Amanda Gaines
To Flame
Your sister has killed you six times. Before she resorted to unnecessary violence, she handled you gently. Placed you on her water-ringed windowsill on fourteen separate occasions, trapped you under mason jars twice, a scratchy piece of paper slid beneath your tarsus. After her efforts to get rid of you proved futile, she started getting shitty. Crushing you with a vanilla-scented candle. Then, a shoe she stole from your closet. Most recently, a Bible, which really made you question your motivation for visiting her in the first place.
Luckily, your designers continue to rebuild your fragile, metal wings and thumbtack body. You asked them once why they kept reanimating you, but realized they couldn’t hear the sputters your proboscis produced. You wish they’d tell you what you were doing here—how you actually died in your human form. They could rehash your demise in low voices while you twitched under their halogens like a colic-riddled toddler. It would make the time go by faster, you thought. Might assuage the Lego-like reassembling of your twisted shape-memory alloys. You were shocked, literally went into shock, the first time your sister murdered you in cold blood, forcing your builder to perform your digital necromancy. It hurt. While strapped to your tiny gurney, you often thought of the characters you and your sister played in video games growing up. How callous you were, forcing them back to life at checkpoints after being run off roads, shot by sniper rifles. Stung by seas of wasps while you sank your hand into a bag of Hot Fries.
Now, every time you see that lunky object hurtling toward you, your sister’s tapered fingers gripping its edges, you know you shouldn’t blame her. You’d probably kill yourself too.
And besides, it was kind of a relief. Not having to worry about having a body anymore. A girl one, you mean. How many swaths of hair had you destroyed while taking out your tape-ins? How many hours had you wasted applying perfumed creams to your forehead in clockwise circles to make up for the cigarettes you smoked to crush your unquietable appetite? How many orgasms had you faked in hopes of expediting the ritual of bad sex?
Your designer cracks their knuckle and keys in data with the tip of their pen.
Before you died, you and your sister weren’t all that close.
There was a five-year gap between the two of you. Your interests and body types never lined up while you both lived at home. Before she hit puberty and you’d gone off to college, she spent most of her time outside, picking around the elm trees that shaded your back porch. She convinced your mother to help her start a garden that she filled with zinnias and dill and marigolds. Unlike you, she didn’t cling to the screen unless Discovery Planet was on. You were allergic to grass and prone to bug bites. While willing to fry your hair with bleaching agents and cook under the halogen lights of a tanning bed, you refused to risk botching your skin by handing it off to nature. Unlike you, she seemed completely unaware of her body, how it took up space, moved–looked in low-rise jeans. She’d read off facts from her various bug books as you tried to curl your eyelashes. Shoved mason jars filled with caught caterpillars and praying mantises in your face as you edited selfies you’d never post on Instagram.
“Gross,” you told her.
“Did you know insects get their name from Latin? It means ‘cut up,’” she replied. “In pieces.”
“Tell it to someone who cares,” you said.
She bit her lip and left, leaving a dirt-smudged handprint on your vanity that you wouldn’t notice until the following morning as you picked at a zit on your chin.
It’s brief moments like these that you revisit as you fly around your sister’s house. You inspect the face creams and serums organized in descending sizes. The color-coded schedule hung on her refrigerator that allocates two hours after work to working out, but none for play. The fake fiddleheads in their gray pots situated on both sides of her suede couch. You read the post-it-note mantras she’d stuck to each of her mirrors, telling her that she is good and whole, and want to die all over again.
When your sister curls under her beige cotton quilt in her silver silk pajamas, you do not fling yourself on her, kiss her nose repeatedly. Instead, because you are a good and patient sister, you sit by the light of her charging laptop. Earlier, you’d tried slamming yourself against the keyboard and bench pressing the exclamation point. Your success was limited to an added space between my and throat in her online journal. You daydream jumping into her bed and splitting a bag of gummy worms, digging your tongue between your teeth to dislodge cherry-flavored clitellum. When she puts on her Hertz frequencies, it feels like an approaching avalanche. You flutter over to her still form and carve through her slippery collar. At first, her sweat tastes like honey and mint. As you drink from her, you pick up on other notes. Cedar doubt. Mossed loneliness. You eat and eat until you feel as if your metal stomach might split. You want to tell her to make one of the dishes she watches amateur chefs cook on TV. How fucking lucky the children she teaches are to have someone like her lie about the quality of their drawings. How sorry you are, all the time.
Instead, you crawl onto her fossa. Tell her stories of talking cats and magical hair dryers that can push looming rain clouds away. You describe a mine shaft full of canaries that refuse to sing. The shape of your maker’s hands beneath a pink layer of latex. You ask her whether she’d rather have scales or fur. If she has recently thought of piercing her nose. When she’ll see you again.
Amanda Gaines is an Appalachian writer, born and raised in southern West Virginia. She holds a Ph.D. in creative writing from Oklahoma State University and an MFA from West Virginia University. Her work has been published in Passages North, Cleaver, Potomac Review, Barrelhouse, Fugue, december, Witness, Southern Humanities Review, Willow Springs, Yemassee, Redivider, New Orleans Review, Southeast Review, The Southern Review, Juked, Rattle, Pleiades, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Ninth Letter, among others. She’s currently a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.