'The Scar Above Her Lip' by Faye Brinsmead

Tell me about when I was born, the ghost of my sister begs.

I remember icicles melting, I say. Snow turning to slush. Dirt poking through.

The ghost of my sister thins. No more talk of melting and thawing.

When you were bigger, there were picnics, I say. In the pine woods, on a butter-yellow blanket.

She seems to want me to go on.

There was Rex, our German Shepherd. He growled and bared his teeth when Dad fed him.

But what about me? she insists. Coming home from the hospital. Being bathed on the kitchen table.

Once, maple sap ran down the kitchen walls, I say. Mum bent over a cookbook, muttering. But the sap behaved so strangely. After hours and hours of boiling, stickiness everywhere. Only half a cup of syrup.

She’s thinning again.

Should I tell her I cherish these visits? On nights I can’t sleep, towards morning, when awareness liquefies.  

Should I recount her death? How she skipped meals, jogged all night. Slowly regained the lightness of the baby I can’t remember. How, wasted and weak, she staggered out of hot bathwater, fell.

There, I could say, pointing to the mark above her lip. That’s the scar.

Then, clinics. Weigh-ins. Fine down sprouting from her blue skin like translucent lawn. Discharged, she gripped my hand, all bone. Sat at her place like a spectre, retching at the sight of food.

The hardly-anything in her bed one morning. Sunlight sliding, the rest still.

She never asks about any of that. Only the void where her story should start.

Don’t go, I plead.

Cold light slices the curtains.

Next time, I tell myself. I’m a storyteller. I’ll make it up.

But next time the scar above her lip will wring the truth from me again.

 

 

An earlier version of 'The Scar Above Her Lip' was first published at Reflex Fiction on 22 September 2019.