Your sister is losing her voice. It feels like it happened overnight, her lips turning into rubber, but it’s been almost four months, and your sister, who would have suffocated you for calling her doll-like, spends her days sitting by the window, looking at everything and nothing, all at once. For what it’s worth, you try to remind her of her human self. You clamp down on the flap of fat on her arms but not a pipe. A deep paper cut exacts only a hiss of air. She has long, dark Rapunzel hair that thins into her calves, and with a pair of garden scissors, you give her the first haircut she has had in sixteen years. All her history is in her hair, and that’s the problem, you think, the weight of it.
Three sombreros hung on pegs in a cantina, where their owners stood at a bar, soaking in the tequila. The sombreros got to talking and soon discovered they all despised their owners. “My man,” a sombrero said, “came home drunk every night and beat his wife and children with a hard stick he kept just for that purpose.” Another sombrero confessed that his owner sat on a porch and shot cats that had strayed into his garden. He skinned the cats and displayed their pelts over the fireplace.
Someone nodding, and the light pressing down as though it had weight. And right in the middle of what I want to say there’s a long row of chairs. There are green, red, yellow arches that gradually contract and close, like doors. Like a disease whose threshold no one can cross, she says.