Creative NonFiction

Ultrasounds are prettier when you think of them as a dolphin using echolocation. Doctors draw silhouettes of an entire person yet can never quite tell who that person will grow up to be. No matter the identical elemental construction of a human, doctors can determine nothing. The silhouettes of my little sisters were labelled “Baby A” and “Baby B.”

Baby A and Baby B both lived less than a month; I cannot tell you their favorites colors or list their hobbies.

Known facts about Baby A and Baby B:

Babies A and B were both female

Babies A and B were born at 23 weeks and 6 days (premature)

Babies A and B were born on November 26th, 2013

~

Summer ‘23:

The family farm has two preemie cows this year. One was birthed from a sickly mother, cancer eating her eyes, tearing away layers of white and leaving red. The other was born to a newly bought auction cow -- purchased unknowingly pregnant. They attempted a late term abortion but the calf came out alive. When I first see her, she is shiny and silky. She crosses her legs and stumbles as she walks. My mother and I place lawn chairs in the grass next to the calf once she lays down. Soon, she tries to get up again - she shakes and her front legs collapse. Faceplanted in the grass, and we jump to pick her up. She is fragile. Mom breaks it to my brother, "She's probably gonna die." Nathan’s thirteen now and tall enough to look us in the eyes. He answers, "Should we shoot her? Would it be better to die fast, or slow." I understand the humanity in it, but I wouldn't be able to pull a trigger. I'm not even capable of using my voice box to ask a question like that.

I unpack my suitcase into my childhood bedroom once we get back from the farm, and my backpack finds its way into the same spot it sat for years. The sound of my feet on the floor is a kind of nostalgia that is soothing but never craved. But I think, upon entering my house, that this is what it must feel like to be a dog returning to your kennel.

My mother pushes open my door. She tells me that earlier in the week, on the drive home from the farm, my brother started crying, saying “They’re going to die just like my sisters.”

~

2014:

I cradle a stone body in the palms of my hands and dunk it under the bathtub faucet. The cement begins melting away to reveal pink and purple flesh. I can’t scrub underdeveloped skin, so I whisper prayers under my breath. In every iteration of this recurring nightmare, I can’t melt away the cement fast enough, and I watch as their skin turns grey again and their cries are muffled. My mother walks away crying. When I awake I hear her real sobs down the hall. We both cry in our own beds.

~

Ten years to the day after the birth of babies A and B I receive a text from my dad:

“Your going to get a message from someone likely on messenger, it’s a very long story but he would technically be your older brother. Short version, his mother and I briefly dated in high school, she got knocked up and left town and just bailed, I had no phone number or anything, she contacted me once when she came back to town when he was a few months old, I met him and then she basically disappeared. I talked to her once from that time until she contacted me again when he was 18. He started asking questions so she tracked me down. He and I talked a little and then inevitably had a falling out, it was weird, he just seemed angry, which made some sense, but it’s not like I had a chance when he grew up. So anyway, he is interested in getting to know you. If you want I can give him you phone number, he’s asking for it.”

Ten years of wondering who my sisters would have been, only to spend an entire evening wondering why the text couldn’t even be bothered to use the correct “you’re.”

My mother videocalls me over snapchat, and my youngest brother is behind the screen, camera too close to his forehead the whole time, but I find it charming. He holds the phone while my family sings “happy birthday” and my mother blows out the candles atop the angel food cake, breath as soft as wings beating the air. It’s funny, watching a long, serrated bread knife slice a cake soft enough to tear with your fingers.

It’s weird, my stepdad thinks, the way we still are celebrating ten years later. If I were to die tomorrow, I wouldn’t want ten years to be the cutoff for receiving flowers on my headstone. There’s a little boy buried next to my sisters, but the family never got a headstone. Never revisited the grave. The groundskeepers eventually forgot that the “temporary” plastic sign with his name marked the brown grass, and the orange hot-wheels car kept getting moved onto my sister’s headstone.

I think of telling my stepfather the story of Cain and Abel. After Cain slayed his brother out of jealousy, the Lord Confronted him, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” The Lord punishes Cain. For the rest of his life, he restlessly wanders the earth. If Cain could wonder the earth for the rest of his life, could we not light candles for my sisters a few years more? I don’t want the solar powered dragonfly garden light by their headstone to be stuck in fresher dirt.

My therapist asked, “At what point do you stop lighting candles?” I would trudge through the November snow with my walker, is what I want to retort, but I only shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know.” I am angry, I am upset, I am hurting, ten years later. “Time heals all” is a load of shit, and anyone who tells you differently is lying. “God has a plan” my ass, because if he did, why would he have let me cry alone in my room? Where was he? Who let an eleven-year-old sit at the top of the stairs and cry alone while her mother and stepfather leaned against each other and created a slideshow of pictures for the funeral? Who had nightmares for years and said nothing? Why, God, did you watch and do nothing? Wholetmegothroughitallalone?

I am coated in guilty, red-handed blood for being the sister who lived. So, no, I don’t have an answer for when I can stop lighting candles. My stepdad might be ready to leave that behind, but I’m not. I am coated in guilt, just like Cain.

I know, though, that my sisters’ blood is not crying out like Abel’s was. They were laid in a casket together with arms hooked at the elbows and buried beneath tears; but there is a different blood calling out to me. There are different candles that will be lit every year.

I message my father back after a few hours of rereading the text and tell him that he can give my number to my older brother. I may only have a list of known facts about my brother as short as the list for my sisters’, but among those we already have one similarity: the pain of not knowing anything about our younger sibling. For my sisters’ tenth birthday I am given the opportunity to be a little sister to someone else. Who, better than me, could receive this gift?