The day May was birthed, the mother lost liters of blood. The father had craters pocking body from where the mother had clung her wrathful hands. But May emerged lovely and full of inky hair. She had red cheeks. Her eyes were the greyest grey either parent had ever seen. The mother thought she was a few shiny teeth in her mouth, but the doctor said it was impossible.
The day May was born, she was a banshee. She could not be kept with other newborns. She had a room all to herself, one without a shred of glass, lest her cry become that shrill, and no one doubted it would.
Ana
At night, when all the lights are turned off and everyone is nuzzled against blankets, Ana crawls downstairs to the kitchen and pulls open the refrigerator door. She stares at the shadows on the linoleum, the way the bottles of pop and ketchup distort, cast in sapphire. Sometimes, as she stands there on the tips of her toes, she makes up stories where the world has ended — reduced to nothing after nuclear bombs thrown like pebbles across the pond — and this cobalt haze is a remnant of the fallout. She is quiet.
Ana wonders what she would do if there really was a war like that, if she would survive. Contemplating, she closes the door to enter darkness. She is careful not to let any part of her body touch the ground. Kitchens, she knows, are reservoirs for hidden mines.
May
Two sisters, and she is already tired. May stares, mouth agape, at her sister’s back as she creeps, moving like she owns her body, moving like she is unafraid of breaking. May doesn’t see how they could have been born of the same two beings, how someone so light could be a part of her. May thinks Ana is a sand dollar waiting to be crushed.
And May, only two years and five days younger, is immovable. Her head is a cement block, and her arms are so heavy she calls the mother to help her retrieve goods that are mere fingertips away.
Ana
Two sisters, and during the day, one of them prepares for war by pretending to be a little girl.
Ana understands that if necessary, if it comes down to it, she may need to use May as a shield. She wouldn’t be sacrificing her sister, she knows, because May’s body is solid stone. May is a small boulder. And she is still expanding. She will grow, and once she is grown, together, no war will be able to defeat them.
May
Two sisters, and at night, May watches her sister from bed. Ana floats up and disappears into air.
May is a rock, a piece of marble: cold and blank.
At night, when her sister makes her way downstairs, edging her ghost-bird body around corners without stepping on the creaky floor, May lies in bed, twisting and knotting the blankets between her thumb and forefinger. She doesn’t let herself sleep until her sister has safely returned.
At night, when her sister returns to their adjoining beds, May becomes the more active of the two sisters. In her dreams, she becomes stones, monoliths — leftovers from the last ice age and those that came before. Leftovers who have survived wars, heavy footfalls, storms.
When May dreams, she enters their history, and she eagerly lets her body serve as a blockade to save soldiers from bullets, flaming arrows, and swords.
Ana
Two sisters, and she is the older. She is six years old, and she is prepared for battle.
During the day, the sisters play with their dolls and ribbons. The parents smile, but they are concerned that Ana has no interest in books or logic. May, on the other hand, reads like words are food, both of which she consumes with great aptitude.
At night though, the training begins. Ana leaps from wall to wall. May times her. Although Ana cannot do the mathematics, May can. Ana determines herself to be faster than an airplane. She is no fool to believe she can be outrun a bullet, but if all else fails, she will be able outmaneuver it.
May
Two sisters, and she is the younger. When the mother takes Ana May to the park, people stare, not at Ana but at May. She can hear them talking. They say the mother is irresponsible, a bad mother, to let her daughter become so large.
There are some things May cannot logic herself out of.
Ana
Two sisters, and she is the older, and when the mother takes Ana May to the park, Ana wants to run across the heads of the people who are mean to her sister. She imagines it like cartoons, but in real life, she can’t do a thing.
She hears the people wonder how it is that there is one pretty little sister and one ugly fat sister. She hears them say that they must not belong to the same family.
But Ana knows better than to believe any of it. Ana May belong together. Together, they are a warrior, unpenetratable, but right now, now when they are around all these people who will one day want their protection, their vulnerability is exposed. These people who will one day want their protection, with each word, they devastate Ana May.
May
Two sisters, and the younger is called Fatty, Fatso, Piggy, Freak, Beast.
Ana
Two sisters, and the older is called Acrobatty, Weirdo, Gumbo, Circus Freak.
May
Two sisters, and when the younger goes out, she is always hungry so she eats and eats, and the people shake their heads in disgust.
Ana
Two sisters, and when the older goes out, she hides her body behind May’s body, and when the people discover her, they point with their index fingers, as though they’ve just spied a corpse or a leech.
Ana May
Two sisters, and no one loves them the way they ought to. These people do not deserve the two sisters’ love in return.
May
Two sisters, and she is the younger. When fall arrives and it is time for her sister to go to school, she, the younger, must stay at home with the mother. During the day, while her sister is at school, the mother encourages May to move about the house by cracking cookies into small bits and scattering them along the floor. May becomes a vacuum cleaner, sweeping up the ground with her tongue.
She can taste where each bit of dust comes from. She understands legacy. The mother, however, simply sees a little piggy, eager to eat anything, even off the floor, with no regard to sanitation.
Ana
Two sisters, and when the older goes to school, she learns how to read and write, but she has already known these things. Two sisters, and they are entirely different from other children. The other children are slobs and fools. They cannot speak or color properly. Ana’s teachers call her a genius. She is wiser than all of them combined, and she is no where close to as smart as May.
The other children stare when Ana speaks, when she strings words together. They don’t like her, this girl who thinks she knows everything. No one likes a know-it-all. They call her “brainiac.”
When Ana walks home from school she leaps as quickly as can, from telephone pole to rooftop, so the other children cannot see her cry.
May
Two sisters, and when the older returns from school, the mother doesn’t notice anything wrong with her daughter, but her sister does.
After days of the older returning from school with a face bloated from tears, May says, “Enough of this.”