An hour later, my sister’s body floated up in the new river behind our house, covered in bruises, red plastic cups bumping at her bare feet, and lightning spiked white-hot through my chest, searing the ground of my heart into a desert. All I could see were cities burning, houses shelled, every regret and act of cowardice twisting through me into blinding rage.
And in that moment, perfect power was bright in front of me, a seam in space, in time, across myriad axes. I stretched out and grabbed it, and split the world in two. Its ribs reached out to me, and I reached back.
“You can’t change this, Hannah,” my sister’s ghost said as I tore the sky apart, shredding the fabric of air, of cloud, of matter and possibility. The lightning danced for me now, bent and buckled for me the way it had only done for Melanie before.
I will, I will. I will fix this.
“You can’t,” my sister said. “It’ll end the same way. Differently, but the same.”
“Why?” I screamed.
The world crashed, bowed like wet rice paper, spilled inward. Our parents’ house a crater, the flame that was Melanie nowhere on the brightly lit grid of eventualities. No, no, no. Wrong again.
“I never meant to hurt you.” Her ghost sighed as my hands blindly rearranged the components of reality. “I didn’t mean for you to see it. This was never about you, Hannah. I wish you’d realize that.”
The week before my sister ended the world, I didn’t go home. I stayed in the theater and broke every plate, every mug in the green room, hurling the shards in the faces of every person who’d come to court me. I blinded my agent, I crippled my director, I hamstrung the rest of the actors with porcelain shrapnel. Gale-force winds whipped around me, a crushing power at my back, the storm building behind my pulsing temples, and I blew out into the city, heading downtown.
At Melanie’s favorite bakery, where we’d ordered donuts as big as our heads the last time she’d come to visit, I ripped the boards out of the floor one by one, sending them flying through shattered windows. Icing splattered, electricity scorched wood and sugar alike; the scent of ozone was ripe and acrid in the air.
“Hannah,” said my sister’s reflection in the glass pieces on the floor. The gentle weight of her phantom hand on my shoulder burned, and time tugged at me again. “That’s enough.”
The blame circles back, hungry, and I recognize my own voice hissing from its mouth. Your fault, Hannah. All your fault. You could have stopped this, but you were blinded by your own ambition, your own selfishness; you let the haze of the city—the toxic glamour and crystalline cold—seduce you away from the people you love. And it was true. Even once in flight, the taste of glory lingered on my tongue the whole way home, sharp in the stale cabin air.
But Melanie and I had talked, we’d Skyped. Even if it had been through the computer screen, why hadn’t I seen the storms at home crackling on the horizon, their dying sparks reflected in my sister’s eyes?
“You’re being selfish,” my sister’s latest iteration said as I whipped the storm into a dark frenzy over the barren mountains. I couldn’t remember if the body in the wash this time was hers, or if that was a memory by now. “Hurting yourself over this is just a way of trying to get control over something that was never in your—”
Shut up. Shut
“—something that was never yours to control—”
up. Shut up.
The world ended with a bang, folding in on itself, the lines of the horizon collapsing like soaked origami. Our parents’ house turned to glass, to fire, to energy sparking ripe and rich for the taking. I drained it, pulling it deep into myself until the house was empty, our parents gone. And then there was nothing but me and my sister, her imprint, her echo.
Melanie’s ghost sighed. “I expected better of you,” she said.
The void roared back to life, and tossed me out again.
So back to the city again, rewound further this time. Back, past the donut shop, windows never scorched, pastries never eaten. This time I didn’t break anything. I went to auditions, cooked rice and fried eggs for dinner, and worked until my muscles screamed for me to stop, then worked more. For a week, I didn’t speak unless I was using someone else’s words.
The night before boarding the plane, I found myself whispering my secrets into the frigid night air, combing the space between skyscrapers with my tongue.
The city madness was getting to me.
I passed through the same airports like a shade, the route now familiar as the curve of my sleeping cheek in my weary palm.
I did everything right that time, and arrived home to find that the thunderstorm had demolished the airport, preventing anyone from landing.
The next time, I ended the world by myself, during a power outage. Life blinked out, softly, and screamed back into being.
The void spit the kitchen knife out at my feet, onto the floor of my Bushwick apartment, a taunt echoed in my perfect, intact wrists.
You selfish bitch.
The cycle remained unbroken. Gentle sparks kissed my hands in the dark, glinting off of the blade. My blood roared in my ears.
Again, then.
I reoriented the knife.
“Hannah. How many people are you going to destroy before you give up on me?”
Five times, five lines, lead and edges and crushed pills all yanked out of me, spit back further and further each time. I lined them up on my windowsill like the rejected possibilities they were, and let time spool itself out.
Not my fault, not my fault. I’d tried so hard, first to knit the cycle closed and then to slash it to pieces. But still the end danced away from me, the world bleeding into its next cycle.
“What the hell are you doing?” said my roommate for the fifth time, leaning against the doorframe as he did in every iteration. My sullen eyes saw his every possibility splayed out before me like a fall of cards: roommate disappearing into the bathroom to find his medications gone; roommate leaving for work and returning too late; roommate blackened and burned as the apartment went up in smoke; roommate helping me into bed and turning the light off before heading back into the kitchen to bundle up all of the knives.
“Thinking,” I croaked. My hands itched with electricity, sparks I couldn’t control dancing across my fingers.
“You and your weird sleight of hand shit.” He sighed and tossed me my iPhone. “Your phone is ringing.”
It took me a second to realize that the stupid anime song filtering out of the speakers was the one that Melanie liked, my ringtone for the home landline. But it wasn’t her on the phone. It was my mother, who told me that Melanie had drowned in the pool in the backyard during a freak rainstorm, one that had ruptured from an empty sky. My heartbeat slowed, each second syrup-thick.
“But I thought I had more time,” I whispered into the phone. It was true, I was supposed to have a few more days to think of things, to fix them—
“No one knows when God will take us home,” said my mother. “He’s in the Lord’s hands. Always has been.”