– 0-mg –
Your sister has been evicted from her apartment—again.
You count this to be her eleventh eviction. This time, instead of paying her landlord rent for the last three months, your sister bought:
- lots of cocaine,
- even more molly,
- Burning Man tickets,
- plane tickets to Nevada,
- a 10-person tent,
- a persian cat,
- and a VR headset.
You’re not sure where she got the money for all of it, as your sister has never held down a job for more than a few weeks at a time, but you’re not surprised that she didn’t use it to pay her rent. You’re also not surprised when she bangs on your door, begging to crash on your couch. She says she’ll only be here for a week—two weeks tops—which you know is not true. The last time she crashed on your couch was just for a week, but the time before that, she crashed on your couch for three years.
During that first year, your mom died. You couldn’t bring yourself to tell anyone, so your sister was the only one who knew. She held you every night as you cried yourself to sleep. When you woke up in the morning, she wouldn’t let you go. Your sister threw out all of the food in the house because “mom wouldn’t have wanted you to get fat in her absence.” You agreed with her. You lost 36 pounds that year. You’ve never felt so fragile.
The second year, your ex-fiancé broke off the engagement. The first night without your fiancé, your sister got wasted. You held her hair back while she puked.
The third year, you fractured your wrist while rock climbing. You couldn’t type, so your boss told you to go on disability. With nothing to do and nowhere to go for months, you were almost glad when your sister showed up: at least you won’t be alone.
That year, your sister stole your identity, opened up seven new credit cards, and maxed them all out.
And now here she is again, at your doorstep. You’d be crazy to let her in, but she’s your sister. You don’t know who you’d be without her.
So you open the door.
– 0-mg –
It takes less than 24 hours for your sister’s chaos to consume your whole house. You find yourself always plucking something off somewhere it doesn’t belong: a dirty T-shirt off the living room lamp, soda cans wedged between the couch cushions, joint roaches out of the bathtub drain, panties out of the kitchen sink. You vacuum and scrub for hours.
As with every time your sister crashes on your couch, this soon becomes a daily ritual. Sometimes, cleaning up after your sister keeps you in your house all day.
Weeks pass. You start to regularly miss appointments and meetings.
Your friends complain that they never see you anymore. They’re worried about you. They don’t know about your sister because you’ve never told them about her. You’re worried what they’ll think of you: they’ll think you’re weak for not kicking your sister out. They’ll call you pathetic behind your back. They just won’t understand that she’s your sister. She’s been with you your entire life. She’s a part of you.
You couldn’t get rid of her if you tried.
– 0-mg –
It’s been two months. Your friends say that if you don’t come out to them, then they’ll come in to you. They decide you’re hosting a dinner party. It sends you into a nervous breakdown, but you don’t know how to get them to not come, so you give your sister $200 to stay out for the night. Then, you make it look like your sister was never here. You clean and clean and clean. You light all of your strongest candles. You shower for the first time in a week. You put on pants with a zipper and button. You catch yourself in the mirror—you actually look like a person again. When you open the door to welcome your friends, you start to actually feel like a person again. Your friends bring you food, wine, and a bouquet for the table. They hug you, ask if you’re okay, ask where you’ve been. You deflect with a laugh, saying “work has been crazy,” even though you’ve been calling in sick for weeks.
Over dinner, they fill you in on the talk of the town. You talk about all of the new shows on Netflix—because besides cleaning up after your sister, binge-watching is the only other activity you have had energy for. They reminisce of the good old days, retelling stories you’ve heard a thousand times, but they still make you laugh until your abdomen hurts. Your house is filled with hoots and hollers and life—you feel so alive again—
and then somebody is violently banging on the door. It’s your sister. she seems to have lost her house key so she kicks the door down, clean off its hinges, and there are a bunch of strangers behind her, stampeding into your house – you suppose she met them at the bar or the club or on the sidewalk or in an alley and somehow the strangers all look familiar, they look like your exes and other mistakes you’ve made, and they’re screaming at each other in the middle of your living room but your friends don’t seem to notice, you realize that you’re the only one who can see them so you jump out of your seat and try to play it cool, hoping your sister will take them and leave, so you go to serve the cheesecake but now your sister’s strangers are brawling on your living room floor while you’re trying to focus on slicing the cheesecake and then your sister throws a punch and misses and her fist strikes the TV and the screen shatters, glass flying everywhere, and you’re walking around the table placing a slice on each of your friends’ plates, the shards slice the bottoms of your feet but you keep a smile on your face while you trail blood behind you and all around your kitchen and the strangers who look like your past keep swinging just a few feet away.
This scene continues for hours until you fake a yawn and tell your friends that you’re tired, that you have an early day in the morning, that you need to go to sleep, that you need them to leave.
The next morning, you decide it’s time. You need help. You don’t know where to get help. You go to your kitchen table, where your laptop is already open and waiting. You sit down. You hover your fingers over the keyboard to type, but you’re not even sure what to enter into Google.
You drop the tips of your fingers onto the keyboard—lightly.
Uh oh.
Your fingers immediately adhere to the keys.
You recognize that sharp superglue odor just a little too late. Looks like your sister decided to prank you. You wriggle in the seat, but she’s coated that with superglue too. You’re stuck in this pose: frozen, moments away from finding help.
No. No more. You refuse to be stuck here. You cry out, hoping somebody will hear you.
Your sister creeps up from behind, the bottle of superglue in her hand. Like a striking viper, she whips the bottle around your head and glues your lips shut. Your scream is muffled. Stuck in your mouth. You can’t make a sound, so you start to cry. Your sister giggles. This prank is funny. She’s having fun. She squeezes beads of superglue along your eyelashes.
You try not to blink, but you can’t help it.
Your sister wraps her arms around you. Shhh, there, there.
– 0-mg –
The only time your sister will let you leave the house is when the fridge is empty and she gets hungry. You sprint to your car in the driveway before she can change her mind and order DoorDash. The car sputters when you start the ignition. It hasn’t been driven in a while.
Driving through the neighborhood, you feel so giddy and free. You turn on the radio and flip through the stations, listening for something peppy, something poppy.
All the radio gives you is static.
You go through all of the stations once, then twice, then a third time. You make it halfway to the grocery story before you deflate. First, it’s a single tear sliding down your cheek. Then, you’re sobbing uncontrollably, your whole body shaking. You can’t see anymore. You have to pull over. Put the car in park. Pull out your phone, call your friend. She answers and she says she’s busy, she’s studying for her psychiatrist licensing exam. Beg her to not hang up. Tell her about your sister, then tell her again, slower, because she can’t understand your blubbering. She listens. She says soothing things. She gives you a number to write down, instructs you to call ASAP, tells you they’ll help.
– 100-mg (Red round tablet. Take one in the morning.) –
Your sister still hasn’t moved out, but it’s okay: you fixed it. You gave the master bedroom to your sister, and now you sleep in the office. The office-now-bedroom is pretty small—you had to downgrade from a full-sized bed to a twin—but this was the right decision. Your sister’s chaos is contained. She has an ensuite bathroom, and you even put a mini-fridge in the closet, so she rarely comes out.
Still—the walls are thin. Sometimes, when you’re in bed, trying to fall asleep, you can hear her brooding.
Once your house feels more like your home again, you redownload the apps. One evening, you bring a woman you met on Bumble home. You’ve been on a few casual dates, and now this woman is the first woman you’ve brought to bed since your failed engagement. You’re a little anxious about how you’ll perform—it has been a while. You do the math in your head. Close to two years. You wince, then hope that Bumble Woman didn’t notice.
Holding her hand, you pull her to the bed. She crawls on top of you. Pulls her dress over her head, then your shirt over yours. She scoops your breasts in her hands and kisses them softly. You sigh. Two years. Bumble Woman kisses you down your belly. She stops at your hip bone and pulls away for just a moment, brushing your birthmark right there with her finger—just how your ex-fiancé used to—
You wince again. You turn your head away—
There, around the gap under your bedroom door, you notice a dark shadow pooling. It’s spreading. You nudge Bumble Woman off and swing your legs off the bed. When your feet hit the floor, your toes squelch. The carpet is soaked.
Bumble Woman is still on the bed. She’s confused, probably upset. She doesn’t understand why you’re yanking your shirt back on and running out of the bedroom. She asks if you’re okay. You don’t answer because your entire living room is flooding. The water laps at the legs of your furniture. Bumble Woman comes out of the bedroom in just her bra and panties. She seems entirely unperturbed by the lake that is your house—instead, she wants to know what happened with you, why you left her, if she did something wrong—in fact, she seems to not even notice the water, nor the wet feeling swallowing her feet.
A cackle breaks through the door of the master bedroom.
Of course. Your sister. You can hear the bathtub going. She’s flooded the bathroom.
You waddle to her door and furiously twist the doorknob. It’s locked. Bumble Woman in the background asks again: are you okay?
No, but it’s not me, it’s my sister, you want to say. But she won’t understand. She doesn’t know you have a sister. You don’t want to explain it to her, and besides, your living room is going underwater, and then you’ll probably drown in it, so you simply don’t have the time to explain. Instead, you tell Bumble Woman that she has to leave, this was a mistake, you’re sorry for wasting her time.
– 200-mg (Pink round tablet. Take one in the morning.) –
Keeping your sister inside the house did not work, so you convert the garage into a private living space for her. You even add soundproofing insulation and tinted windows.
Your sister gets a drum kit. Every night, she bangs on them until the morning birds sing. You can’t ever hear her, but you can see the windows trembling.
Since moving your sister into the garage, you’ve been able to return to work. You have so much energy and focus these days, even though you can’t fall asleep most nights. You’ve caught up on months’ worth of projects and tasks. Your boss doesn’t ask questions about why you’ve been work-from-home for so long; you’re grateful for this.
One day, your sister shows up at your workplace.
You have no idea how she got by the front desk and your nosy coworkers—you don’t even know how she got your work address—yet here she is, towering over you in your office chair, demanding money that you don’t have. She says she needs it for a trip: she wants to travel around Southeast Asia, or maybe South America, she hasn’t decided yet, but she really needs to leave the country to “find herself,” and she feels that you owe this to her, somehow. You tell her that you can’t afford to give her more money—you’ve spent all of your disposable income and some of your savings on feeding and housing her—but she won’t take no for an answer. She tells you that just because you’re wasting your life, doesn’t mean she has to waste hers. Just because you’re a coward who never goes after what you want. Just because you never moved out of the state where you grew up, even though you always said you would. Just because you failed to achieve any of your dreams, and now you’re stuck working a desk job that doesn’t add up to anything. Just because you didn’t chase after your ex, didn’t fight for her. She raises her voice until she’s shrieking at you, until you can’t even make sense of the sounds she’s making, until her voice drowns out your thoughts.
None of your coworkers come to your defense. You slide out of your chair and crawl under your desk, hoping your sister will just go away.
– 300-mg (White round tablet. Take one in the morning.) –
You find your sister an apartment in the next zip code over. You pay her rent. You never have a reason to be in her area, and she doesn’t have a reason to be in yours—yet you’re still on edge whenever you get a little too close within her radius.
You’re safe for a few months—happy, even. Then you find a manila envelope on your front door step. It’s filled with newspaper clippings.
Dire statistics about the climate crisis.
Images of the genocide in Gaza.
Stories of missing children.
Homicides. Suicides. Homicide-suicides. Obituaries of people who died horrible deaths. Of people who died too young. Of old people who died alone.
Soon, the envelopes are everywhere. Every day, when you step out your front door, you see them shoved into the bushes, strewn across your lawn, stuffed in your mailbox, taped to your windows, jammed into the cracks in the asphalt of the driveway. You never see your sister, but somehow, her shadow still lingers.
– 450-mg (Purple round tablet. Take three times daily.) –
You took out loans in your own name to buy your sister a small house on the opposite side of the country. She never visits, never calls. You haven’t seen one of her manila envelopes in years.
But sometimes, the pills you take aren’t enough to hold her a country’s distance away.
A ghost of your sister floats through your mind when you miss your dead mom, when nothing but static plays on the radio, when your new-girlfriend-who’s-not-your-ex-fiancé touches your birthmark. When she does break through just a bit, you wonder what she’s up to. How she spends her days. If she’ll ever find her way back to your doorstep, asking to crash on your couch. You don’t really miss her—or maybe you do. It’s just that she has always been around, your entire life, and now you can’t help but feel—off, without her.
Untethered, almost.
Whenever you leave your house, the sun is always shining. And you actually notice how warm it feels on your skin. And the skies are always clear. And you don’t have to hide from your friends anymore. And everything around you seems to just—glow—
and when you move your body, you feel so light—and nothing feels quite real anymore—and your feet rarely touch the ground anymore and you’re always laughing even when you don’t have a reason—and your laughter sounds—like bells—or maybe like windchimes—hollow—and the sun is just so warm you want to touch it and anyways you’re so light so empty you don’t feel anything anymore you can just—reach up touch it—maybe even—float away—
K. Degala-Paraíso (she/they) is a Filipinx-American writer based in Los Angeles/NYC. Her work has appeared in [PANK], ANMLY, and elsewhere; and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She teaches creative writing and likes her mangoes sour. More: kdegalaparaiso.com.
Image: stress.org
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 