Anchor

This isn’t going to be pretty. Buckle up. Take a breath. We’re going into the thick of it.

You don’t want to read this.

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The heat is punishing us.

Thick and heavy, it weighs down on our already broken necks, pulling sweat from our pores to mix with our tears.

Last night, when the rabbi showed up, we pulled hoodies over our heads and sat around the dining room table while he answered questions we didn’t have. Hiding in the folds of the sweatshirts that made us invincible, we stifled our giggles and pretended we were paying attention like the good little girls we were raised to be. Seven daughters. Six now. Follow the rules and you get to be behind the curtain. Don’t follow them, and you disappear.

I have already disappeared, so I let my mind wander as the lesson went on, scoffing at a god who gives a shit about protocol when he’s clearly too busy torturing a teenager with cancer for nearly two years and then murdering her a week before her eighteenth birthday.

I must have missed the part about choosing your funeral attire. I didn’t think about the ripping.

When we offered thick fabric to the lady holding a blade in the little room where our baby sister mocked us from her box, the sound of sawing thread echoed into the abyss.

Now it’s done, the burying, and she took the cool air with her to the grave.

So we sweat and wrap ourselves in thick humidity until someone realizes that the thermostat upstairs is broken and there won’t be air conditioning here all week.

There is a hustle and a mad dash, and a/c units from the nineties are procured – one for each room, even the one she died in.

We spend the afternoon entertaining grief spectators in the cool air of the first floor, our torn hoodies proclaiming our status as mourners.

Her first day gone is almost over, but we are not ones to waste time.

We push through the punishing heat of the hallway and gather in her room to purge. We read her journals, we steal her underwear and socks. We rummage through her clothes, grabbing at her possessions like we’re drowning. Our sweatshirts absorb another layer of humidity, pushing us down further into a primal need to suffer with the dead.

Without a thought, we distribute the blankets and head to our barely cool rooms to lie in silence under the bold, cozy blankets she died under less than a day ago.

We don’t know if they were washed.

We hope they weren’t.

You don’t mourn on the sabbath, so we eat for the next 25 hours.

I soak watermelon in a bottle of gin and walk around snacking on a cold escape, taking shots with my cousin who sees my empty eyes and knows not to use words.

It doesn’t stop people from saying things to me, and I lash out at my first visitors because they didn’t see my pain.

We have nowhere to run.

The heat outside is building, and upstairs is a furnace.

We use our rooms for respite, tossing around in our ripped sweatshirts under her fuzzy blankets.

In the morning, we rise with the stench.

We wait outside the bathroom in the steamy hallway, taking turns on the slick porcelain, each of us delicately stepping over the bag on the floor as we stand in front of the mirrored sink and will ourselves to stay alive.

The house fills up again, the overflowing bodies a stark reminder of the one who isn’t here.

I want to scream, but I’m not the majority here, and I’m silenced.

Escape to the rooms where the stench is choking, roll in another day of sweat, step over the bag, lie in her bed, walk in her shoes, another day alive without her.

Morning doesn’t break—it explodes with the smell of death in simmering heat.

We know it’s the bag.

Still, we step over it and face another day.

Downstairs, in the cool air, they don’t know what we know. Their pitying head tilts and sorrowful eyes face our hardened stares hiding the rising, roiling smell of her decaying flesh, the emptied colostomy bags, the swabs and gauze holding the last remnants of her body in a flimsy plastic bag on the sweltering bathroom floor.

But we cannot let it go.

It is our anchor.

Without it, she will float away.

When we find a moment of bravery, we sneak out like thieves in the night and throw our sister out with the trash.

The tears don’t come all at once; they’ve been trickling for eight years.

These days, I don’t have an anchor. The grave is far away, the house is gone, we are scattered and alone, but sometimes, in the dead of the night, I inhale a wretched aroma and my blood boils with grief.