I forgot about my sim and just checked on her and she wet herself all over the garden patch I am not happy.

     I found Marlow at 3.33am on June 13th. It was a very still night. So very silent as I crept across the lawn and down the cobblestone path to the quarry, which is where I smoked cigarettes sometimes. The quarry dried out every spring and left behind it a sullen wasteland of our childhoods. I sat myself in the Bermuda, which is what we called the hammock because sometimes we lost ourselves inside it (Marlow would hold my hand as we found our way out because anxiety always got the best of me and she was always left with the worst). I lit a cigarette and inhaled the toxins, and even had 2 more before the sun started to break the night and I noticed a hand lying in the reeds.

     My mum read to me about Christopher Boone once, how he found a dead poodle and hated lies and liked to tune the radio to a point between two stations and listen to the white-noise because it made him feel safe, not being able to hear anything else. Sometimes I would run away from school with my fathers little radio that he took fishing and find a quiet place to sit, which was usually in the wheat field at the Millers farm, and listen to my own white-noise, and it really did make me feel safe. Marlow always found me, and I guess now I’ll never know how, but back then I felt so angry at her, so mad that she had invaded, that I never stopped to think that maybe she was looking for her own white-noise.  Maybe she was looking for her very own route of escapism from the perrills of the world, because our dad had died, and soon our mum would be dead, too. The non-empty silence that we clung too was all that we could do to save ourselves.

     I can hear myself screaming but I can’t really feel it. I’m numb. Marlow fell in an ice-lake once, stepped on the wrong place at the wrong time and her little body slipped between the cracks. So it’s like that, except I’m the one screaming and the one beneath the ice, watching the world as I die. I try to see through the cold. I try to find her freckles, her sticky fingers covered in melting ice-cream, the blonde hair that fell like rain down her her back, the way she protected me against all odds; her burnout little sister who never really cared too much about anything because nothing cared too much about her. I try to find her so much so that it consumes me entirely.

     The sirens hurt my wounds. The red and the blue that tell me her time of death in a matter-of-fact kind of way. I watch as they pound her chest, shove things down her throat, take her away from the safety of the noise. I know that they’re wasting their time. I know that now I don’t have anybody left, because if my sister wanted something enough, she stopped at nothing until she had it crushed in her palms, even if all she wanted was to go home.

     The next few lifetimes I’ll spend trying to remember her, but as it was with my parents, each day I forget something else I was supposed to hold with me forever. I’m trying really hard to cling to her scent, was it vanilla or strawberry, and I’m trying really hard to remember the color of her eyes, where they blue or where they green? I try so hard to remember her as she was before the reeds, before the dryness of the quarry took hold of their newest casualty. I can almost hear her sometimes.

     Like the stars, she was fleeting.
     Like the stars, we are all fleeting.

You cut up a thing that’s alive and beautiful to find out how it’s alive and why it’s beautiful, and before you know it, it’s neither of those things, and you’re standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.

Clive Barker