Gretchen Van Lente

Sisterly Sin

 

I suppose these people are more common than we realize—the soul thieves. We are born related to them, or we date and then later marry them. When the time comes, when they have made us bestial with hurt and revenge—when they have dragged us down to their hell, we no longer recognize ourselves. They have abstracted our souls and left us barren, glum, mean, and eager for the infinity of revenge. Isn’t hell infinite?

 

When my sister was three and first set eyes on me, a week-old baby, I imagine she pinched me. Maybe she covered her little hand over my face so that I would stop breathing for a time. These are the things you imagine when someone has stolen your soul.

 

I knew she was after it. She’d been after it my entire life but maybe I just figured it out. Or maybe I’d always known from the start of our lives together.

 

How I figured it out: here we are, old women finally, and perhaps it is on me but I have stooped to her level a thousand times in my life. I told her husband the doctor that she was sleeping with the tattoo artist he had paid to stitch a heart on her ass. I hacked her web site and photo shopped her body in big woman’s underwear. I made a routine of telling people what she’d said behind their backs.

 

You know how it is: At every family reunion, every damn year, like some kind of fiendish freak, she ridiculed me from head to toe in front of everyone, and spent the entire day warning people not to eat what I’d brought. So, I had to trip her up. I mean literally. I tripped her with a plate of ham and pie and beans in her hands. I watched her go down into the spring grass. I did it every year. Especially if she’d had her make-up done professionally for the occasion.

 

I made her snort watermelon up her nose. I creamed her with potato salad. Those years she pretended to be vegetarian, I laid juicy slices of spit- roasted pig at her feet, and yes she gobbled it up.

 

These sorts of things feel good, because they are evil, and because they unleash the soul.

 

Then they feel bad in the vast hollow where your soul once sat. It takes me one hundred Hail Marys to get my soul back, only to lose it again the next time she taunts me.

 

But I never really understood that before last night. She left her light on while I was walking my dog past her creepy white house with the purple and black shutters, as if each window opened up to a bruise on her face. I saw her sitting at her kitchen table. I saw two of her. One was just the old pale thin hag who was my sister--sitting rigidly with her hands clasped too tightly. Opposite sat her other self, identical except for a few things: she draped her chair comfortably, looking younger and gorged with blood and sated with evil. This other sister held in her hand an old fashion feather quill, and laughing in a mean way, she wrote my name in a gigantic black book.

 

How I knew it was my name: I knew it was my name because I had just opened the hatch on the cage which held my sister’s angora rabbits, and set my Doberman free to devour Pinky and Paul after shaking them to death. I watched that scene of carnage with pleasure, until I felt it drop out of me like a cosmic wave, a bad vibration, a ripple effect. It was my soul leaving me for good, I knew, because I could no longer feel the soft night rain on my face, or sense the radiance of the moon beams, or smell night blooming jasmine. My Earthly senses had slipped away, and that is when I knew I’d been had for good. That quill in her hand. Pinky and Paul set out like a trap. It was my name, not hers, she’d sold to the devil.

 

The next morning my sister came to my door with Ralph, my Doberman. “Your dog got loose again. He stinks, as usual.” She smirked, looking twenty years younger, gorged with blood, rosy, pretty, coquettish. Perhaps, after all, she had been born without a soul, just as I had always suspected--because mine fit her very well.

 

 

 

Gretchen Van Lente writes from Oregon. Her premiere short story collection, She-Thing and other Righteous Tales (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2018), is now available exclusively on Amazon.com. {US GB FR DE IT SP JP}