Sister One's Story: A New Beginning It felt like my tears would never dry even as the dust obstructed my view. Minutes, hours, days, months seemed like they passed without any inhibitions even though in reality it had only been several minutes. The ground had given way beneath my feet as I stood in front of the fire pit making dinner. My face felt like it was burning and I climbed out of the hole that was my home. Desperately I cried out for my family, my sister and my husband. It was too difficult to hear anything over the commotion and chaos. The earth seemed to be roaring like a demonic beast creating a terrible ringing in my ears. I couldn’t hear anything it was like everything had been put on mute. My eyes fell upon the motionless body of my sister and I prayed she was okay, but to my dismay she was already gone from this world to the blissful heavens above.
In a way I was grateful she was out of the misery that was befalling our small hometown. She was at least not suffering the full calamity. Her soul was resting in peace up in the clouds. My body hardly seemed to be real as it moved through the debris searching for the light of my eye. My loyal husband who had been with me for seven years was nowhere to be seen. Well, if I had been thinking rationally I would have realized he had been at work for the most part of the day. The only sound I heard suddenly was a faint whimpering and confused sobbing. Everything seemed to fall into place at that moment and I scooped the less than a year old baby from a stack of blankets and mattress springs. The babe was completely unscathed yet my sister’s crumbling house was a different story. I recognized the familiar features and saw my deceased sister in the baby. My sister had left the physical world for the spiritual world without her child.
It felt like my heart was strung up with an uncanny joy that this was a new beginning intended by the lord himself. The doctors had said I would never bear children due to scar tissue that had formed in my uterus and my husband and I didn’t want a surrogate mother. It just wasn’t natural to me. Except this was a sign, my sister would be reborn with the life of her daughter being kept alive despite the tragedy. I would be able to cope with a new beginning as long as I held the warm, breathing body of my own kin alongside my devoted husband.
Sister Two's Story: Neutrality of the Heart I was fully aware throughout the entire time my sister and her husband had moved in that she had eyes like daggers towards me. Whenever I turned my back I felt a hole being burned in it. It hardly mattered despite the annoyance that she treated me in my own house like that, and she would be on the streets otherwise. I was just another pawn to be used in this life of her religious crusade to be given entrance to an ethereal utopia that doesn’t exist. I had learned of her condition when she had come home from the doctor’s office with tears running down her long face. Her inability to have children was the reason that her and her husband hadn’t been able to have any.
One day I recall my sister was out of town visiting our mother’s grave, and I refused to visit the burial place of my mother since she was already dead and what was the point of looking at a cracked rock in the ground with a name carved on it. All that was left of our mother was her rotting corpse. Tears would do nothing, or that was how I saw it anyway. Her husband had to stay for the weekend for a project due at work. The tension in the house while we sat and ate dinner without the incessant chatter of my sister was ruining my appetite for the food. He asked me why I was single and I told him that it was my choice and that if a guy wanted to date me I would be fine with that. He was silent for a long while and looked at me with hungry eyes. He wanted me and I felt the urge that I had not felt for a while. The next thing I knew I was leading him to my bedroom and ruining the sanctity of his marriage.
The pregnancy that followed was not suspicious at all to my sister, but she was actually excited to see the bulge coming from my abdomen. It was like I was living her unreachable dream. To be honest, I was surprised she didn’t have a holier-than-thou speech pointed towards me for not getting married nor staying with the father of the child. I shot a glance at her husband who turned red in the face and mumbled something about having to work. It’s funny how I think of this as I lay dying. An earthquake had shaken the ground so badly and for so long that the very foundation of the house seemed to shatter and I felt a cold numbness taking over my body. I was glad my baby had been born, but I felt no remorse to not live and see her live a long life. She would live her life as she wished and make her own decisions just as I had done. My teeth chattered from fear as death became more apparent. I wasn’t sure how I was dying, but it was definitely happening and there was no way out. I shut out the rest of the world as I accepted my fate. It doesn’t matter what happens to my body, I lived my life with no regrets and that is how it ends.
Wyvernlet · Wed Nov 24, 2010 @ 08:06am · 0 Comments |