You’ve been gone awhile, living elsewhere, believing the world’s your oyster and all that, when your sister calls. She needs you, so you use all your savings for a plane ticket with a layover of seventeen hours in a city you’ve never been where you sleep in a fetal position across two terminal seats. No biggie, you tell yourself, it used to take ten days to cross the hemispheres in a ship. And it’s worth it when you arrive and your sister’s right there, in the flesh, with those brown eyes you used to meet three feet up from the top bunk bed. You note the changes in her, the before and after: the false brightness in her voice, the column her t-shirt makes, the scar on her belly when she reaches for the cereal box that’s only got sugary dust at the bottom. You’ll take care of her, you say. First things first, you’ll cook real people food. Then you’ll go to the ward and see the twin who lived. As you trek to the grocery store, you try to remember the recipe she liked that one time and when you walk down the first aisle, you let out a Jesus. You forgot that this is home sweet home and the shelves have a hundred different cereal boxes. You stare at the cardboard tigers and toucans and leprechauns and other bizarro creatures and it’s just too much to confront their unblinking faces, watching as you step back into a life you had left behind. You turn the corner and stuff the cart with anything you vaguely remember your sister likes—plus sparkling grape juice because there’s still something to celebrate in all this. When you get back, you’ve cut off the circulation to your wrists from all the plastic bags around them and you find your sister trying to decide on which of the two names she had picked out. Neither, you say, both. You start chopping up onions and garlic and in the steam of the kitchen, your sister’s face is swimming before you, whispering thanks for coming, and you feel that same disorientation of arriving somewhere new, in a foreign country, the way your tongue slips trying to make even the most basic words—but all the same, you open your mouth to speak.
Nadia Born writes peculiar fiction, both literary and speculative. She won New Letters’ 2022 Editor’s Choice Award and has stories featured in The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, Water~Stone Review, Arkansas International and elsewhere. She also has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. Find her online at www.nadiaborn.com
Photo by Phil Aicken