Writing by Eva Olivares
When I was ten, I forgot my little sister on my way back from summer camp and I’ve been riding that bus home ever since. It was a similar school bus that ran over our family dog right in front of our childhood home about thirty minutes ago and now, standing a couple feet away from the crimped-out corpse of my once springy Shih-Tzu, I find I can’t put dirt on her. Almost beside me is that same sister, who has been angry at me for ten birthdays now, with an old, torn-up blanket pinched furiously between her knuckle and thumb. This is as far as my sister’s kindness extends; she’ll offer the blanket but won’t dig the hole.
“Do you do anything?”
My glasses slide further down the bridge of my nose with every strike of the shovel breaking the ground, grains of dirt slipping past the edges of the blade and finding their way into the bulb of the grave where we’ll lay our third sibling to rest. I don’t turn to see her reaction. Facing forward without looking at each other mimics a sort of confessional we haven’t attended since her First Communion, and I can talk to her better when I can’t see her lips curl in disgust at even the slightest breath I make. My sister has always had a way of making others feel like the nuisance that she actually is.
“I found her,” she says evenly. “That’s enough.”
We should be taking turns burying my dog the same way we took turns walking her, but then I remember she would only walk her to the end of the block where her dealer was waiting for her, and back. My sister walked past the family dog after coming home in much the same way she would walk past me in the halls at school: a slight glance out of the corner of her eye, a grimace, a turn of direction.
It should be her doing the brunt work, but I have the shovel. I always do when Mom’s not home and she’s never home. When she is, she locks herself in her room which is right across from mine. Work, she’ll say. My sister does the same and this is the only way that they’re similar.
Throwing a shovel is something my sister would have done to me, but it’s hurling straight at her right now. Her eyes must be red from holding back tears and not from her questionable extracurriculars because she dodges it at a speed I wouldn’t expect of her. I’m our mother’s sensitive boy, the victim of my sister’s venomous tongue and wayward fist, the guardian of the medicine cabinet; Mom would be so disappointed to know I’ve stooped so low as to act as my sister’s brother. I don’t want to associate with my sister but I could only pray that she would
associate with me. Maybe then she would have been less angry.
“Enough?” I say in the same way she spits my name. This enrages her.
Her eyes drill into me in a way that forces me to look straight at her. How long has it been since I’ve last seen her? Who has she become other than what I’ve heard through the walls? Something forceful I decide as I watch her chest heave weightily with every breath. Strands of sweat-slicken hair stick to days-old makeup cured onto her face and the pieces that aren’t cemented dance with the ripple of her hatred. My sister isn’t stronger than me but she is angrier so I take a step back. Surprisingly enough, she doesn’t hit me. She doesn’t say anything at all.
Instead, she bends down slowly, still trembling, and grabs the handle of the shovel. Her hands fall right where the sweat of my palms stained its wood and in another memory many Christmases ago, her smaller feet are mimicking my footprints in the snow. The warmth of her body as she steps beside me melts this recall and brings me back to Spring. Still, she copies me. I’m not quite sure why though, I was only born first.
The blade finds its way into the ground again, this time by my sister’s hand, and makes a puny sound. It barely breaks the surface. Her short frame teeters unevenly as she tries to gouge out the skimpy helping of dirt right along the cutting edge. She lifts from the arms, then the shoulders. It doesn’t budge. When she decides to lift from her knees, they buckle beneath her and she’s faced with the edge of the dirt just as she’s faced with the edge of the toilet bowl on Friday nights. I don’t want to help her up – showing kindness to a stranger is scary enough – but I can’t watch.
I drop to my knees beside her without looking at her, just in the way she likes to be left alone. A sandbox is to a child what the dirt was to our dog and my sister and I used to play all day. My hands sink into the slight impression I’ve already made and my eyes purposefully avoid the unmoving lump with a blanket – my sister’s blanket – draped carefully over. Rubble falls and sifts through the openings of my fingers. We’ve never played with shovels.
I begin to dig. I dig like my sister, I dig like our dog. I fling the excess behind me, grab handfuls, scoop and ladle, I kick up with my back legs. My sister doesn’t say anything (she doesn’t need to) when she leans forward and does the same. Dirt embeds itself under the bracket of my nails and I know it would happen to my sister too if she didn’t bite her nails to the quick. Some places that I latch onto dampen my palms and I’m not sure if it’s my tears or her snot but it doesn’t matter. All we want is a hole big enough for the three of us.
We dig until we risk burying ourselves. When we’re done and we’ve lowered the disfigured carcass of what once was our Good Girl into her bassinet, the sun is gone, the hole is covered, and my sister’s smoking something behind the garage.
But I won’t tell Mom this time; it’ll be between our little dog, my little sister, and I.
