Saturday 27 June 2015

'Sister' by Claire Hennessy

So your baby sister was on the kitchen floor with a knife. This is what she tells you. Just a teeny bit of self-harm, she says lightly, like you are discussing a late-night text to an inappropriate man.
                She is light and air and you are cold. You feel suddenly she is on the other side of something, like you are separate species – like Jesus Christ who takes a fucking kitchen knife to their arms –and she says, it’s fine, honestly.
And all you can think of is shrieking over her two-year-old self putting radiator knobs in her mouth, in the days when they twisted right off, and now you want to pick up that knife and hold it against her throat, and say, if it’s so fucking fine then why don’t I just do it for you, huh, and watch her shake and shake ‘til the poison’s out of her.

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