The dog had gone silent. The little sister’s ribs were sharp beneath her skin. Her eyes were hot, the way their mother’s were hot when she came home from work, wanting to dance, smoke, sing.
The older sister’s body was made of air. She was a balloon, skidding over the ground. The light on the waves in the bay made her cry, but not with sadness. It was so beautiful, it wanted to speak to her; it was about to say something if she only watched hard enough.
The zip of a mosquito near her ear was a needling beauty. She let the mosquito land on her skin, and slowly it pulsed and pumped and she felt her blood rising up into the small creature.
It was all so much. Through the years to come, she’d remember these days of calm. She’d hold these beautiful soft days in her as the years slowly moved from terrible to bearable to better, and she would feel herself growing, sharpening. She’d learn the language of men and use it against them: she’d become a lawyer. Her little sister, so lovely, so fragile, only ever wanted to be held. For a long time, the older sister was the one who did this for her. She was the shell. But then the little sister met a man who first gave her love, then withdrew it until she believed the things he believed. He made her give up her last name, which the older sister had fought their whole childhood to keep, though their third foster parents had wanted to adopt them, because it was the only thing they had of their mother. And then one day the older sister stood in the pews and watched her baby sister get married to this man. She wore a white dress with a skirt so giant she could barely walk, and bound herself to that man. The older sister watched and started to shake. She cried. An ugly wish spread in her like ink in water: that she and her sister had stayed on the island all those years ago; that they’d slowly vanished into their hunger until they turned into sunlight and dust.
Once upon a time, the older sister croaked, and the little sister whispered, No. Shush, please.
Once upon a time, the older sister said, there were two little girls made out of air. They were so beautiful that everyone who saw them wanted to scoop them up and put them into their pockets. One day, the god of wind saw them and loved them so much that he lifted them up and took them with him to the clouds to be his daughters. And they lived there forever with their father, and it was full of rainbows and people singing and good things to eat and soft beds made of feathers.
The end, the little sister said.
* * *
—
The younger sister dozed in the cabin. The older one let her body float above the path to the pond and back with water. There was no more charcoal, so they had to boil it over sticks she’d collected on the way back.
Twenty feet from the cabins, she heard the slightest of sounds. She peered into the palmettos and saw a glint of metal. She walked through the prickles and not one reached out to scratch her.
It was the dog. He had spun his leash so tightly around a scrub oak that his tongue was extended and his eyes bulged. He was no longer white fluff but knots of yellow and brown string.
The girl took the steak knife from her belt and knelt and sawed and sawed. She had to take breaks, because she kept getting dizzy. At last the leash broke and the dog stood and stumbled off into the underbrush again. There he would live forever, the girl knew. He would stay in that forest, running and howling and eating birds and fish and lizards. That dog was too mean to ever die.
She came back to find her sister naked outside the cabin, under the banana tree. Look, the little girl said dreamily, sucking her fingers.
The older sister looked but saw nothing. She did not see the unripe bananas like stubby fingers hanging down, which had been there when she went to get the water; she did not see the peels, which she would find later in the garbage.
There was a monkey, the little sister said. A tiny, tiny monkey. It had fingers like person fingers. It sat on the roof and peeled the bananas and ate them all up.
The older girl looked at the little sister. She stared back with round eyes. There was a long silence, and something in the older sister turned away, even as she nodded.
All right, then. There was a monkey.
Now, over the wind, all the way across the pond, from the beach on the other side of the island, there came a noise the older sister caught, then lost, then caught again. It was a song their mother had often sung along to on the radio in the car. A song—that meant a radio. The older girl took her sister’s face in her hands. We got to get ready fast, she said. Then we got to run.
* * *
—
They scrubbed themselves in the waves and, wet, put on their mother’s dresses, the only clean things there were. Shifts in tropical patterns that came down below the older girl’s knees, to the younger one’s ankles; on their mother those dresses were so short you could sometimes see her underwear when she was sitting down. They poured her perfume all over their wrists and heads.
Then they ran. They stopped when they were still among the trees, breathing heavily.
There was a boat anchored not far out, and a rubber dinghy pulled up on the wet part of the sand and a fishing pole buried next to it. A woman lay on a blanket. She was white, though her shoulders and thighs were going pink. She was plump. She was mouthing along to a different song on the radio, her feet waggling back and forth in time.
There was a man beside the dinghy with his swimming trunks down to his knees. He was peeing, the girls saw. He didn’t even wash his hands in the waves, but went over to the woman and stooped and put them in a cooler for a minute, then popped them under the woman’s bikini bottom while she screamed and swatted at him.
He laughed and took a beer can from the cooler and opened it and drank deeply, and picked up a sandwich in waxed paper. The older sister’s mouth watered. She was glad when he crumpled the paper up and didn’t litter but put it neatly back into the cooler.
The older girl looked at her sister. She was wild. You could see all her bones. The older sister took the brown leaves out of the little one’s hair, brushed the dirt off her dress, took out their mother’s lipstick, which she’d put into her pocket as they ran out the door. She put lipstick on her sister’s lips, then made tiny circles on her cheeks. Now me, she ordered, and her little sister’s face pursed in concentration and the lipstick tickled on her own cheeks and lips.
She put the lipstick back into her pocket. She would keep the gold cartridge of it long after the makeup inside was gone and only a sweet waxy smell of her mother remained.
Ready? she said. Her sister nodded and took her hand. Together they stepped out of the shadows and onto the blazing beach.
The woman on the blanket looked up at them, then shaded her eyes with a hand to see better. Later the woman would visit the girls once, then disappear after she left the older sister a gift, a vision of how the sisters had looked just then: ghost girls in clown makeup and floral sacks, creeping out of the dark forest. The woman’s mouth opened and a cry of alarm stuck in her throat. She raised her arms in amazement. The girls took the gesture for a welcome. Though they were very tired and felt tiny under the angry sun, they ran.
THE MIDNIGHT ZONE
It was an old hunting camp shipwrecked in twenty miles of scrub. Our friend had seen a Florida panther sliding through the trees there a few days earlier. But things had been fraying in our hands, and the camp was free and silent, so I walked through the resistance of my cautious husband and my small boys, who had wanted hermit crabs and kites and wakeboards and sand for spring break. Instead, they got ancient sinkholes filled with ferns, potential death by cat.
One thing I liked was how the screens at night pulsed with the tender bellies of lizards.