Rubedo
March 2022
My sister and I died in a house fire about twenty years ago.
We were buried in a pretty field, filled with pretty flowers and pretty trees and pretty grass and pretty rocks. Bushes filled with the biggest blackberries you’ve ever seen, forbidden to us.
She was five and I was seven. I was supposed to take care of her. I guess I didn’t.
Our mom mourned us. She took her friends and the rest of our family to the remains of that charred house and showed them our pretty little kid graves. They left us flowers and toys and things we would never see, dripping tears over the freshly-tilled holes, water for the wildflowers that would grow there. My grandma whispered a prayer under her breath, wishing us luck and joy wherever we were.
My sister and I did not learn we were dead for twenty years.
I remember that car ride, hours long. We stopped in the city. Our mom told us it was a vacation, a trip to make memories that would last a lifetime. She sat us on a bench, a hand up so we wouldn’t move. She said she was just getting her camera out, that we looked so cute. She told us she’d be right back and disappeared into the crowd. My sister had on dress-up heels. I was wearing clip-on earrings. She disappeared back to our old life, a life she no longer wanted us to be a part of.
I held my sister’s hand as she cried, my own lips trembling as we searched and searched for our mom. The crowd was thick and we were so small. We thought every woman was her. We were wrong. We had lost her, and we were alone.
Our mom killed us. She had been alone and decided she didn’t want us anymore. So she killed us.
Left us alone in a city, told our family there was an accident. They mourned as we were shuffled from family to family to family before one finally stuck, always looking for them. It was only once she died that we found out we were dead. Mourned. Alone.
Our new parents loved us. They hugged us when we met and hugged us at night when we cried. They looked for our mother and used our childish memories to never find her. They took us back to that city on a real vacation and we took a real picture on that same bench
Our mom killed us. Burned us alive in a house fire. She buried us in a pretty field with pretty things around us. I was older; I was supposed to protect my sister. I guess I didn’t