Now

As a family we have rules. Avoid the couch and the carpet. Aim for the sink, the tile floor, the backyard. Carry a tourniquet. We go through sheets like people go through paper towel. We faint. We slip. Our shoes are sticky. A wardrobe of dark clothes. Nothing hides the color of blood except no color. We crave iron, we eat meat and marrow. You’d be shocked if you saw us at dinner. Maybe disgusted. Probably afraid. 

When I was nine I cried until my mom let me go to school. I lasted one week. My blood pressure plummeting, my clothes a mess. My older sister, Ruth, saved my life one day when she found me unconscious in the driveway, my fluid drooling down the sloped cement and into the street. She dragged my body inside and nursed me back just in time. 

I want to be like my sister. She’s brave with her life. She wants things. Experiences. A life outside our house. Love. None of these things are easy. Two years ago she fell for a man and had her heart broken. He was born unable to stop screaming, from a family of screamers. He came to our house one evening, his mouth open, his face morphed in terror. We tried to make conversation while wiping blood out of our eyes, the young man bellowing and shrieking at the table. The scene was too much for Ruth. 

I would have given up, curled into myself, but Ruth did not. Six months later a man came to our door, which we rarely answer. Intrusion is always trouble. But he persisted, spoke through the door about the universe’s plan for everyone. Even us. Intrigued by his refusal to leave, Ruth peeked through the window and their eyes met. He said he felt the need to speak with her. To show her something important. Ruth opened the door. 

He explained that he’d come with a personal message for her and revealed a thin book. “An important work of truth and transformation,” he said. It was a religion we’d never heard of. Salvation for the uniquely burdened, people like us, people like himself. “A blessing from my God,” he said, motioning to his stomach, which bulged strangely on the left side. My sister listened and I watched them. Her hair line was crusted and dark. There was a small red smudge on the doorknob. He asked for just a few minutes of her time. Ruth hesitated, then went outside and they talked for two hours. 

He returned the next day. Then the next. He and Ruth talking on the front porch, then taking short walks together. They saw each other every day for a month. Then one day Ruth told us they’d married. They looked happy and doomed. They moved to his small house well outside of town. 

It was a lonely time for me without her, though I was happy for Ruth. I fantasized about a life like hers. A love like that. But it’s hard to believe it could come true. Any boy I’d ever spent time with could see what was happening to me and turned away, repulsed. Understandable. There was no hiding it. All the stories went the same way––hope crumbling into shame. 

As a small child I remember disliking my body. Fearing it. Then my fear turned into curiosity and acceptance. I liked how warm my blood would feel leaking and seeping from me, and I would touch the little drips with my fingers and spread the small pools across my arms, my stomach. I would taste it.  

A year went by. My sister and her new husband had a child, a girl they named Alice. But their contentment did not last. Her husband deteriorated, his body expanding grotesquely in places and collapsing in others. The end came quickly––without doctors, hospitals, procedures, or hope. My sister grieved but she was also busy being a mother. They knew their time together would likely be brief, she told me. Then she asked me to move in with her.

Over time we became a family in our own way. My sister and I caring for Alice. A girl after her mother, and after myself, an inheritor of genetic strangeness. When we weren’t busy with Alice, Ruth and I would talk about her life in a marriage. They had been happy and in love from very early on, she said. She didn’t share his spiritual devotion, but his commitment, both to her and to his religion, was a comfort. “And,” she added, smiling, “he never prayed for me,” she said. “Not once.” 

Ruth died six months after I moved in. Her house was set off a narrow dirt road, settled in a small field and surrounded by tall pine and oak trees. A little fairytale cottage. I found her still body next to an upturned and rotten tree, her dress and socks and skin wet, red, and cold. I wept there in the woods. 

And now for some months it’s just been me and Alice. We are alone in the cottage most of the time, though she is curious and wants to explore––the house, the yard, the world. I’ve created a routine for us, so the days have structure. And I am more careful than ever with my own body. Watchful, attentive. There are meals, and reading, and play. But there are many and constant preparations and precautions. I explain things to her delicately.  I notice our attachment growing deeper and stronger every day. It’s a comfort but also fills me with fear. She is beautiful. 

My favorite time is the evening when I get her ready for bed. We eat together at the small dinner table. Then it’s bath time. I fill the basin with warm water, set her in the tub and run a soft washcloth over her small body. She babbles and plays. I let this go on as long as possible, just watching her, but paying close attention to the color of the water. When I see it’s time I tell her gently that it’s time for sleep. She protests, shaking her little head, and using the new words she is learning to speak. “No, no,” Alice scolded me last night, then patted her small hands on the surface of the pink bath water. “Oh, look,” she said. “Pretty.” She smiled up at me and then turned back to admire the vividness surrounding her. “So pretty to me.”

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Jeffrey Hermann writes short fiction and prose poems in his spare time. One day when he retires he will write in his regular time. His work is out there if you look. His wife and two children and dog mean everything to him. He has two books forthcoming in 2027, from Unsolicited Press and Gnashing Teeth Publishing.