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She leaves in the morning. It's a quiet affair. You're too tired to lift your head, so you watch her back through squinting eyes. The ocean laps at the windows, docile in the wake of its flooding violence. It sits, like a dog, 50 stories high.
Her lover lays dying on the couch in the corner, gasping for air through the water in his lungs.
You are five years old again, watching your mother walk away in rice paddy reflection. Your sister is tall like her, hair dark and curtained like hers. She is too big for this world, this girl you held on your hip.
—
There is love you store in ice cubes. Frozen pieces of your little sister. She is too big for your icebox, but you are selfish and cruel and you won't let her go. You tell your stories to trays in the dark of your kitchen, the same way you used to talk to her.
It's hard, these days, to breathe past the moisture in your lungs. The cards she made you sit on their shelf, papier-maché parents in the shape of a brother. You read them every night. Lull yourself to sleep with her years of growing vocabulary.
Your hands twitch and ache at your sides, your throat burns. It's like you're choking, drowning in your aching chest. You promised your family you wouldn't drink again. Little sister, sad and scared the way you never wanted her to be. Little brother, confused and too small to understand.
Instead, you flex your fingers at your sides. Teach kids how to make fists. You watch the children you teach grow, walk them through forms like you know what you're doing. Like you're some kind of role model. Instead, you're just sad. Small in your skeleton, skin loose in patches around your bones.
—
She comes back from the sea different. The salt crusts thick in her hair, like barnacles on the side of a boat. She comes back frantic, she comes back settled in her own skin. Her legs are steady on the deck, rushing to and fro.
This, at least, you know how to handle. Your sister, at her most agitated. You brush out her hair, scrape away the sea while she explains. There is a serpent, and a villain, and the world is ending again. It always is. You heat up the kettle.
Your sister drinks it too fast, burns herself on the tea you make and you feel like it should mean something. You're always doing this, trying to find meaning in the pain.
—
Little sister in the creek like a frog, her wide eyes and round cheeks. She moves like the reeds, steady and waving in the tiny waves you make together. She is six years old to your eight, three years past the end of the world. Her hands are small and wrinkled, pruney in the murky water.
The water beats against your ears, spirals in front of your eyes in silt filled bubbles when your head goes under. You slip, third-hand rain boots sliding on the muddy bank. You smear your lungs with muck, settle sediment in your chest. It's an hour in a minute, your sister's scream rattling your teeth.
Back on solid ground, you heave and tremble like a leaf in the current. The water had moved with your sister's voice, a wave and a surge. It flings you to shore.
You blame it on exhaustion, on delirium, on being eight years old.
—
Your sister creates waves, great pushes and pulls that rock the boat. Against a green sky, she is greater than the ocean. Greater than a god, or a realm, or any other word that means unstoppable. She stands in the center, unmoving.
It makes sense, in a way that makes you feel a little stupid. She's always been good in the water, smooth and graceful among the waves like she was born to be there. Water always splashed higher around her, surging walls of brine that never knocked her off her feet.
You are five years old, you are eight years old, you are watching your sister breathe in tides. Despite everything, you are afraid.
Of her, perhaps. The little girl you held to your chest on cold nights, the little girl you grew up for. She stands in the water, and you never learned how to swim.
—
You aren't needed here. They leave you on shore while your sister descends. A part of you is grateful, the part that is still young and afraid.
A part of you can't breathe at the thought of her below the waves.
In your memories, you are five years old and your little sister won't let go of your hand. Sticky fingers press into your palm, still wet from being tucked inside her mouth. You don't know what to do. She is loud and annoying and she is too small to be alone.
Little sister in your arms like a stone, you don't know how to hold her right without your father's hands behind yours. Your mother filled the basin with steady hands, water as an extension of being. You copy her as well as you can, chubby hands clumsy on the taps.
She is small and she is precious and bath time was always in the evening. These days, you're not sure you're all that precious and you are bigger than her, but this, you can do. You place her in the water.
What happens next, you don't let yourself speak aloud.
Little sister in your arms like a stone, breathing now where she was not before. You are five years old and you do not try to bathe her again.
—
You see your sister in the waves, walking away again and again. Rewind the moment, watch it once more. She holds her form like a blanket around her shoulders, clenched in two giddy fists. Her hair floats around transparent shoulders like a halo, like algae, like maybe they're the same thing. You stand on the shore, watching the water fall and rise, turning sand to glass.
There is water filling your lungs, finding empty spaces next to all the smoke you've inhaled. This is all that is left of your sister. Choke, and drown, and carry her with you.