SEE HERE MY HALF-SISTER, hair wilded by her ever fitful sleep, frothing around her head like a straw halo, grubby fat baby fingers, shoeless, dirty feet. Here I am, eight, pink skirt, pink sandals, white belt, red shirt, red purse, white bow. My hair, the same shocking blonde as hers, is combed and parted, soft with natural curls, shoulder length. I carry myself with dignity. She is almost four, but she is still kept on a leash at the farmers’ market, even though my mother attempts to carry her. She has gotten away before. 

She wants something, a phenomenon signaled by the magnetic distortion of nearby space: her widening eye. She lurches, goes limp, heaves, grunts. Me, she says, as if the thing is part of her gone missing, a central cog, a battery, a heart. Me, me, me. Today, it is some farmer's prize turnip atop their basket, hulking and purple shouldered, heavy and white-bellied. As often as not, vendors give us the things she wants without my mother purchasing them. My sister does this once or twice an outing. I make a game of guessing what she will want.

When my teachers, the stewards of my catechism or math lessons, ask about my family, I describe my sister as a special, but difficult, person. I savor the surprise and compassion and fondness in their reactions, all swept into one crinkling smile. In this way, I know that something about my sister is also something about me.

"She speaks, just not English," my mother says.

"It's not Spanish, or French," I say, two languages I know a few words of.

"It may be Chinese," my mother says, which irritates me. It is impossible that my sister knows Chinese. The suggestion is not only absurd, but hurtful; a pinprick of jealous blood from my finger.

She cradles the turnip like a doll, self-satisfied and self-absorbed. She protects it ferociously when strangers attempt to compliment it, or compare its weight to hers (it is half her size), coiling her body around it, shutting her eyes tight. Her small hands strain to keep their grasp; of her physical endurance for such holding on, we have no doubts. She will take that thing to bed with her for days. She will even begin to resemble it, or it her, we can't be sure—dirt smudged, plucked from the garden.



FROM BENEATH HER BED—a sturdy, low, day bed with a wooden frame, large enough that it should last her into adulthood—for my mother’s astute, forward-thinking purchases she is renowned—the trappings of my sister’s cave are spilling out, invading our shared floorspace. There are rocks. They come in all sizes, pilfered from the neighborhood park and the church landscaping, the grocery store parking lot and the bottoms of shoes. There are shining, broken tree ornaments, stretches of ribbon, cookie tins, toilet paper rolls, marbles. Also the withering garbage of natural ephemera: once-colorful leaves, locust husks, raisins, the deflating sphere of a coveted beet, turning black with its rodentine tail. My mother draws the line at food, but it proves to be a blurry line, on ever-closer inspection. My sister collects with unbridled urgency and determination; she can hardly be reigned in. She lines her lair with the refuse of her life, her chubby hands a net thrown over each routine. It is a wonder I dare rake her heaps away from the walls, pick the sequins out of the carpet and flick them at her; it is a wonder I don’t see it coming.

When my sister gets unsupervised access to the kitchen scissors—by what succession of blatant irresponsibilities on her father’s behalf, we can only conjecture, baffled—“One minute she’s in the garden eating dirt, the next I don’t know!”—she draws a line in the sand. She marks her territory with destruction. My colored pencil portrait of Saint Lucy (gorgeous), having slipped from its clip on the wall and landed with its upper corner on my sister’s side of the room, is shorn exactly away at the boundary. Lucy’s left eye gone missing, her halo sliced like a pie. My paired white socks, neatly folded pants and the black top with ruffled shoulders, placed beside the door for tomorrow morning, were evidently straddling the border. The clothing is mangled, torn, chopped. The scissors are sharp, but too big for her; she may as well have done it with her teeth. There is evidence, too, that my sister crossed over and collected certain items from deep within my territory. First, there is the metal hanger my mother bent into a circle, where I keep my many hair bows clipped in rainbow order—this is missing the colors red and pink, my favorite. Second, the white teddy that sits nestled between my two decorative pillows has been stripped of his tuxedo vest and, horribly, his glass eyes. Third, and nearly a week later, I find that she has gotten into the shoebox containing my much admired Easter shoes, the tissue paper still intact and the lid replaced on the box.

“Sometimes I wish you and your sister could meet halfway,” my mother says to me, mildly amused, while she sews buttons onto the stuffed animal’s face.

“Do you love me?” I ask her, because I cannot conceive of a scenario in which there is any value in compromising myself in my sister’s direction.

“Of course I love you,” she says, and explains to me that I am a bright, wonderful daughter, helpful, and good; she is proud. After a few minutes, she says, “You know how you have bad days sometimes? Hard days? Every single day is hard for your sister. Every day.” Her face is pulled down, flattened out. She makes every day hard for me, too, I want to say, but after all of the affirmation, I don’t want to let her down. Instead, I ask her what precocious means, so that she will ask me where I heard it, so that I can tell her it was used to describe me at school.

It is not until I investigate the Easter shoebox, sometime later, that I understand the magnitude of my sister’s power.  One of the shoes, nestled in its crisp paper, gleaming white with baby-pink plastic crystals inlaid around the heel, has been cut cleanly in half. She nearly worked the kitchen scissors apart, cutting through that shoe. This second time, I do not give her the satisfaction of an imperious meltdown. I do not even let on that I have found it. I replace the lid, I replace the box, I emerge from the closet and return to my drawing table, fingers tingling, in the square of sunlight from the window with my back to the dark scuttling sounds from beneath the bed, the glinting eyes. I start with the halo.



WHEN HER AMELODIC RAMBLINGS converge into her first words in our language (after “me,” of course), they are, most unsettlingly, “I love you.” I love you, I love you, I love you, she says, to all things, at all times. Fists purple with yearning for a passerby’s Schnauzer, tears steaming from the heat of her rage, “I love you.” To the cashier, as thanks for the sucker from under the counter, puncturing my mother’s hard-won sugar restrictions, “I love you.”

I say “thank you,” with exaggerated enunciation, placing the sucker in my pocket demonstratively. “I love you,” my sister says to me around the candy, just as performatively, the red saliva already leaking down her chin, the cord of her leash snapping as she lunges into the harness, away.

Late in the fall, when she is four, she begins to attend school with me, three days a week, off leash: we walk hand in hand in hand with my mother toward the wide double doors, which have until now signified my separation from her, my otherworldliness. I hold my head high. I wear her like a sash, proof of my tribulation. With too much eagerness they drink her in, the much discussed wild thing, nervous voices falsely warm, tempered by the respect that comes with fear. I hold her hand tight, tight; she is mine.

More phrases settle themselves in her mouth; she squawks such oddities as “excellent work” and “can you say that?”, “Happy Thanksgiving” and “need you to cooperate.” The speech pathologist is encouraged, and vexed. Still wearing her own, my sister brings home another child’s shoes, tucked into her armpits; they are never claimed, and nobody seems able to identify the child to whom they once belonged. It is an impossible situation.

“Me,” she tells her dad when he holds the shoes in his hands and tries to pry answers from her, “I love you, excellent work.” He throws them over his shoulder in despair, a move she’ll emulate gleefully for months, a move he’ll regret most when she’s holding a bowl of spaghetti. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

Her first successful escape attempt leaves her hung up on the chain link fence at the perimeter of the play yard. I trace her footprints in the snow: dogged, quick. I know her face when she runs. The teacher’s strides are longer, preposterously so, and yet the tiny footprints make it right up to the fence, the snow is shaken down, the pristine terrain is so widely crumpled as to indicate prolonged struggle. I can see her raw fingers, red, scrabbling up the woven metal, I can see her marshmallow legs kicking in their green snow pants, I can see her windmilling down once captured, her utter disregard for the woman trying to secure her safety. I can see her smug tenacity and her broken pliability, after. I hate her for being so vulnerable to the world. I hate the world for hurting her. I dust up the prints on my way back to recess, kicking in circles, an elaborate, self-occupying dance that nobody will think strange of me. Arms outstretched, tracing an elegant arc, back and forth, drifting in and out of curtsy.



THE SMELL is at first only subtly rotten and earthy, not so different from my sister’s smell, but as it matures, a household assembly is called, an investigation is in order. While her father disembowels the kitchen plumbing, I am sitting on the bed with my book, attempting to read, though I am attuned to my mother’s every overturning and rifling. My sister works happily in the hall, I love you I love you I love you, loading marbles into the bed of a plastic truck and dumping them into the wagon of a metal tractor trailer, back and forth, I love you, back and forth.  With my sister’s thrice weekly absence from the house for hours at a time, my mother has gone slowly spelunking, removing debris, sanitizing, vacuuming—small, almost imperceivable tidying, so as to minimize the shock. The dark emanation in the carpet around my sister’s bed is now only a soft fairy ring. And yet, the smell persists, and pervades. When my mother emerges from beneath the bed with a light-starved sapling, a sprouted acorn twisting and unfurling in the dark, having taken root in the carpet, she holds her palm out with the upturned miracle.

“What do we do with her?” she shrugs at me, pushed beyond exasperation to helpless amusement. We are in this suffering together, she and I. I twitch my nose with a smile. The turnip is rotting in my own closet, in the Easter shoe box beneath the intake vent, its exterior drying down and its fermenting center perfuming the house with hot rotten cabbage, the reek of our war. It is a trap I have laid perfectly; I am giddy with my own genius. I will incriminate her, and she will be falsely accused, inarticulately furious, she will be laid low. I am seething, impatient.

My sister will be diagnosed and undiagnosed over and over; she will be on any number of spectrums, which of course, include everybody, and are therefore not definitive. After we flounder for a decade in diagnostic language and a reorientation of all expectations, we will emerge from it, slough it off like so much mud, and we will settle into our relationships, in which she simply is, and we simply are. We will not be so different from other families whose children turn out to be real and complicated people. My sister will turn out fine. She will live in her own apartment and save her money for exotic fish; she will be lonely, in that particular way she always has been; she will be a proliferative comic artist and gain a sizeable internet following; she will eschew words for image, action, meaning. My mother will be proud.

At some point, I will also be diagnosed, and the cold binarized calculation, the solving of puzzles will be called symptomatic: in another family, my own place on the spectrum might have been determined sooner. Whether my mother is proud of me remains to be seen.

Until then, we are interlocked like the antlers of rival stags, exhausted from pushing, too single-minded to stop.

Boundaries, rules, and language—maddeningly, my little sister grasps these concepts, but I cannot prove it. Because just when I think I have calculated a snare that will match her, injustice for injustice, just when I will get my mother to mete out the punishment she deserves, my sister trundles in, a train of marbles spilling in her wake, retrieves the box from the closet, carries it triumphantly to my mother, and reveals the turnip. I love you I love you. Happily turning her chubby hands over and back, over and back. I go whiter than white, I am translucent, I am a veil of gauze behind which there is only the holding of breath. I love you I love you. Her eyes, ablaze with her particular intensity, burn through me, and leave me ash.

“Oh!” my mother says, leaning back from the new pungence, “Well that mystery is solved.” The halved shoe, incredibly, goes unremarked upon. My mother leaves to dispose of the entire box, now ruined, and to call off the search.

“Thank god we don’t need to call the plumber,” she says brightly, dusting her hands as she returns from the dumpster, and that is that.



HERE I AM, nine, bow slightly off kilter from a raucous recess but still respectably high on my ponytail, ankles crossed on a bench in the library vestibule, reading. Here is my sister: she has melted into a sweating, weakly thrashing body, hands darkened from digging in the leafy detritus beneath snowmelt. She cannot, at present, pass through the doors into the library, nor can she be removed back to the car. My mother comes to sit beside me on the bench to wait her out, sighing. I cannot describe the satisfaction I feel when my mother takes respite in my company, in the goodness of me, beyond that when she rests her palm on my leg and leans back, I almost go blind with it, I almost burn up. I wonder what our life would be like without my sister; I even wonder if it could happen this late, if she might cease to exist by some confluence of blameless circumstances.

In the quiet of the truce, her eyes having rolled sideways so far they have come back around, my sister growls, in two ragged breaths, “Need you, to cooperate.” It is not the first time my mother shocks me with her laughter, it is not the first time she abandons me, the child who does not need her so desperately, to sit on the floor in public and wrap her body around my sister. My mother must hold her, and hold her, and hold her, a thing half as big as her body, twice as big as her life, a creature whose wanting outweighs her. Of my mother’s physical endurance for such holding on, I have no doubts.

I take off through the library doors, outside, and run. I do not want to be chased, I do not want to stretch her between us like a snapping cable, I do not want to cut her in half—I want, by some miracle, to release her from me, to release us all from each other—but the sound of her voice in the crisp air, the gravel shriek of her need for me to behave, trips me to the ground, where I stay, coiled around myself, sobbing, bloody-kneed and tights torn, until she carries me to the car.

Look here, the squalled-out child in the car seat beside me, my shock-haired sister, scum-eyed with crying, one hand in her sock and chewing on her shoe, her other palm open to me with two dark glass gems, my teddy’s eyes. “Me.” The battery, the heart, some central cog gone missing, extended back to me.  She babbles urgently, tonal nonsense, mauled by the shoe. Here I am, nine, black shoes, frayed tights already blood-browning, ponytail fallen out, sodden with dejection.

“I hate you,” I whisper to my sister, slapping the glass eyes from her open hand. In a kind of shock, my sister collapses her fat baby palm into a fist. I expect it will turn purple; I expect a screech; I expect the bomb to go off.

Instead, she whispers back, squinting as I have squinted, “I hate you I hate you I hate you.” Then she smiles at her achievement.

I look up to find my mother’s crumpled eyes in the rearview fixed on me. She looks away, puts the car in reverse, and navigates us out of the parking lot. All the while I tell my sister I love her, trying to undo what I have done.

Kasey Peters is a writer from Nebraska, with work in McNeese Review, The Pinch, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Blue Mesa Review, and others. A 2023-2024 winner of the Porter House Review Editor’s Prize judged by Elisa Gabbert, and a 2022 winner of an AWP Intro Journals Award, Peters works as the editorial assistant for Zero Street Fiction, a series dedicated exclusively to LGBTQ+ literary fiction, and as Fiction Associate Editor at Prairie Schooner. Before all that, they farmed for a decade.