, my dresser, even my snare drum for Marching Band which now says on one side: For a Small Town, This Place is Full of Assholes, and on the other side - If it Swells Ride It. Sometimes he shoots me these demented looks like a dumb baby tiger about to leap through hoops of fire and I think he is going to pounce on me and bite me or set off firecrackers under my chair, or pin me to the ground and shave my eyebrows or put a light bulb up my bum. He hasn’t yet.” Leopold pats himself down. “He sleeps with his gym bag. I think it is filled with candy and ammunition. Mom thinks he’s the jackpot. But, every time we see a woman, any woman, even if she’s elderly and blind, he punches me in the arm. Not when Mom’s around. When she is, she’s always doing these little claps after he says anything. We’re supposed to go to Disney Land this summer, clap, clap, but I know I’ll get lost or kidnapped. My mother would cry for three days, and then feel relieved, having the apartment all to herself. Clap, clap. She could drink cocktails with the waffles - which she can’t do when I am around because “Oh I look at her sideways” and “Oh I’m no fun,” he imitates her voice. It is lower than Rolf’s.  

“Last year I tried to kill myself but it didn’t work. Now I’m studying auto-hypnosis. I dream of invisibility. I want to appear present, hand up, here, but be elsewhere, frothy surf, bird songs. Get it?” 

We nod. We do. A raven hops by with a toy in its beak. It is not the only raven. 

Leopold continues, “The trouble started with Burr the Elf Killer, my mother’s boyfriend before Rolf. He would wake me up in the middle of the night wearing a bellaclava and think it funny. He was the cat and I was the baby who smelled of milk.”  

Immaculata, pleased by this image, prompts Leopold who has suddenly fallen quiet. As though at a wake in a parlour room, she inquires softly, “And what happened to Burr the Elf Killer?” 

Leopold returns to his story, “He was a wrestler too. Now he’s in traction. So Susie got hungry.”  

He growls. I step back. Immaculata steps forward.  

“And your father?”, she asks.  

“He sends me a calendar every year for Christmas and sometimes a toy boat.”  We frown. “But, it’s hand-painted and made of real wood. He lives on the East Coast. He has three new children, Robert, Vanessa and Cherry and a wife named Debdeb. She makes scented candles. He’s a bureaucrat. I’ve never met them. Only photographs. He’s always in a turtleneck. So are they. My mother thinks it’s for the best. That he’s gone. He was “boring, so boring”, she says. Now he’s been “be-cocked.” And then she does this little chicken dance and says “be-cock, be-cock.” He pays for my schooling, but what’s the point, I just get knocked out on the playing field and left for dead. They call me snot smurf. Even the gym teacher. So I haven’t gone for a year. I spend the money on t-shirts. What about the forgotten people? What about them?” 

He sings the question. And then he is his own back up singer, “Who?” 

Leopold looks at Immaculata, “I’m growing my hair.”

“That’s nice,” she says.

“Like an infidel.”

“You could disappear,” I suggest.

“No. I can’t. My mother last night was like, “oh why can’t you just macramé or something you’re just staring staring staring,” but I was like at least I’m in the marching band. Later today, she will tan in her sports bra and matching underwear with an emergency blanket under her chin. That is after she wakes up, listens to her shower radio and drinks down four raw eggs. I tried to drown myself in the kitchen sink. Lady Hips found me. Now he calls me Lee for short.”  

Another breath like drawing lava through a straw.

“Can I watch you do something?”

“Like what?” Immaculata asks.

“Anything. Eat breakfast. Hang from the ceiling. Build a birth bath. Anything.” We look at each other. Leopold offers, “I’ll probably set up my pup tent on the front lawn. The acoustics are good and I can pretend I’m an anchorite. Want to join?”   

Before we can answer, there is a scratching sound from inside his house. Leopold blinks rapidly as though something has flown into his eyes. He starts to hiccup. 

“I forgot to keep them in the bathroom.” He hiccups. “The dogs. When I shaved (hiccup), I forgot to put them (hiccup) back on their chains.” He holds up his finger, “Wait.” 

He looks up to the bedroom windows. Hiccup. Still dark. Hiccup. He opens the door, the dogs come outside, look at Leopold, he lifts a finger, “stay,” and immediately they lie down, mouths black with blood, heads burrowing like ostrich. Leopold goes inside. He returns moments later with a graveyard face, hiccups gone.  

“If our parents aren’t parents anymore, do we still have to be sons and daughters?”  

Leopold dashes his finger between his eyes until his hand drops like a hero shot in the shoulder. He falls still, unblinking. Immaculata kneels below him. Patiently, she waits for him to wake. Instead, he grows, like Immaculata, uncomfortably tall. He fills out the black leather jacket. They appear to be the twins now, the pale twins, she and Leopold, frail and beautiful lines drawn against the hard surfaces of the world. Set there to be pawed by time. Set there with their white eyelashes.  

“You should stay here Immaculata.” Insects cresting under our feet, the weeds climb up around us.

“Yes,” she nods, “I should. With Leopold.” The way she says “Leopold” makes his name longer than it is. Her calling has announced itself. Saints tend to arrive at their postings with an ailment, a clubfoot, a cleft palate, a hole in the heart. Not Immaculata. Sprouted in such a perfect place, our mother could not even name it. 

I give her the black suitcase. She insists on splitting the contents. I stuff my share of Mister Next Door’s trunk money into the bag of onions. Her hair, still a rope between us.  

Suddenly, Leopold’s face takes on the quality of a baby having a nightmare. Immaculata whistles him awake. He looks at her, so thankful. He looks at her and he thinks “forever” and he prays that she thinks it too. He prays that she will say it before he has to. Forever, I know, it is just too much of a risk to offer first.  

Leopold cannot cry. That is why he has so many onions. When he needed to cry to his mother, he would crawl under his bed with a butter knife and slice the onions open and gaze into them until they went watery. When you left, and he had to beg and bleed for days to attend your funeral, she caught him under his bed with the onions. That is why he had the surplus. You left just when he thought of asking you to teach him how to cry. He wanted his hurt to fit him the way it fit you. 

Immaculata straightens the cuffs of my suit and runs her fingers down my face, a Braille she can read. We untwine her hair from my wrist. It leaves a red tangle. We hug, buoyant as ocean water, a love hurtling between us, indelible, my sister’s indelible imprint. Feeling the impermanence of all things, the spin of the earth, the pull of a gravity all my own, I move away. She leans into my ear, sugar breath, “Just don’t let it make you love differently.” I look at her bones. Archeologists will mull over them one day. Even as dust in their hands, they will be able to tell that she was beautiful, oppressively beautiful. This is how we lived, this is how we lived.  

Her step, suddenly a lope, she returns to Leopold and the dogs, the pine needles not breaking beneath her feet. Beside them, her face is a burning white candle.  

And then, the one word we never heard,

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

We sew the moment up.  

“We’re orphans,” says Leopold.

“Not really,” I say.

“Think about it.”  

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