SIBLINGS
Brother Norman
Word Count 1,826
I had been dating the man who would become my husband for several months when he announced his brother was in town and wanted to meet me. I suggested he bring Norman up for the weekend to my country house. (N.B. This makes me sound grander than I am. When Vogue, where I was a writer for twenty five years, sent a photographer to shoot me there, someone in the art department remarked that my house looked like a trailer.)
From the start, I was taken aback by Norman. He was on the short side with a turned-up nose, high cheekbones, full lips, square jaw, and a mass of thick, curly hair. His ever-scheming mother once tried to get him work as a child model but I’m sure those casting agents took one look at him and could only imagine a miniature devil. She got her wish with my husband who became America’s top child model at the age of 8, but that’s another story.
My husband tended to wear faded polo shirts and beat up boat shoes on the weekend; Norman was wearing a loud Hawaiian print shirt over his large belly and gold-rimmed aviator glasses. His voice was loud and booming and his eyes were often slits. Probably because he was high.
Step Lively
Word Count 822
I don’t have siblings. I am an only child. My mother didn’t want or like children but gave birth to me anyhow. The more I think about it, I realize it wasn’t her choice. What she wanted was romantic partners and she had several. One came with children, much to her chagrin, but it gave me step-siblings, four exactly. Full disclosure, I’ve changed all of their names.
Wills was a teenager when we met. I was pre-pubescent. He was tall, dark, extremely good-looking and could cook a little. His specialty was tuna melt on a hotdog roll. He also made Sloppy Joes. He was a scuba diver and got his pilot’s license. Once, he took me up in a little propeller plane. That was exciting. He had girlfriends and a subscription to Playboy, which I read, religiously. Playboy exposed me not only to high quality fiction, but to journalism. The Playboy interviews with J. Paul Getty, Sean Connery, Miles Davis, and Ian Flemming blew me away. I still remember reading the Q&A with Helen Gurley Brown, author of “Sex and The Single Girl,” and editor in chief of Cosmopolitan. I credit that interview for inspiring me to be a writer. Wills, interestingly, wasn’t terribly interested in the magazine. He was too busy living his life and preparing himself for college and law school. He did grow up to become a prosecutor with a life on the straight and narrow.
Ants On Fire
Word Count 884
Summer is dying.
It’s so hot we smell the pavement bake. Shrill buzz of cicadas in our ears, my big brother and I squat until our knees scrape sidewalk. Leaves scatter across the curb, spilling onto the road like Legos. Soon, they’ll go crisp at the edges, breakable to the touch.
On vacation, my brother and I always get along. Summer is intermission from our school-year theatrics, roles of tough-guy boy and pretty-doll girl tossed aside like outgrown clothing. We are just us. I cackle constantly, face hideous, head thrown-back, snorting so loudly neither of us can breathe. My brother’s sweetness is a smooth white stone, ordinary and beautiful. His skinny arms, the same ones that fail him during baseball season, wrap around my waist.
Our spirits are breaking as summer falters, but neither of us will admit this to the other. Denial is a language we’ve learned young, as siblings with unhappy parents do. There’s beauty in forgetting.
Hatchback
Word count 545
We took a trip, me and her, after I quit my dumb job at the Forest Service, after I jumped in line to be “bought out” for four grand, after they told me I couldn’t come back for five years per the agreement and after I laughed and told them to ban me for life because the job was crap, all that filing, all that pretending it fed my soul in the slightest way. I worked in some musty federal building near the San Francisco Bay, a building stuffed with bored bureaucrats, a dumpy old building in such a pretty city, a quirky kaleidoscope city as it was back then, before mega-corporations colonized it with their ilk. But the price tag of such marvel was daunting, even in the nineties, and I was glad to leave while in my twenties, glad to look for cheaper digs up north, but before I drifted to Portland I joined my younger sister for a trip to the deep south, the Gulf-rimmed states as mysterious as a sphinx.
Undertow
Word Count 140
I’ve heard the stories, and the pictures show
a laughing child, bright-eyed, hugged frequently—
but she had dipped a toe into the salt
and foam two years before I knew her name,
and long before I could have understood
the tides that siblings swim in, and how one
can draw the other, or recede, how years
adjust the undertow. She waded in
without me—for a while an only child—
The Boys
Word Count 891
A baby octopus. A bounty beyond our wildest dreams. My brother, Aaron, the youngest boy, yanks it from its crevice under the yacht club dock. It’s tentacles undulate in the air. We touch its slimy body and dream of taking him home, making him an octopus pet. We wordlessly acknowledge that impossibility and return him to his natural home, the saltwater of the bay we live on.
A wave thrashes me. My bathing suit and ears are packed with sand, full to bursting. Paul, the oldest, a devoted surfer, gently shows me how to pour hydrogen peroxide in my ear and turn my head, pouring the hydrogen peroxide and sand out, little by little. We repeat this process until my ear is clear.
Step on a Crack, Break Your Mother’s Back
Word Count 1,324
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” my sister answers
“Yes, you are.” I stare down from the lofty three inches and four years that I lord over her in 1959.
Suspicious as always, I have cornered her against the kitchen counter. l Iook past her shoulder but only see the toaster, a cluster of spice bottles and a greasy butter knife. I can’t resist pursuing this. Early morning on a school day, we hear our parents in another part of the house. Their angry murmurings are indistinct but familiar.
She wrestles herself away and then stands there with a look of defiance on her face. I know this look.
“You were.” I embellish my conviction with the universal cuckoo sign, twirling my index finger next to my temple.