DEUX:Le_Moineau

I watched them from the breakfast table, and imagined them as my servants. In a way, if our house was a castle, then I was the noble who owned the halls within which they all walked. They would, had I demanded, been required to bow to me. To put their weight into whatever I demanded of them.

No, that wasn't quite right. My mother owned the house. She had owned it for longer than I had been alive. Which, I supposed, made me a princess. The princess of dung. In a sense, the powers of a princess were rather limited, because there was no real power she held over a person. Over the imagination of people, maybe, but not in her domain. She was only what her parents permitted her to be.

I suppose that was another reason I never really used my powers either. Because a princess' word could always be overtaken by the word of a king or queen.

Of the 'peasants' of the house, there were many faces that came and went, never lingering long enough for me to recall their names or faces.

People from all around the town, who could've had real lives, in real houses, somewhere away from here. But they lived here, in this house. I didn't know all of them. But I knew my mother. A pale woman with her hair pulled back into a tight knot, to try and lift her face to disguise aging.

Then there was the couple. Booker and Margarite. They kept me awake every night. They coveted each other. They owned a big truck. Which was the only vehicle of our house. Then Bacchus, the one who watched them. Unpleasant, and foul mouthed. I knew his opinions on a great many things I didn't understand. Politics, philosophy, women. He told me all about women he preferred. But he'd never loved a woman, only his own hands. No one was stupid enough to be his bride.

Rabbit and Sparrow.

Stranger ones.

Rabbit had been given a bunny to be his practice wife. Ruie had told him the animal was immortal. So when he killed it in his rages, normal for a twelve year old boy, or maybe he was thirteen? No, incorrect, he was fourteen. Fourteen years. I only knew the unfairer sex as angry. We bred bunnies in the woods and the mountains. Perhaps we should've grown celestial strawberries to serenade those bunnies.

Sparrow was the good one, especially compared to the wretched animal she had as a brother. Her parents had left for the oil sands too, leaving the children with us. Sparrow never spoke of them. Not once. Not even in the quiet hours when the house exhaled and the walls seemed to lean in closer, listening. She simply folded their absence into herself like a letter slipped between the pages of a book. A demarcation that didn't matter. Because of course, who would miss someone who left them behind?

Rabbit, though. Rabbit carved his grief into everything. Into the walls with his nails, into the furniture with his fists, into the soft flesh of his own arms when no one was looking. I didn't care enough about him to worry about him, regardless of how much my mother doted over him.

The elder sister was all I cared about. The forever forgotten. The one who would live in a constant state of service. First to her brother, then to whoever she dated, then to whoever she married, then to whatever she gave birth to. That was the state of things. That was what she was raised for. Just like I was being raised to take over the family house.

If she wanted, she could stay here forever, but it didn't seem to be what she wanted. I'd have gladly kept her in my house forever, gripping her by the arm, keeping her head above water.

The thought itself– that Sparrow would leave– felt like a bizarre violation of our lives, but it was also just a massive part of the lives we lived. Still, the idea she would stay forever never seemed to sit well with her. Which was almost maddening in how sad it all was. Since she was the best candidate to stay forever. If everyone else left, I would've been glad for it. But the day she left, I would've probably ran out the door to hunt her down and drag her back home.

She noticed my staring at her, and frowned. "What's wrong, Eri?"

I want to nail your shadow to the floorboards so you can never step beyond the threshold of our house. I shrugged. "Just spacing out. I'm not sleeping much, just tired."

She looked back down at her food. "Is it because you were playing that game again?"

"Not this time. This time I just couldn't sleep."

Sparrow leaned closer, eyes narrowing. "You're lying," she said, voice low. "You always get that look when you're lying."

I pressed my lips together, fingers tightening around my fork. The tines scraped against the plate. "You're wrong. I was just listening to music all night."

"Music from that game?"

"No, just regular songs."

Sparrow's eyes lingered on my face, before she finally had the decency to look away. She slammed her spoon into her plate, hard enough to chip the edge. She grinded her teeth together, eyes widening. "We all keep telling you that you shouldn't keep playing that game, you know."

"I was just thinking about the house next door," I insisted.

Sparrow exhaled sharply. "Okay, then. I guess that's normal." She dragged her spoon across the ceramic plate, scraping away the skin. I could see her expression, reflected in the polished bottom of the china. She was beautiful, more so in reflection than in person. The scratches in the plate, the bits of grime, everything softened her. A softening she desperately needed.

. I wanted to peel back her scalp and count the thoughts rattling around in her skull, see if any of them matched the ones festering in mine. I wanted to dig my fingers into the pink inside her skull, poking around and squeezing, until hey unravelled like noodles. Until there was only blood heat and not life heat and I possessed her like a husband possessed his bride. Owning her in total capacity.

"Do you have your school supplies together?" she asked.

"School supplies?"

"School starts tomorrow. You're not doing that well, huh?"

Carcass returns.Greatness lumbering carcass cara… sa sa… No, no, how could you? All I want is time with you and you rob me of it? I can't move, I can't move my carcass, but you didn't tell me? Maybe I could drag my remains– drag to the star to the sparrow into flight I would drag my carcass love you with my carcass carcass I beloved flah flah flah no no no.

"Oh. You graduate this year, right?" I asked. I swallowed something off a utensil, as a hand pressed so close to my face. There was no taste, it just caught in my throat. I feigned a smile.

Sparrow eyed me, sighing. "Yeah. One more year to get through, and then… I don't know," she said. "I think I'll do a trade."

I nodded stiffly. "Mechanic, like Margarite?"

"Maybe. I was thinking something else."

"Something else?"

"I'm not sure what right now. I'll probably decide with a little time."

She didn't really need time to make the decision. Not exactly. She would go the same place everyone else did. It was the one thing we had, aside from some particularly ambitious farmers. There was the oil drilling, and there was not much else. When I gazed toward a future as an adult, I saw only oil drills or homemaking.

"Eri?"

"I'm listening, sorry, I thought you were going to say something else."

"I wasn't." Sparrow sighed. "But maybe I should just tell you something simple, like go outside for once, instead of wasting all your time on some stupid video game."

"You don't get it," I muttered.

Sparrow rolled her eyes. "Get what? That you'd rather rot in front of a screen than do anything with your life?" She jammed her spoon in my face, the metal scraping my eyelashes. "I worry about you."

"I'm sorry," I grumbled.

The others paused their conversations, glancing over as they saw the two of us so tense. Bacchus smirked into his coffee, his yellowed teeth glinting under the light of the sun. Sparrow looked around at them, before finally lowering the spoon. "But really. It'll do you good to walk or something. Not just sit around all day on your video games."

I stared at her. She stared back at me. She wasn't interested in letting me avoid answering with silence.

Watching the last grains spill from the hourglass of the time in which I was free to escape, it seemed as though time was standing still. Why wah wah. A glass of juice had tipped over on the counter, and the glass broke easily. It was not a piece which was meant to be moved with any sort of roughness. The grains had begun to spill– rapidly at first, but slowing to a crawl as more left. Reluctant.

Bacchus had tipped it over before, in the past, but the thing which sent it shattering was when Sparrow slammed the bedroom door. She was always slamming doors. Frustrated. Banging against walls– throwing herself against them and screaming words that tore through everyone's hearts in her deep frustration. And doors. No doors survived.

And in the end, without the hourglass, I couldn't track time at all. But she won, with a slammed door in my face. When I went outside, the sun tore through my eyes, scraping off the jelly layers of the iris, until there was nothing left at all. Just an empty socket, which could hardly see.

 I lingered on the front step for a moment, before I decided that she would not win today. Could not win today. I retreated back inside.