Things In Boxes
By Erin Strubbe
You are caught in the doorway of your room like an insect in sap as your mother flies past you down the hall. On her way downstairs, she shouts something that you don’t quite catch. Not at first. Your father hurries after her, not looking back, taking the steps two at a time.
It takes a moment for the words to reach you, like a thunderclap many miles away. Finally, you hear them: “She jumped out the window.”
You stand there for a long, oozing moment. You don’t wonder who she’s talking about.
Two stories. Sixteen feet. Fourteen years old, same as you. A fall like that is survivable under the right circumstances. Assuming she wanted it to be.
Your sister is alive.
Your sister is dead.
Your sister jumped out the window.
These three things are true and not true all at once as you stand in your doorway, and it’s as though you’ve been split into two. Into the you who has her and the you who lost her.
In this moment, as your sister is alive and dead, as a body is broken and whole on the pavement outside, for some reason you think of the lizard across from her empty bed. In this moment, when she is both dead and not dead, you realize that it is both yours and not yours too.
#
You have never liked reptiles. Mice and hamsters, small furry things that eat vegetables and curl up in your arms to sleep, have always been your preference. The neighbor’s rabbit gave birth to a litter of six last summer, and you and your sister spent a week perfecting your pitch to buy one.
The two of you would make perfect guardians to a newborn rabbit, you told your parents. You would feed it and she would water it. You would bathe it and she would brush it. You would take turns changing its wood shavings. When they turned you down, you’d stormed up to your room to sulk, but your sister just disappeared outside without a word. She came knocking on your door an hour later, a shoebox tucked under her arm. Tiny claws scrabbled over the cardboard.
“Don’t tell mom and dad,” she giggled.
You sat with her as she dropped squirming things, worms and crickets and small roaches, into a tank that had once housed a short-lived carnival goldfish. She watched as the lizard chased them around and around, but you always had to close your eyes before it struck. Once or twice she saved up quarters meant for school lunches to buy tiny mice for it to eat. You cried when you heard them squealing through the walls.
You were born six minutes before her—the older sister, technically. But she was always the tough one.
She jumped out the window.
Your sister’s door hangs slack across the hall, an open jaw. You uproot yourself, move toward it like stunned prey.
#
It’s dark inside her room. Even the red bulb over the terrarium is out, hanging blackly like some diseased uvula. A pile of clothes is slumped beneath it, things she hasn’t worn in months. One by one, you peel away halter-tops and denim shorts until you reach the dull, scummy glass underneath. The lizard is curled up on a rock inside, wide awake in the dark. It blinks mistrustfully up at you through the water stains.
There is a world where it is yours. There is a world with a lizard and a funeral and teachers with pity etched in their crow’s feet every morning forever. A world with you alone in your big, dark house on weekday nights. With parents who look at you and see a ghost. You wonder what holidays are like in this other world. In this other house, with this other family that are both yours and not yours. You picture them, both your futures in these two worlds that branch away from each other like a rope unwound.
In one is a Thanksgiving with a sister still to giggle with when dad burns the croissants, when a napping cousin drools on your mother’s favorite armchair. To apologize for when she leaves food untouched, tugs at hoodie strings and disappears upstairs.
In the other, a turkey dinner with somber uncles and soft-spoken aunts. With you picking at cherry pie that you cannot bear to tell your mother you’ve always hated. Tight smiles. Unspoken apologies.
You stare at your own face reflected wide and convex in the lizard’s eyes. You lift up the lid, reach inside.
In this moment, you are a sister and an only child. A matched set and an orphaned saucer. You are mother and not-mother to this untamed thing that hunts and kills, that basks on rocks under a synthetic sun and a strip of mesh cut from your sister’s bedroom window screen. The lizard—your lizard maybe—thrashes against your fingers as you lift it out of the tank.
How often does it eat? You wonder, holding the creature to your chest. What’s its favorite food? How much water does it drink? Does it need exercise?
You almost laugh out loud as you picture walking a lizard on a leash, you nodding to neighbors with their dogs, stopping every now and again for your lizard to smell another’s behind.
Blinds slap in the breeze.
You imagine what it might be like, going to the window’s edge, looking down. In your mind, your sister is in your father’s arms. The head that once laid baby-soft beside your own is split, or not. The back you’ve pushed on slides and tire swings is bent, or not. A carpet of grass gulps down her fall. Or the pavement sinks its teeth into her bones. You step toward the window.
Below, two worlds are yawning up at you, each hungry, ready to swallow. Your sister’s lizard wriggles in your hands, straining toward the black maw of sky.
THE END