The following is my first attempt; as I work to flesh it out, I greatly appreciate any inputs. Thank you for reading, and for your time!
Don't You Weep
The economy may be failing, but sex will always sell. Or at least put food on the table of the lace-clad model with the soft stomach on my computer screen. I paid $12 to view this black-haired woman. She has angry eyes, and tilts her jaw toward the camera like she is looking to me for a fight.
Perhaps she is. The last time I saw her, she certainly was. Then she stood between me and our mother, blocking the doorway way with her angry fists and threatening to kill me if I dared to walk by. That night, once I was safely inside, she tried to set my room on fire. It was the dog who woke me.
She is my sister. Or rather, she used to be. Now she is a fetish queen on my computer screen, with her legs splayed and her panties around the mechanical bull she rides to nowhere. She has covered her body in tattoos. There are hoops, barbells, and studs through a landscape of holes where her flesh used to be. Large letters across her bony chest that read "don't you weep." The words rise and fall over the ribs and collar bones, leaping from her skin like roosters into the ring her gaze creates.
Her body is a canvas of words. She also sports four hooks through her back. There is a picture of her limp, black hair swinging like raven's wings, suspended above a crowd of screaming arms. I wonder what kind of man would pay to see those piercings, those tattoos, that pain, and be aroused.
What kind of man would pay to feed off of her pain?
The third row from the bottom includes a snapshot of her tongue. It swells to fill the screen, and I see a word written across it, above the stud that deforms the lips - "vegan." I wonder what kind of vegan puts meathooks in her back. Isn't the wearing of said hooks some kind of endorsement of the meat processing industry?
I have formed my own life around words, and reading her story on this $12 body causes a sudden rush of sympathetic pain. I push my own tongue against my teeth to stop the flood, and lick the insides of my mouth while I mull over this updated view of the sister I have not seen in six years.
Buddha said that "A merchant, a servant, a thief, a soldier, a priest, or a king: each of them is what he is because of what he does." So what does that make my sister, this angry woman with a cobra face and fleshy body who dangles herself above crowds by the hooks in her back? Buddha was referring to the caste system with his remarks, and I wonder if there is a caste system for prostitutes. If there is, would my sister be one of those classy prostitutes you can buy in the pretty red windows in Amsterdam, the kind with health care? I hope so, for her sake... it could be expensive if those meathooks got infected, and we are in a recession.
. . .
Seeing her makes the old worries rise up. I can taste my old fear, the terror that follows the question - am I like her? Am I like the mother that made her this way? Crazy runs in my family, you see. Turns out that my kind of crazy was different than theirs, but it took time to learn. My kind of crazy is the kind that makes you feel inadequate, guilty, and out of control; the kind that pushes you to regain control through an ever-increasing series of obsessions. The kind of crazy where the compulsions become increasingly destructive. My kind of crazy is not tattooed on my chest, but there were days when it might as well have been.
Those where the days when I would see my mother every day in the mirror. She was the face of my obsessions; my sister was the face of my compulsions. I would stare, and note that the set of my mouth is the same as my mother's. Our mouth gave her wrinkles. Was I going to be wrinkly, too? Would my wrinkles be from anger, or depression, or some kind of manic illness? Oh God, I feel angry and depressed and wrinkly. I'm like her, aren't I, aren't I? Give it to me straight, God.
There was one particular image of her that burned in my brain. We lived in Texas, then, and she is running across the lawn - an overweight woman in jean shorts that pleat in the front, wearing gold jewelry and a thin-lipped smile. Her shoulder-length hair flies back with her movement, making long floppy ears that bounce. The memory does not show what she was running after. Probably something trivial - she was like that. This awkward gallop is as happy as she got, and the sadness of that thought pulls me back to the present. She is a retriever, a destructive golden dog running across the lawn of my memories. I have not seen her in 5 years.
The naked sister on my computer screen means the dog has slipped its noose again. The two of them, mother and sister, are connected in their effect on me, and both run about the ridges of my consciousness. My mother has a mole over her lip. After the divorce, while my crazy sister followed our crazy mom across the country, my sister had her lip pierced in the same location to show their unity. They bonded, their marks shouted, over a shared hatred of my father and anyone else with blue eyes. We have the same eyes, my father and me. I think my sister's bipolar brain got bogged down in all that blue, until she hated everyone who wore that shade in the middle of their faces. Her eyes are green, like a snake. It is eerie, seeing her there, still splayed on the monitor, her vegan tongue laughing at the non-kosher meathooks.
Our shoulders curve to similar breadth. Our waists are tiny. We both hold fat beneath the round curve of our bottoms, and on the backs of our arms. Our teeth are straight, and when we smile our grins encompass our faces. I laugh a lot. She does not, or at least, not in these pictures. She does not know that I take my clothes off, too, but I call it "bodybuilding."
They make me worry. Then I worry that worrying is something they would do. The fear makes me want to gnaw on my nails, and chew until the red spatters.
Only a few years ago, I would have sucked my finger into my mouth. Today, however, I take a deep breath. Another. Another. Deeper. "Self," I murmur, "you are looking at pictures of your sister, not your mother. Do not even think about the blood-letting; that blood would make a mess on your new keyboard. The computer was a Christmas present, you've only had it a few weeks, and Jesus probably wouldn't want blood to cover the memories of His birthday. Come on, Self... breathe."
I raise my eyes as I follow my own instructions, rolling my shoulders back. I catch a glimpse of myself in another mirror, the one above my desk. I know how easy it would be to be her, and all the deep breaths in the world cannot hold enough air to cushion those feelings.
I was a prostitute, too, for a while.