The Sisters

The cuticles of her left hand were creeks, meaty and flooded with blood and her right pointer finger dug into them time and time again. It was almost rhythmic, the pain, and Danny forgot it as her knee jammed itself over and over against the rickety airport chair.  

It was late enough in the night to be early morning and those around her who were awake had wells for eyes; deep and full of stories that had been melted down into dark, muted ink. In the distance a night shift janitor had fallen to his knees, scrubbing a dark spot on the floor that Danny couldn’t quite make out.  

She could see the muscles of his arms, thin and wiry, growing stiffer as he scrubbed. They would snap if he kept pushing them like that, and she had the oddest sensation that this was something they were both aware of. Nevertheless, the man kept going, dragging the rag across the spot, faster and faster and faster. The urge to stand up shot through her, feverishly cold and sharp. And then, the black spot, the one he’d been scrubbing all this time, began to crawl up his arms. 

 It started slow at first, nibbling at the latex fingertips of his gloves, but there was an obvious hunger to it and it soon lost its hesitancy. It took the backs of his hands, swallowing the palms and following the pathways the veins in his arms created. The realization of what was happening to him did not seem to fill the janitor with any fear at all. Rather, relief. He stopped scrubbing, throwing the rag into the blackness and resting his head down. The thing -whatever it was- swallowed him whole in an instant.  

Danny stood up, partially out of shock and partially because no one seemed to think it was appropriate to help this man. She ran over to him, or rather, she ran over to the shape of him, of which was slowly dissolving into the very spot he’d spent the last moments of his life trying to destroy. But, by the time she got there, he was gone. Gone too were the cleaning supplies, the rag, and the scuff in the waxed floors his knees might have made. It was as if he’d never existed at all. Danny blinked, lungs sputtering from the run, as she stared at the fluorescent gloss of the airport floor, a flood of disbelief rolling coldly throughout her. 

He was there. He’d just been there. There had been a man on the night shift, scrubbing the floors on his hands and knees. He was real. He had been right there.  

She turned back to the others, who’d been sitting on the chairs with her, searching their faces for some sort of sign that any of them had also just witnessed this. But not one met her eye, each staring straight ahead, frozen as if time had not moved and nothing had changed at all. Danny almost gave up, a terrified laugh bubbling deep within her throat and threatening to burst, before her eyes caught onto something not quite like the rest. There, in the corner, was a woman. Head down, black hair curtaining nearly every part of her face, save her eyes.  

They swished back and forth, nearly jittering in their sockets- lacking the calloused, unobservant gaze of all the other witnesses. She had also seen the man get swallowed and was pretending she hadn’t.  

“Hey!” Danny suddenly shouted, the sound bolting from her lungs without permission or patience, only fear. “Hey! I know you saw that!” She yelled.  

But it was too late, and her voice was drowned out by the sound of the luggage belt groaning to a start and passengers de-boarding into the gate.  

The sound, sudden and jarring and purposeful, blasted out Danny’s vision; turning the terminal into a blur that wouldn’t focus. Wouldn’t focus as those that had been sitting with her got up, reaching into their coats and pulling out folded signs with bolded, capital lettering. She knew the woman with the dark hair was escaping, the only other person who also knew the fate of the man.  

Danny had one of those signs tucked into her coat too, folded into the pocket over her heart for safekeeping. But she couldn’t take it out. Couldn’t look away from that bright glossy spot on the floor that had once been a pit dark and hungry enough to swallow a man whole. If she did, she might forget where it happened, seeing as there was no mark, and she couldn’t lose the woman and the spot. So, she didn’t look away. That is, until someone called her name 

“Danny?” The voice was soft, peppered with a certain sort of fatigue that’s exclusively born of long flights, and it was one that pulled on the rubber strings of her consciousness; snapping her back into reality. 

“Lara?” It was the name on the sign in her coat pocket, the name that had found her in the airport in the first place. The name that belonged to the women in front of her, and had belonged in Danny’s mouth all her life. There were some obvious differences between the two of them; mainly the color of their eyes and the chemicals in their brains, but besides that they held the same inner structures. Sisters. 

Danny felt herself being examined in full, like she was a patient to a physician who loved her, and tried to imagine what Lara saw. Since they had seen each other last her hair -like a wild flowery weed- had grown out, her clothing had become unfamiliar and browner, and her nails had become a permanent pink with the bloodied pulp of cuticles she’d developed a bad habit of mining. But beyond this Lara kept looking, and she, very suddenly, understood Lara was looking for evidence of her crime; leaving Danny alone in what she had worked so hard to escape from.  

They didn’t hug until they reached the parking lot; withstanding anything beyond eye contact through the luggage belt and trek through the endless terminals. Inside the airport a sort of wall existed between the two, built from their rotten last moments in that same building months ago. But, in the parking lot, under a canopy of exhaust and roaring engines, the wall collapsed.  

“I missed you,” Lara exhaled, gathering all of Danny up like she was nothing more than a paper, wishing to be crushed.  

At first, Danny’s eyes bulged and her mind began to beep erratically; unsure of what was so suddenly holding it. But, after several seconds of Lara’s arms being wrapped around her, Danny’s body understood it was finally receiving what it had been craving for months and months and months, and all beeping stopped.  

“Yeah, me too” Danny mumbled, voice young in the shoulder of her sister’s coat. It was new and black and thick and long and overall very New York. It smelled of lilac and warmly tinted perfume and screamed LARA in all the ways Danny had known she’d dream of being. “I should have kept in touch,” she said, a little louder and in place of all the words that had been building in her head since the last goodbye.  

“We can never do this again, okay?” Lara pulled away from the hug, holding Danny still at the shoulders, “I love you too much,”  

This was Lara going to New York and leaving Danny to fend for herself in the very house they lived and the one Lara was fleeing from. This was the fight that had scared even the attendees as Danny sobbed wetly and begged Lara not to board her flight. This was Danny refusing to say goodbye and the months of zero contact that occurred between then and now. Asking to never do this again was asking for forgiveness.  

In another universe it would not have leaked from Danny, pouring first from her bloodied cuticles and then from every orifice of her skin. Forgiveness would have required months of trust rebuilt; the work laborious enough to make muscles cable thick.  

However, there were bigger battles to be waged, chiefly, the reason for Lara’s return to Indianapolis. And so, all was instantaneously voided and sunk deep into the thick tar beneath their feet. 

Danny nodded.  She forgave.

If she had not, she might have found her own black spot, of the same family as the one that had swallowed the janitor, back at the house. Or rather, the ruins of what would soon become an Estate Sale.  

Blackness might’ve gorged on the backsides and palms of her hands, the pathways her veins made in her arms. She might have felt sweet relief in her own consumption as a woman in a black coat watched but never intervened.