That Afternoon

“Don’t touch that.” 

“Why not?” 

“You don’t know what you are doing, and I’m not going to be here to fix it after you fuck it all up.” 

Andrea eyed her older sister with a glance somewhere between contempt and sly amusement, but nevertheless put the slightly cracked, ashen skull head back down on the top shelf of her sister’s armoire. 

“Mama says you’ve gone crazy.” 

“Mama wouldn’t know crazy if it hit her with a red arrow in between the eyeballs.” 

Emily was not one for subtleties, and among a face of cracked paleness and brightly red cheeks, she looked like an angry Raggedy Ann doll ready to lay a curse on anyone who looked at her funny. Even now as she hastily packed up her belongings into laden cardboard boxes, her wild bright red hair seemed to swallow her boney frame into an envelope of contempt and frenzied frustration; indeed, she only paused her ministrations to either groan in agony, or, to occasionally scold Andrea. 

“I don’t get why you need me here to help you move. You’ve seem to got a good handle on it already”, Andrea commented as she shuffled her feet below her. Emily huffed loudly but didn’t pause her actions. It was an obsessive ritual; one Andrea had seen before. Emily carefully picked each of her unique items from precariously scattered shelves around her apartment, wrapped them delicately in newspaper, and then laid them to rest with their other siblings in moving boxes. Vases, ornaments, shrunken heads; all of them had seen these newspapers before. 

“Wow,” Andrea bemoaned as she watched Emily place each item with the utmost care into its respected box, “you’d make such a good mother”. 

“Shut up”, Emily hissed between her large front teeth, “You know I didn’t need you here. I just asked you over to get mama to stop bitchin and moaning about talking to you”. 

Andrea reached up to bite her thumbnail, carefully balancing the hard cartilage between her teeth and the soft flesh of her finger. She was used to Emily’s cruelty in her later years, but the comment about their mother made her uneasy. “Why would mom want you to talk to me?” she mumbled quietly with her thumb still in her mouth. 

Emily was quiet for a moment, but only after five seconds did she cease her packing, stand up straight with a long, groaning ache, and crack her knuckles before staring steadily at Andrea. Her freckles flashed dangerously across her cheeks as Emily offered a small smirk of sarcasm, raising her boney eyebrows to the top of her forehead, “Oh, you know mama. She’s been worried about me since Jake left and all that. Thought you might be able to talk some sense into me, seeing how you’re the top shot lawyer or some shit.”

Crack. Andrea had bitten the top half of her thumbnail, and she tasted in horror the blood that began to fill her mouth. Savoring the salty iron in shock, Andrea quickly picked up the discarded beer can next to her on the floor and spit delicately into its cavern. Andrea was hardly a lawyer; she wasn’t even fully employed. The only thing she had told her mother in the past two years was that on December 18th she had suddenly decided to pack up her belongings, adopt a bastard dog named Grover, and move away from Pickens, Georgia to Charlotte on the fringed hopes of a law scholarship. 

Not only did the law scholarship fall through, Grover ran away on their second day in Charlotte, and Andrea found herself unceremoniously working as a temp in various locations, all ironically next to Brian and Folger’s Law LLC. Emily watched Andrea’s discomfort with an obvious grin; she had always been one for sadism, but lately, her obsession with the macabre and grotesque had taken an even more unhealthy turn. Every space and corner in Emily’s cramped apartment were covered with evidence of the occult; shrunken heads in green viles, tattooed voodoo dolls of all shapes and sizes, lizard tails and rabbit teeth, animal fetuses in pickle jars, pentagrams carved in the wall like a disturbed children’s’ drawings, and an assortment of books and ouija boards scattering the filthy floor, complete with Blair Witch stick figures hanging from the ceiling. As bad as Andrea’s lie was, Emily’s situation had to be worse. It was no wonder Emily’s landlord had enough and was evicting her. If the five month’s back rent wasn’t enough, it was one glimpse into her apartment that did it. 

Yet even with homelessness facing her 35-year-old sister, Andrea knew that Emily reveled in Andrea’s obvious discomfort. This wasn’t the first time Emily had found herself in this situation, and it was only on the assumption of two missing people that Andrea finally heeded her mother’s plea to confront her eldest daughter on the outskirts of East Jesus nowhere. Anger and animosity were a double edge sword, and Emily wielded hers with a fury that shocked even her younger sister. 

Without a word, Andrea shot the bloodied beer can clear across the room at Emily’s head. Emily dodged only at the last second, swerving and watching as it exploded with a pop at the back of the wall, taking with it an assortment of dusty gemstones and talismans that looked straight out of Salem’s asshole. 

Emily’s eyes blazed with furry, so much so that her whole body seemed to glow red. But Andrea stood her ground. A five-year age difference between them, and only now did Andrea feel she knew how to handle the brunt of Emily’s irrational mania. “Remind you of someone?”, Andrea asked carefully. 

Emily ceased her anger, if only for a moment, and slowly reached her fingers up to her temple. Rubbing her head slightly, Emily closed her eyes and chuckled. “You know everything that I know. Jake left three weeks ago in the middle of the night. He came home from his shift, told me that he needed space, packed to go to Poughkeepsie, and then ghosted me.” Emily opened her eyes to stare dead-panned at Andrea, who had since seemed to shrink smaller in the dingy, dark corner of the apartment. 

Letting out a long huff of air, Emily abandoned the box she was working on, and taking long, angular steps, glided over to a green loveseat on the far side of the room, and sat down. Reaching underneath the tattered and stained couch, she grabbed a half bottle of whiskey, and unplugging its crumbling cork, took a thoughtful swig of the brown liquid. 

Her eyes fluttered ferociously as she drank, eyes rolling into the back of her head, her throat gurgling with gluttoned anticipation as she quenched a lingering thirst. Seizing the opportunity, Andrea quickly moved out of her corner to stand in front of her sister. 

Emily paused to glance at Andrea, her expression rotating between boredom and eager anticipation. Andrea reached behind her waist to hang on to the belt buckle circling her jeans, as if she was hanging on to dear life itself.

“Cut the bullshit Em. Jake Harper is missing, but a few months ago it was Lee Arnold, and for two years three children have gone missing in Anderson County”. 

“Why the fuck do you care?” Emily asked vehemently, gripping the spout of the whiskey bottle so tightly her knuckles turned white. “My life is already shit enough without you having to storm back in and interrogate me like I’m some kind of person of interest. You ain’t a cop, you the one who left mama, and I could give a damn about what you do with your life, but you sure as hell ain’t coming in here like some light princess of Persia.” 

“I loved him”, Andrea choked, only now realizing that warm tears had started to flow down her cheeks and pool at the corner of her mouth. 

“Piece of shit”. 

“Where’s mama?” 

“No one cares in this county. Everyone does me wrong, have since I was little. They don’t know the powers I got, the people I talk to, the things I can do.” Emily was now standing, towering over the shivering Andrea with a force unlike anything her younger sister had ever seen. “No one’s going to be there for you in life. Not mama, not your daddy, not some man, not Jesus, damn, not even your own sister. You gots to do what you can to survive, dance with the devil, talk with them ancestors. It’s what I been telling you since we was little Andrea Dean!” Emily was absolutely screaming, her hair leaping off her head in fiery tendrils, her pupils so large that her black eyes bore into Andrea’s skull. 

Andrea’s tears wouldn’t stop flowing, and her head began to pound blindingly. Discarding the whiskey bottle with a loud crash, Emily reached up to cup Andrea’s face, slowly wiping the salty water with her thumbs. 

“I have done told you this before”, Emily whispered, her black eyes permeating into Andrea’s skull. “You shouldn’t have come back”. 

“What did you do to mama?” 

Emily didn’t answer at first, but instead slowly rubbed her thumbs more firmly into the corner of Andrea’s eyes, all while her mouth slowly opened, twisting into a grimace of vile pain and convulsion. 

“I feel alive”, Emily all but whispered, looking at Andrea with a pleading gaze, a mix of something between pity and admonition. Clutching her face, Emily slowly leaned forward. Andrea thought she might kiss her, suck the life out of her once and for all, and leave her as an abandoned husk in this god-forsaken room. 

Clinging to her belt buckle, Andrea reached down into a hidden holster to pull a Glock out from beneath the seam of her jeans. Without another word, she pressed the cold tip of the grey metal shaft to Emily’s abdomen and shot. 

Smoke permeated the air, and Emily fell back with a deafening choke onto the green couch, clutching her stomach in agony and silently screaming, blood curling from her midsection and pooling from her mouth. Her lips stretched so wide and unnaturally that Andrea noticed Emily’s uvula shaking uncontrollably, a sight of a tiny man shaking his fist in disbelief. Andrea checked her rounds before pointing the gun again at Emily’s forehead between the eyes. She pulled the trigger and reveled in the following silence. 

Andrea stepped out of the apartment to gaze at the midafternoon air. All was quiet, and the soft hum of summer cicadas buzzed in the stillness, frequently scattered with intervals of broken chords and distant cars. 

Checking her phone from her front pocket, Andrea sent a quick message to her current employer to let them know she would be in at work tomorrow. Brian and Folger’s didn’t like her taking the afternoons off.