My Sister And I Wander Through An Empty Make-Believe Land by Beth Konkoski

Image Via Pixabay AlkeMade

Flooded twenty years ago, abandoned, now the castle slumps like a collapsed birthday cake, the jungle boat run aground, Peter Pumpkin Eater’s cracked concrete shell filled with dry vines, leaves rattling, too much like snakes. We trespass. She points her phone, snapping while I throw empty beer bottles of my 12 pack behind me, hear them bounce on gravel. 
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“Dad’s here,” she says. “Somewhere.”
 
A waste of a Saturday to hunt his belligerent ghost. And why here? Sure, we visited twice the year we lived with him. Surprise afternoons of freedom from Wilson Elementary, we headed through the mountains with a canteen of coffee, ham sandwiches coated in mustard, wrapped in aluminum foil. My sister hated mustard but forgets this to glorify our adventures.
 
​“Remember, the stagecoach picture?  In a frame on his desk forever?”  It was the 70’s, people couldn’t scroll memories or pass them back and forth like insults as they can now.  It took effort to have a photo developed, printed, framed.
 
I was not smiling in this picture, having just been stung by a bee as I climbed into the velvety cabin of the stagecoach. My arm throbbing and tears near the surface, I thrust myself out the window because missing the picture, crying over a bee sting might ruin the whole day, might get me walked to the car, Dad’s fingers tight around my arm, my feet barely touching the ground, his rage over my betrayal strong, like the smell of dirty laundry, strong like his hand reaching for his belt to signal some rule we were breaking.

With four beers left, I find a bench under an oak tree, and lean my head back. The bark a maze of deep rivulets and shadows, uneven as I drink and rest, drink and close my eyes, drink and let the memories fade as much as they will. She talks to herself, searching and snapping, hoping, although I suspect she might not really believe herself. Point the camera here, I could tell her. Find your ghost here in my blood, my throat, my birthright to be who he was, the set of my lips, too often the slump of my shoulders when I look in the mirror at all the broken promises.

​“Come on,” my sister insists, kicking my foot to get me up. I open one eye, roll my latest empty down the length of the bench and watch it skitter across the grass. There is almost a buzz going, the quiet tingle I can trace up and down my body until it lets me rest, like I’m a shirt slowly ironed free of wrinkles.  

“You’re so much like him,” she says, no longer pleading.  

“I know.”  This moldy truth is not comfortable. I pat the space beside me, feel the bench take her weight, only a slight shift but then she’s leaning against me, solid, real, our bodies almost the same size now. I reach in the box, hand her a beer, and wait.  

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Beth Konkoski is a writer and high school English teacher living in Virginia where she spends as much time as possible listening to the sounds of water over rocks and a pen across the page. Her work has been published in journals such as: Smokelong Quarterly, Bending Genres, and Split Lip Magazine. Her collection of short fiction,  A Drawn & Papered Heart, won the 2023 Acacia Prize for fiction and was published in 2024 by Kallisto Gaia Press. https://www.kallistogaiapress.org/product/a-drawn-papered-heart/