LIFE

Two sisters sit in a light blue SUV surrounded by ashy tombstones.

"I do the best I know how," one of them says to the other. "It's not like I have had the best examples, you know."

Her words respond to indirect accusing of her failure to carry out birth placement duties.

"Can't say what you had or didn't have," the taller sister responds. "You're my big sister. I'm your little sister. What you went through ain't none of my business. You're suppose to take care of me regardless."

The shorter sister stare at rusty corners of a once white sign posted a few feet in front of them displaying bold black empty letters. ETERNAL GROUNDS CEMETERY. She refrain from saying it, but she know she prefer to be home working on the novel began ten years ago, even though she'd feel stuck and not good enough by her output.

She laughs aloud because she realizes she will never get it right while living. Then, one day, this creepy place will be her home.

"What's so funny?" she is asked.

Her peripheral vision catches her sister missing the ashtray between them in the cupholder, dropping ash where she cleaned before the trip.

"Life is funny."

She ignores the ash and accusation, while forgiving herself for remembering her unimportance. Without intending to, her mind visits her childhood causing her to feel more grey than the sky. Her eyes threaten to drop tears. Her heartbeat quickens as her breath shortens. Easily, she could imagine them sharing a casket despite knowing they are in her vehicle with all four windows down.

Images present upon the screen of her mind through the lens of an observer also participating. She feel a smaller version of herself sitting on a red round spinning toy turning round and round. Olive green painted walls spin along with the sound of her mother's firm voice, along with the white two burner stove, where her mother is standing holding a telephone between her ear and shoulder. The girl's head is leaned back. She feels dizzy but continues turning a small wheel posted between her leg.

"He's my son, Momma," she hear before sounds of crying mix with anger. "You took my child, and now you act like he's yours."

The oldest sister, as the girl she once was, experiences discomfort from wanting to help her mother without knowing how. She is too small, too young, too dizzy.

The vision shifts to sight through a bus window where an illuminated city fades into blur of glowing color. Anxiety snakes through the oldest sister's veins as she watches the place where her father remains be left behind. Already she misses his playfulness. Her laughter is, now, silent and there is nothing she can do about it. Fearful thoughts take form.

A blackened round older woman, holding a black book labeled, HOLY BIBLE, is introduced to the girl as her grandmother-her mother's mother. Immediately, this woman attacks the young girl, disliking her city dialect and ignorance of southern respect. Before long, she is slapped across her lips with a thick blackened hand, then torn away from her mother. She is sentenced to her grandmother's spare bedroom and told to lie in a small bed, indefinitely.

"We need to get headstones for, both, Grandma and Momma," says the younger sister opening the passenger's door.

The older sister is freed from mental prison. She follow. They step out onto mushy muddy ground.

"We do, don't we?" reply the older sister, nonchalantly.

She remember the lie she told her aunt after her mother died. Back then, she believed in the importance of purchasing decorated rock for the deceased.

"I'll buy her headstone," she had said not knowing when or how she would do so homeless, unemployed, and fighting depression.

The oldest sister walks alongside her younger sister towards a section of headstones where two small metal signs, rusted like the main sign, stand in the center of an uneven row. Mentally, she walks alongside a childhood friend who informed her she was poor.

The friend lived with her mother and stepfather in a newer house next door to the one the oldest sister lived in with her single mother and siblings. She believed they were poor because her friend had said so, since she didn't have expensive dolls, her own room, or a swing set in their backyard. They didn't have family parties with barbecues and worldly music. Instead, they worked cleaning their family houses and yards. Playtime was spent studying her grandmother's bible. This was where she learned they were poor resulting from sin.

The sisters stop in front of the two small metal signs planted next to each other as if to denote one casket below ground is being occupied by two.

"I can't believe they're gone," express the youngest sister.

She plant large bouquets of purple and orange roses behind each sign.

"Me and my wife made these. I bought the fabric online. My wife drew out the pattern on paper, first, then I used Grandma's old sewing machine to sew together the fabric I cut to match.

"You did a good job," the oldest sister comments. "Both of you did a good job. Now, those signs look beautiful."

Her hands are empty, yet her mind is full.

Her left hand ache where there is a scar between her pinky and ring finger. In a space where only she can see, her grandmother bites her hand, and then spits out her skin. Internal rage returns.

She looks up at the cloudy grey sky, seeing it spin. Silently, she apologizes for her reaction to her grandmother's violence.

"You're going to die from tasting my blood," she hear herself shout drowning the sound of her apology.

On that day, rage beat her heart. Sadness scolded her disobedience. She was supposed to respect her mother's mother even though her mother was dead. The oldest sister wanted to honor her mother and her grandmother, but she had failed.

The bowl of a white commode appears in the mind of the oldest sister, next. She feel cold air whip her naked skin while on her knees bound by the grip of her mother's legs. A flexible swift moving tree branch bruise her bottom. She tries, but she can't move. Pain burns deeper than surface as she endures what she is told she earned.

"Momma cared too much about us," says the youngest sister. "She had too many. Should've learned to care for herself."

She laughs shaking her head from side to side.

"Forty-nine was too young for her to have died."

The oldest sister nods agreement. Her visions continue.

"He raped me," she see and hear herself saying to her mother when she was twelve.

That night, she felt relief, momentarily, from having survived threats of death made by a man posing as a stepfather. He was her friend's oldest brother, who had invaded their home. Her mother's disbelief and discomforting questions told the girl she had failed.

"You were supposed to fight him," her mother said days later. "It's your fault," she was told when the man in question burned the house her mother proudly acquired without her husband.

Sorrow planted itself deep within the girl day by day as her nightmarish life unfolded.

"I lied," the oldest sister hear herself saying to authorities, knowing she is lying. Her mother and her friend's mother had asked her to recant this speech they'd written. They convinced her it was the right thing to do- to keep the man, who also raped her mother, from returning to prison. Afterwards, this same man lied on her and was allowed to punish her for refusing to claim his untruth.

As an adult, walking through a cemetery with her sister, the female's left palm pulsates mimicking how it felt after being struck repeatedly with a leather belt. Her heart ache, again, as she hear her mother say, "Beat that_____."

This was the last straw, the observing adult recognizes. She was responsible for herself, and she feared death by the hands of the adults in her life. This young girl was determined to survive and succeed. She would not accept misfortune as though undesired gifts from her birth. Nor would she give ultimate power over her life experiences to forces beyond herself. This decision was sound and shaky at best.

"There's my daddy's headstone."

The youngest sister points to a mass of polished concrete bearing a picture of a young man resembling her, wearing a coily afro and a coy facial expression made with small circular eyes, a short thin nose, and slightly smiling thin lips.

"At least your daddy still walking the Earth."

The oldest sister thinks of her father, who seems to lack intimate connection with her as she once believed they had. It feels, to her, similar to him being deceased outside of sparse phone conversations throughout a year.

Her father provided exit from the girl's uncomfortable life though he did nothing about the abusive situations she'd endured. He couldn't change them. He wouldn't avenge her innocence. He didn't nurture her emotions, yet he was a conduit for alternative living the girl would achieve alone.

"Y'all left us," the youngest sister once said said referring to when her oldest sister and one of her older brothers left their mother's household following their father to a different state.

"I was too young to take you with me," the oldest sister explained.

"All you cared about was yourself," her mother accused when she returned to visit.

Again, she had failed to live up to her mother's expectation. Her sister's dissatisfaction with her reminded her of their mother's. Years ago she hurt over the complexity of actuality and perspective. While walking through the cemetery, having planned the trip in response to her sister's request, she observe absence of this sort of response. She has come here acting within her true nature. So, when rain starts to fall upon them, she feels satisfied. She appreciates being able to leave the cemetery with her sister despite them arriving to her vehicle, now, muddy and wet.