I have secrets. Information gathered while nosing up to the hereafter time and time again. A fever took me to visit death when I was five. I remember riding a giraffe. I didn’t know giraffes could swim until we barreled off the coast of Africa. When I was eight, I drowned. There I discovered that this entire planet fits inside an acorn. A forest, coloured all spring and sunrise, nested in my hand. Breath rising from black earth propelled me forward until the lifeguard forced oxygen back into my lungs, pulling me out of the woods, stuffing me back in my shell. In my tenth and fourteenth year I seesawed back and forth over the edge. Chemo does that, cozies a body up to death. In those forays I found heaven and hell exist and they’re closer than we think.
They talk a lot about hell at my school. Sister Mary-Agnes is a soul-worrying teacher. She waits until we’re alone to return my paper. “Serena, how can someone who teeters on the brink of eternity be so flip about spiritual things? This needs to be rewritten in accordance with Church doctrine.”
“Sorry, Sister. You asked for the truth.”
“Serena!” Sister Mary-Agnes snatches the paper and reads, “Hell is located at the corner of Broadview and Danforth in a red brick semi-detached…” She scans the page. “Satan incarnate lives downstairs. Mercifully, Jesus shares a room with me… This is all a big joke to you, isn’t it.”
“No, Sister, it’s a big actuality for me.” You’ve got a head under that getup. Use it. Maybe Satan’s clever enough to figure out a grandmother is better camouflage than a pitchfork and red longjohns. And maybe God-in-the-flesh and a sister are one in the same. Sister Mary Agnes wades out of the ocean of my eyes and buries her brain in the sand. I take the paper. “I’ll rewrite it so you won’t worry about me.” But the truth is, when you die heaven and hell are what you leave behind and ahead is a great expanding universe where perspective turns and you see that the field of summer wheat you’ve been walking through is really the underbelly of your yellow Lab and he’s just been carrying you along to the edge where new worlds begin. “I have to get home.”
Ethan sprints toward me like a thunder cloud hurrying. If he didn’t belong with Maggie I’d welcome his dark body covering mine, like a total eclipse of the sun. I’m the yellow-haired, pearl-skinned, ethereal beauty one might expect of an angelic being. My twin, Maggie, is where God kicks off his shoes and has a beer. We appear as unlike as vanilla ice cream and mud. What we are, though, is shadow and light, one spirit split in two. Ethan catches up to me. “We were getting worried.” He always looks slightly west of my face like the light hurts his eyes, but her never shrinks away from the warmth of my hand.
“Sister Mary-Agnes kept me behind.”
Maggie, Ethan and Sam meet me at the fence everyday. They go to the public school because the Granddemon says there’s no use wasting a Catholic education on darkies, micks and rags.
Maggie sees Ethan and me walking arm in arm and sends her thoughts across the soccer field, ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field…’
When I reach her I finish the thought just to check that our waves are connected. “I’ll meet you there.”
Maggie nods. Sam asks, “Meet you where?”
Ethan says, “They’re talking in their heads again. What was it this time?”
I say, “Rumi.”
Sam says, “Who?”
I kiss his confused lips. “The mystic poet.”
Sam turns me, possessing me from behind. I feel the fear and the hurry in his arms. Boys are always in a hurry. Lucky for Sam, I am too. He kisses my neck and says, “I wish you wouldn’t head travel. It creeps me out.”
Maggie says, “We’ve mastered thought transfer as far as Vancouver but we need more practice. Death might pose some dimensional challenges.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Sam coils and snaps away. I follow, four blocks, down the stairs, into his room and coax him out of his tuck on the corner of his bed. He says, “You’re not going to die.”
We all know that next year he’s going to college, Maggie and Ethan to university and I’m going extra-planetary. I fall soft on his bed and make him forget.
God yawns and sucks me into his gaping mouth, spitting me out somewhere north of familiar. Mom and Dad sit like empty tombs in the weeping church. Granddemon fills with more bitterness or something as big as hate, hatred that God was cleaning wax out of his ears and listening to Jimi Hendrix while she pleaded for my life over Maggie’s. Some things the high mucky muck gets right.
Maggie’s watching through a rain of tears, not so much seeing, more knowing that the light cartwheeling on the choir rail is me and the wax beauty splayed on white silk is not. I send a message to her, I used to fall like a stone doing this…
Maggie sends thoughts back, …now you turn like a star.
Ethan whispers in Maggie’s ear, “What’s she saying?”
“She’s living out a Rilke poem.”
Ethan’s hand absorbs the smallness of my sister’s. A token of belief.
From the moment we spun into this world Granddemon choose me and despised Maggie. You’d think someone in her position would know light never stays. Only shadows remain. She’s always been mean to Maggie and is more venomous now that she didn’t get her way. The screen door slaps the frame and our dog growls as Granddemon emerges to banish dirt from the back steps. Maggie hears my laughing at Gran’s black oxfords hammering the living daylights out of the crabgrass. Her starched buttoned-up shirt and navy worsted skirt dare not budge as she renders the wood spotless.
She smirks at Maggie, folded beneath the pear tree, contemplating expanding life. The Devil lifts her broom and hurtles a robin’s nest tucked in the branches through the air. Fragile shells explode like blue sky and yellow sun against the asphalt. Maggie searches the old face, lined like scratchings from an angry child’s pencil and cries for her.
The Devil wants many things, but pity isn’t one of them. “Stop your sniveling you stupid rag. I’ll not have the filthy things shatting all over my steps.”
“I know you miss her, Gram.”
Compassion is another. The broom lands hard on Maggie’s head. “This is your doing. You were poison to my angel and you’re poison to me.”
Maggie rises, scrapes up the broken family and buries everything beneath the budding peony. “It’ll make your flowers bloom the colour of wine.”
Our dog yelps as Granddemon’s hoof connects. There’s nothing the old bat hates more than someone who can’t be bothered with hate.
Hell is a desert, ash dry, freezing at night. Mom and Dad wander thirsty and lost while Granddemon serves up doses of salt. Ethan is an oasis, welcoming Maggie’s skin pressed to his, unafraid to touch the aura of light lining Maggie’s back. He asks, “Did Serena really tell you there’s no sex there?”
“She just said that so Sam wouldn’t drive his Buick over the bluffs to join her.”
He rolls back on the pillow all muscled and live. “What’s it like, Serena?”
“Tell him Mags, tell him there are worlds in worlds, like crawling inside a conch shell and discovering the ocean you heard, and finding never-ending beaches with great turtles dropping whole universes in the sand…”
“Is there really a God?”
“I’ve heard of some guy named Greg who might be the Grand Poohbah, but he’s always off golfing somewhere. Charlotte says…”
Maggie sits and opens Ethan’s hand. It unfolds pink like a hungry mouth. “Charlotte says—“
“Who’s Charlotte?”
“Near as I can make out she’s this energy ball Serena’s been hanging with. She says it’s all right here, in our hand, heaven, hell, life, death, love, hate.”
Ethan asks, “What’s that mean?”
Maggie laughs. The music and shiver of it touches every particle of me. “I haven’t a clue, but it’s all very big and so small you can’t even see it.” Her hand slides beneath his, light beneath shadow. “Serena says the secret is holding on and letting go at the same time.”
“Don’t ever let her go, please, Maggie.”
Moving quiet over him she blows out the candle and settles heavy on his smooth chest. A spring moon spills on them through the open window. “Ethan, look what was hiding behind the candlelight.”
“I know secrets.”
Ethan whispers, “Tell me them.”
Maggie dream sighs, “Tell you what?”
“What you said.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
Ethan opens his hand, full, absorbing the warmth on my sister’s back.
Published in Wicked Words Anthology, 2009