Big Sister Luck

Round the bowl I plod. The task at hand, dishes. Mood: Big sisters lead lives that suck. Big sisters are assigned tasks that big brothers evade without awareness. Luck finds boys like mold finds bathrooms. Insidiously.

Darkness infringes on the daylight used to complete my chore. A scream strikes the air at a pitch that rivals the goddess Mariah Carey herself. The bowl slips into a loud collision with the stainless-steel sink. “What the heck?” I mumble. The soft shudder of our double screen door sounds and a bitter chill foreign to the tropics bleeds inside.

“It,” Malakai, my youngest sibling, starts. “It’s coming.”

Fear, like light, finds his eyes and focuses his gaze out the window.

“What?” I ask, alarmed by his hurried breaths. Malakai is always cucumber and cold carrots, calm. He struggles to form words around the tremble in his lips.

“The Chicken tornado.”

***

Plump chickens’ cascade through the air. The winged creatures gaze at us with intention. Instinct or conditioning demand my outstretched wet hands take hold of my brother and pull him close. The theatrical winds die down when my hands have dried, and I force my bony body to shield him.

The sight that settle around us, save for the chickens themselves and the humidity, is wholly novel. A substance at our feet licks my sandals and pleased with the taste, laps my toes. The sensation is cold and curious. Alive.

Malakai and I look up and there is a void more profound than darkness. The black hole of space is a painful attack on our eyes and we each turn to each other, our frightened expressions carrying the horror of the moment further afoot.

Millions of Silkies, a breed of chicken nowhere native to our Caribbean home with their densely packed satin fluff feathers, clamor around with gooey interest. A tart smell grows stronger the closer they tiptoe. Each wonted flap elicits a gag from Malakai.

“Stop,” I plead. The outcry stirs a commotion and the chickens bark, suspicious sneers on their sharp black and brown beaks.

“Monica?” my brother whimpers, his seven-year-old arms wrapped tight around my waist. “I want to go home.”

I try to bend down and utter words of assurance like heroes manage with select kids in action movies, but he refuses any effort of amputation. My stomach churns with the strain of his restrictive hold and the phone in my back pocket pops out.

“No!”

My attempt to catch it before it falls into the midnight liquid is unsuccessful.

“I’m so sorry, Monica.” Malakai laments. He pulls away by a hair and we each stare down at the spot it fell. “I didn’t see it -,”

Before he can wrap up his apology, my phone breaks through the surface, alight with the yellow outline of a Silky on an otherwise black screen. The image blinks out and the green vertical line of a factory reset appears in the upper left corner. Pick me up, it types.

Compelled by a lack of options, I gasp and oblige. Point me at the Leather Clad Leader. I hoist the phone up and it zones in on a brown vested chicken with cream plumage. Bow.

“What’s happening?” I ask.

You’re following commands from a sentient phone. Now bow.

What was meant as a rhetorical question has produced an answer that leaves me even more bewildered, but again, I heed its direction and when I stand, await further guidance.

I will act as a translator. Keep my camera pointed at the Leather Clad Leader. They will decide your fate.

My throat swallows a proper gulp of air, and my hands shake under the device as if it weighs hundreds of pounds. Sweat falls into my eyes and I can smell the scent of my own fear rivaling that of the environment. My brother breaks down and pinches his nose for relief, a helpless glint in his eyes.

Leather Clad Leader extends his wings, and they span on for what looks like an eternity. The screen blares a hyper blown out version of the gesture and Welcome stranger appears in comic sans below it. Underneath that, the phone writes, Greet the leader, don’t be rude.

“Please, send us back,” I say, my larynx strained and squeaky.

Point my screen towards the Leather Clad Leader. Now. Goddamn idiot -,”

Geez, my phone is rude. The chicken leader, wings folded, saunters within reach. His plucky head bobs towards the screen then wobbles side to side in agitation. When he stops, his glossy black orbs fix on me. I fumble the phone back around.

The comic sans text is packed in a long paragraph that defies the time it took the silky to convey this message: Yo, yo, yo. We got another woman in the house! So excited to meet a Silk-less girl, you’re my first. But yeah, sure thing. You just have to push the blue button behind me to get home. It’s so ‘boing’! It’ll zip you right out of here. But the boy stays. Girls gotta’ eat!

“What the fuck?” I say, perturbed.

“I’m telling grandma,” Malakai wails.

I glare at him but given his tear-streaked face and the message read, I let it go. He is just a kid. The few habits he has are hard to overcome. I turn my attention back to the Silky leader and regret my sexist assumption that the top dog – pardon the phrase - of chickens would be male. Conditioning, am I right?

A square of space appears as the silky leader steps aside. I catch the vibrant glimmer of the blue button. It buzzes with energy, pulsating in deaf echoes that visibly frolic on the surface of the liquid floor. It strikes me that we should dash to it just as a tiny beep escapes my phone. So, are you going to answer?

“Give me a break. She’s asking me to sacrifice my brother. I am responsible for him. My grandmother would kill me if something were to happen.”

Ah, yes. I have heard her sonic rumbles. All the same, you must still address Leather Clad Leader.

“Leather Clad Leader, I appreciate your welcome. But I need to get home. I have dishes to do. My grandmother isn’t a very patient person and she asked that I care for my brother. I’m afraid I need to press that button to send us both home.”

I turn the phone around to face the silky and watch as she shakes her head in a dismissive wiggle. She lifts her eyes to meet mine then stares at the screen. After a series of flaps and a caw that rings on and on and on for ages, it is my turn to read.

No.

Malakai tightens his hold. The pressure is familiar and unpleasant. Grandma has always said “it is your job to look after your siblings,” as if the eldest, Gabe, has a duty only to himself. I am the one expected to clean up, to rally us together, to be the glue. It’s always me and it is the opposite of fair.

“Is there really no other way? How could you eat a little boy?”

Beak pointed at the phone, the silky cackles an unmistakable laugh. She “body-rolls” her head and neck then gives me a pointed look. I pour over the message. Obviously, we are not going to do that. You silly goose, so I really do mean silly.

Air escapes me, a gust I was unaware rested in my chest, eager for release. “Thank God. Then what do you want to do with him?”

Leather Clad Leader chews on the phone case a moment, backs up, waggles her tail feathers, and bumps back into place. She snaps her head at an angle, as though to say, go ahead.

I take up the phone then slam it to my chest. “Malakai, you’re squeezing the life out of me. Please let me breathe a bit. Here, hold my arm so I can read, okay? Please.” I am unable to catch my breath and with the new freedom, I bumble from one soaked foot to the other, back, and forth. My hand with a mind of its own pushes the phone’s ungodly screen under my nose.

I was being sarcastic, can’t you tell? Of course we are going to eat him, duh. Don’t act pretentious. Y’all fry us with grease hotter than the sun over there. That’s why we're here, in the magnetic waters of Every Mother. Here, even your sandals can have their voice awakened. All life exists here, animated even when inanimate. Vocal even when voiceless, like your phone. It tells us about all, and in order to sustain that knowledge, Every Mother needs us to feast on the blood of men - and I do mean men - to replenish all-knowing magnetism.

Men, even as babies, do the same to us gal pals all over space and time. Figuratively and literally. Just desserts, I say.

I close my eyes and take in the truth of those words and think back to when my father abandoned all four of us with our grandmother. My sister and I have been nannies ever since. And what of my brothers? Running amuck. Life at their leisure.

“Okay.”

Malakai screams. He understood more than I suspected. “What? Monica, no!”

I break away and run at the blue button. Once pressed – Leather Clad Leader did not oversell it, and it was deliciously boingy – it envelops me in a whirlwind of silence. A minute later, I think I hear the vicious bleat of a million silkies.

I abandon the thought like I abandoned my brother and look down.

I find myself elbow deep in dishwater.

“Big sister luck has its limits.”