CREATIVE NONFICTION
GRACIE KINSEY
GIRL RELICS
There are tiny glow in the dark stars still on our falling-down-in-places fiberboard ceiling. The house was built in 1890 and it is my favorite fact about it. Saying that you live in a house that was built in 1890 is much more fun than actually living in a house that was built in 1890. I like the fact that this house was built in 1890 and yet plastic glow in the dark stars from the early 2000’s stick to the walls and ceilings with a ferocity and inevitability like glitter. They have outlasted the porch paint. There will always be one of those plastic stars sticking around somewhere, and I like the thought that it once watched as I fell asleep when I was small and sharing a yellow room with my sister. Like the way the real stars have outlasted so much, but these stars were our specific, intimate sky. Our girlhood relics outliving the sinking foundation.
Sometimes I wish that my sister and I had been sisters in a different time. I imagine us as sisters living in a small village on the coast of Ireland, braiding and combing each other’s hair and maybe our parents are struggling then too to get by, but there is a necessary intimacy we have because we are forced to do each other's hair. Our parents don’t have time to do our hair and we don’t have anything else to do and it is briney and bitterly cold outside and we have hands. We sit by the fire and my hair becomes three thick ropes in her hands and she is more gentle than she needs to be and because of this it’s not a very tight or functional braid. I ask her to redo it to prolong the feeling. The world outside the window is not earth nor sea but something in between, untamed and wet winds and grasses like the moors in Wuthering Heights. We switch spots and her shoulders fit between my knees and her hair is thin and soft like the down of a duckling. She asks if I can do two braids and I say yes, of course, two. My fingers glow amber from the fire as they twist and hold her hair like a cat’s cradle string game.
In the gray light we will go down to the rocky beach and dig for razor clams. I don’t know if people even eat razor clams but I like the sound of them, how their shell can so easily slice a heel but they have a tender knot of meat inside. We will bring a tin bucket that still has a small amount of sea water and sand at the bottom, and the sand scratches against the tin bottom with the gentlest scraping. We are all salt and wool and wind as we make our way down the hill to the water. On the beach, our braids come untied and whip across our pink faces. The only sounds are gulls and the sucking sounds our rubber boots make in the mud. We are exposed and raw in the world and we are each other’s perpetual company.
In the real world it isn’t much different, except we grow up together in the woods and dense green of New England summer, with the ticks in the overgrown August grass, learning that the world doesn’t have any true edges. With other girls, we appear and disappear in our parents’ eyes, lazily watching, as we built a nest in the tall fields. We crouched to the ground, knees to our ears, and whispered rules. In our grandmother’s backyard, where lilac and ferns spilled over, we all get poison oak and we scratch and scratch and go shirtless, unknowingly for the last time, and there was the call to come get dinner, and there was our parents' laughter, and nothing else to distinguish the end.
Ask any sisters and they will tell you that the damage is as lush as the closeness. There is the throwing of shoes and the purest anger in our vocal chords and hot tears of not being seen. There was the gash she made in my bedroom door with the small blue stool, and the sharpie writing on her wall and the banister pole that came loose like a missing tooth. There were the potions mixed of mud and dead leaves and tap water mixed in a mixing bowl and not enough hot water in the ancient hot water heater. All signs of both love and the agony of sharing. I learned to not overlap with her, but the overlapping was inevitable when she filled each room with herself so that every molecule that was not me was her.
This morning my sister texts me while I am at work that she had a dream that I went missing. I think of the obvious implications of this, how this must mean her psyche believes I have been absent, plucked from her life and evaporated into mystery. That she is searching for me. I wonder if I want to be found. I think of evenings sitting in the quiet of thyme and stone and mosquito netted doorways left open and the communion with the world I found when I was 13 and sought peace away from her yelling.
To be found by my sister - oh boy. I feel breathless at the thought. Not in a good or bad way, but in an honest way. Like in a game of hide and seek how you hum with both fear and anticipation the seconds before they uncover you. She has not been an easy sister, and that is the truth, the long and short of it, and I have tucked myself away from her in order to be with myself. But she tells me when she dreams that I am missing. And I wonder if in the dream she searches for me. We leave each other little hints here and there. Little winks. Little glow in the dark stars.
We have both moved out of our childhood house and out of our childhood town and out of our childhood woods and maybe that is why it feels more urgent than ever to send each other signals, whether over text or smoke or desperate attempts at telepathy. We are women now and the world is not fond of women and we also don’t believe we are women because the last time we felt honest and true to the bone was when we were girls. And yet somehow we are living 2,123 miles and a ferry ride apart and we are in our late and mid twenties and there is something anciently true that she knows about me and I about her. There is something prehistoric and primitive between us that might predate fossils, or the big bang, preceding everything like bedrock. It is as old and rich as the dark night sky itself.
I had a dream the other night that I sang my sister’s praises for her birthday and no one around us was listening, and so what was supposed to be a public toast turned into an intimate statement of adoration. Everyone was talking over me, drunk and catching up, but, miraculously, she heard me anyways over the rubble and the candles in her cake, which were still lit. The words tumbled towards her, fumbling and gentle and true, like foals. At first I was frustrated as everyone chattered and laughed around us, but then I met her eyes and spoke the truth about her, to her, and she heard me and no one else did and therefore it was only and singularly for her.
I can’t remember the words I used in the dream, but they are a whisper beneath the mud of all I do.
Gracie Kinsey grew up in the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts, against a backdrop of cow fields and milkweed, farmers and artists. She studied English at Smith College, where she was awarded the Norma M. Leas Memorial Award for Excellence in Written English. She now lives in Denver, CO with her partner and dog, Haku. She writes whenever she can.
