SMS 23': Chi Ro

​It was a warm, sweet kind of day, the sort of day where the weather matched your body exactly, hot enough you could wear shorts but cold enough you didn’t sweat. I hated heat, especially the sticky, humid kind that made you feel like pulling your skin off. I hated cold, too; days where the windows of our RV would frost over and my mind would shut down and I would huddle with my sister under the blankets for warmth. Days like this one were a rare luxury.

My brother and I laid on a small grassy strip of land. The RV was parked in a lot overlooking a beach with small, scintillating waves tentatively sidling up onto the sand and withdrawing again. In front of the beach was a road. Between the road and the parking lot laid a thin slice of grass, surrounded by a curb, shrubbery dotting the edges, a worn-down path leading from the lot to the beach, and it was this land that my brother and I had sprawled out upon, looking up at the sky. White, spun-cotton clouds passed overhead.

“Lis.” He spoke, softly.

“Yeah?” I lazily turned over to look at him. The grass scratched at me as I shifted positions, and a slight tremble shook through my body.

“I want to draw something. What do you see?” Logan’s sketchbook lay open on his lap, a plastic bag of pencils at his side. I sat up. The grass clawed at me.

“Hm.” I pushed myself closer until my shoulder pressed against his, then held my hands up, pointer fingers and thumbs joined together to make a square. Through this lens I scanned our surroundings.

“I see…” My words slipped just out of my grasp. It took a moment for me to piece together what I was trying to say. “Look at that spot on the horizon, right below the sun, with light dancing on it.” I centered my hands on the warm, large, golden-hour sun, casting thread-thin shards of perfect light over the ever-moving waves, as I tried to explain exactly what I saw in my mind’s eye.

Logan nodded. “And?”

“It would look so pretty with that boat in the distance moved closer, with its sails pulled wide open. And then have the birds flying above it.”

“Remember the rule of three, Lis,” he corrected, a quick thumbnail sketch of my vision appearing beneath his pencil in mere seconds. He was right. The drawing skewed too far to one side. “It’ll look better once you balance it.”

“Ay. Okay.” I shifted again on the needle-like grass with a huff and re-positioned my hands. “Here, keep the sunlight at the center, I like that, but move the boat to one side. Put that tree,” a slight flick of my head indicated the gnarled oak in question, “on the other to balance it. Have the birds flying across the top.”

Logan doodled this quickly in an inch-long square. “Yeah, that’s better.” He nodded and held up his hand to me, fingers outstretched. I mimicked the action and our fingertips touched, our version of a hug. Having someone’s arms around me was suffocating. He understood that. Our fingertips remained pressed against each other a second longer before he turned and began to expand my vision into art. Several quick lines formed the horizon, boat, and tree. It would fill in from there.

I let myself settle back onto the grass I swore was made of nails. Blades prickled at every bare limb. I stared up at the sky in a futile attempt to distract myself. The cloudless, endless sky, going on into infinity, at the same time looking as if it stopped exactly where it began. I stared into it, down into the abyss, into oblivion, feeling the gravity that kept me pinned in place, laying on the earth, a living, breathing, pulsing organism. How fascinating the world was.

“Logan,” I said, laying flat, hair spread around me, looking deep into the nothingness of the sky, “do you believe there’s a god?”

“Huh? Why do you ask?” There was the slight rustling of his pencil being set down and his sketchbook cast aside.

“Everything. Mama’s god is… difficult to believe in, to say the least. But look at everything. The universe is so big. I feel like something has to have created it.”

“Ah.”

We looked at the sky together.

“The answer,” he said, a slow second or two passing, “the answer is, I don’t know yet. I agree with you that it feels like there has to be something out there. But I don’t know if I believe in a god, or just some sort of divine force.”

“Mm.” I gave a vague noise of acknowledgment. “…Do you ever question the universe?”

“All the time, Lis,” he admitted. “But it falls apart every time I try to get answers.”

“I think it’s meant to do that.”

“Yeah.”

The more I thought the further away my mind grew. Abstract half-formed images and sounds filled my head, a staticky sensation filling me like liquid until I was swimming through dead air, only ever understanding a slight semblance of a concept before my mind descended back into meaningless blacks and whites and shades of grey. The grass bent and buckled under me, and I closed my eyes, dizzy.

“Lis.” Logan’s voice drew me slowly out of my cursed reverie. A dull pain beat at the inside of my skull.

“Yes?”

“What do you see?”

“Nothing you can draw.” I rested my hands on my stomach, feeling the ground rise and fall at every breath. Every single blade of grass beneath me dug into my skin as I exhaled.

“Put your hand into the grass.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Then put your hand on top of mine.” Logan set his hand palm-down in the grass and I placed my fingers over his. “Just sit, Lis, and let the ground hold you. Take deep breaths. Focus on breathing in and out.”

The warm, thick afternoon air draped over me. The grass rose to meet me with each breath. And slowly, my head cleared.

“I’m back now.”

“Good. Go ask Papa what we’re having for dinner, will you?”

“Okay.” I stood, shook the grass off my shirt, and approached the RV, where Papa lay on a wheeled, wooden platform, sandwiched between it and the vehicle’s base. He’d disappeared up to about his waist.

“Papa?” I knocked on the side of the RV to catch his attention. He rolled out from beneath it and sat up on the board.

“What is it?”

“Logan wants to know what’s for dinner.”

“Ask Mama. She’s in charge of meals.” Papa laid himself back down and half-vanished under the RV again. I heard a quiet clanking sound. A second later, his hand appeared and gestured towards his toolbox. “Hand me the wrench.”

I did as he said, then knelt on the ground, the side of my head pressed to the concrete in an attempt to see what he was doing. The ridges in the asphalt dug into my knees. I couldn’t see much of anything beneath the RV besides pipes, twisting in on each other and out to the corners with no rhyme or reason. Then, unable to restrain myself, I asked. “Do you believe in God?”

“Lis, give me the etymology of the word ‘random,’ please.”

I listed it off for him, all the way back to the original Germanic. I could do that with most any word, but it was rare anyone ever asked me to. “Why did— oh. It was because my question was random, wasn’t it.” My expression flattened. So much for someone expressing interest in me.

“Good job; you’re learning. To answer the question, no, I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“The world’s too complex for someone to have thought it up. Would you have been able to think of all of this?” The hand with the wrench makes a vague, sweeping gesture to the outside world. “In addition to that, it keeps existing, and we sure don’t do much to maintain it; it’ll be here long after we die. If it can do that all on its own I don’t see what use a god would have.”

“I see.”

“Go bother your sisters now.”

“Yes, Papa.” I pulled myself to my feet with a hand on the RV wall as a support. I entered the vehicle itself, ignoring my brother Nicky sitting on his bed, then, standing on tiptoes, pulled back the curtain to the bed above the driver’s seat, where my sister Kana slept. She laid there, one hand under her head as a makeshift pillow, her other holding her chest.

“What do you want.” Kana propped her head up on the arm she’d used as a pillow and glared down at me.

“Do you believe in God?”

“That’s what you woke me up for? Really?”

“Answer and I’ll let you sleep.”

Kana yawned. “Fine. No, I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“If there was a god, we wouldn’t be living in a fucking RV, and we wouldn’t be parked in this shithole of a town.” Immediately after she’d finished, she yanked the curtain shut. I heard her turn to face away from me.

“…Right.” I stepped away and walked towards the back of the RV, and pushed aside the sheet dividing Mama and Papa’s bed from the rest of the room. Mama was sound asleep, a blanket pulled up to her neck, her long, curled, silken hair around her like a halo. She was bound to snap at me if I woke her up. I let the sheet fall back into place.

By the time I returned to Logan, our littlest sister Fiadh had joined him. I greeted her by placing my fingertips to her forehead. She pushed my bangs out of my face and patted the ground beside her. I obliged.

“What’s for dinner?” Logan inquired as he guided Fia in drawing out a bird that nibbled on a French fry ten feet away from us. He held her wrist and showed her how to block in the shapes that comprised the bird’s feathered form.

“Papa said to ask Mama.”

“What did Mama say?”

“She’s asleep.”

“Ah.”

Fia pressed her free hand to her stomach. She appeared to shrink back with apprehension. I leant my head on her shoulder.

Logan guided our little sister’s attention back to the paper. “We’ll find something.”

“Someday,” Fia promised herself under her breath, “someday I’m gonna be rich and live in a big mansion and never ever have to worry about food again.”

“And we’ll visit you,” Logan agreed.

“Fia,” I asked a minute later, head against hers, breathing in the sweet scent of her hair, feeling her thin shoulder shift under my chin as she drew, “do you believe in God?”

She hesitated a second. “Yeah. But I hate church.”

“I know you do.” I tilted my face up to the sky. Fia, three years younger than I, dreaded church more than any of us. Nervous energy pulsed around her the second we so much as stepped into a church building. “Which god do you believe in?”

“Mama’s god, probably. The Christian god.” Fia trailed her long fingernails through her soft albino hair as she spoke. “He sounds pretty fair. And he sounds loving. Which is good. I mean, I have a lot of questions, but everyone does, right?” Her hand fell palm-upwards to her side. The bone of her shoulder dug into my chin. “Why do you ask, Lis, ah?”

“Just curious,” I replied. “I don’t quite know what I believe yet.”

“That’s okay. I don’t think you have to know right away.”

A dried, reddish leaf broke off the tree above us and drifted down onto Fia’s shoulder. She brushed it off. Another leaf landed on me and I flinched. My hand flew to shield my head. Logan reached over and picked it off gently.

“Would you say you’re Catholic then?” I asked Fia, breath wavering.

“…No. I think I’m probably a Protestant. But I don’t really like labeling it.” Fia flipped the pencil in her hand and erased a portion of her bird’s wing. “I think it should be personal, I don’t wanna just swear loyalty to one section of it. I mean, there’s so many, how are you supposed to pick?”

“Mama won’t like that.” I shuddered as a slight breeze stirred my hair. The sun was dipping down closer to the horizon, not yet setting, but close. It took a long time for my body to settle back down; I swore I could still feel the remnants of the wind coursing through me.

“I don’t care,” Fia responded under her breath. “In my mansion no one will be able to tell me to go to Catholic Church or Baptist or Pentecostal whatever.”

“Yeah.” Logan nodded.

We sat there awhile longer.

Eventually Kana came and joined us. She stood between us and the road for a beat, her svelte form blocking the sunlight as she stretched her tanned arms above her head, then laid down beside me with a slight huff, head rested in my lap.

“Get off. Your hair feels bad.” I nudged her away. Her hair, bleached blonde one too many times, scratched at me every time she drew near.

“Ay, fine.” She rolled her eyes and shifted several inches to the side, sitting cross-legged instead. After a glance downwards, she gave the hem of her thin, clingy minidress a slight tug so it covered her entire upper thigh for once. “…I know I was a bitch to you earlier. I was just tired.” She held out her fingers towards me. I touched them with my own. It burned.

“It’s okay. I forgive you.”

“I was thinking about what you asked. If I believe in God, y’know.”

“She asked you too?” Fia inquired, somewhat rhetorically.

“Yeah. I don’t, and I stand by that answer, but I guess if you want a more specific reason, Lis, it’s ‘cause if you look at humanity it’s pretty damn clear whatever god there might have been up there ditched us a long time ago.”

“No one tell Mama that,” Logan joked. I squirmed uncomfortably. In the distance, a dog barked. Waves crashed down on the shore. Papa’s wrench clanked against the RV. Fia’s pencil moved on her paper. Kana flipped her hair back and it scratched against me hard. The grass dug into my legs.

Everything. That was all I could think. Everything and everything and everything from here to infinity was happening and I could feel it all.

A slow, tight pain closed up my throat, tears welling in my eyes, my breaths deep and labored. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and put my hands firmly over my ears.

“Lis? You okay?” Kana touched my shoulder, and that was all it took. My arm swung involuntarily to the side, hitting her away. I sat up, legs drawn to my chest.

“Don’t touch me,” I choked out.

“What triggered it?” Logan asked. ‘It’ was this. This horrid feeling of everything being too much and too many and too loud and bright and harsh that made me want to go away from everyone and everything I knew until there was nothing except me and silence.

“Stop talking stop talking stop talking,” I repeated many times over, every sound far too much for me to handle. My ragged, haphazard breaths worsened into something else entirely.

Fia cautiously, slowly slipped a hand in front of me, not touching me, but so, so close. “Lis, do you want to go inside?”

I gave a slight nod as I moved my foot away before she could touch me. Logan stood. I stood with him. He guided me back to the RV, my hands still over my ears tight, his arm hovering six inches away from my shoulders in a protective, detached embrace.

As soon as I stepped inside the RV, everything went blissfully dark and quiet. Nicky lay on the fold-out bed he shared with Logan, tossing and catching his soccer ball in the air. He hadn’t moved since I last saw him.

Out of reflex, almost, or irresistible curiosity, though tears were streaming down my face, I asked. “Do you believe in God?”

He glanced over at me. A slight double-take crossed his face. “Yeah. I do,” he replied with only a touch of hesitation.

“Okay.” I nodded and continued through the vehicle until I reached Mama’s bed at the back. Logan knocked on the wall to wake her up. My hands clamped down tighter over my ears. Slowly, Mama stirred and sat up.

“…Mm? Annalise, nena, what is it?”

“Lis had a sensory overload,” Logan informed her. I nodded.

“…Ay. Come here.” Mama beckoned me over. I gingerly sat down beside her and she wrapped her arms around me. My body violently jerked away. Her hands fell into her lap, defeated. “Why do you always flinch away from me? I’m your mother.”

“I don’t want people to touch me,” I whispered.

“Mama, you can’t hug her when she’s like this, you know that,” Logan reminded her.

“She’s just being a little dramatic, aren’t you, nena. You probably got a sunburn and overheated. You stay outside too much, you’re getting nearly as dark as Kana.” Mama pushed my bangs aside and kissed my forehead. “See, you’re so hot. Just stay inside for a little while, you’ll feel better.” Her hand sent needle-like pain through every nerve she touched. I simultaneously wanted to sink into her embrace and run, as far away from her as possible.

“It’s not like that,” I protested, but she shushed me into submission.

“Go lay down awhile. It’ll all be better once you cool off.”

“…Yes, Mama.” I stood and left to the bed Fia and I shared. Logan remained with Mama and drew the sheet until they disappeared out of view. I curled up on my bed, face down, holding my pillow over my head to block out everything I could. Muffled noises still came through.

I caught snippets of Mama and Logan speaking in low voices. Noises of a conversation passed through the space between the sheet and the floor. I couldn’t make sense of them, and I didn’t want to. Everything hurt.

Their voices rose until Mama gave a curt order instructing Logan to go start dinner. He replied, equally curt, that there was no dinner. Mama yelled at him to find something. Next to me, I heard Nicky cease tossing his soccer ball. I held the pillow over my head. A moment later, Logan returned to us. I felt him press his fingers into the mattress by my head. I reached out and pressed back.

I didn’t move until that night. The noises and scents around me told me somehow someone had found something for dinner, and everyone had eaten. I wasn’t hungry. It wasn’t until nightfall that I lifted my head up and summoned the strength to pry myself away from the safety of my bed.

I pulled a sheet around my shoulders, put on my sandals, then stepped out into the parking lot. Fia and Nicky were playing soccer in the RV’s headlights. Mama and Papa sat together on the curb. Kana and Logan were off a ways further, looking out over the waves. I started towards them.

“Ah, and she joins the waking world at last,” Papa joked when I passed by. My hands clenched into fists. I gave a nod of respect and found my way to my elder siblings.

“Oi, Lis.” Kana held out her hand and I matched my fingertips to hers. “You doing better?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” She repositioned her hand, fingers spread out loosely. I moved my head under her fingers and she patted my head softly. Those sorts of actions were nice, when I wanted them.

“I like nighttime,” I said, bangs still pressed flat by my sister’s palm. “Everything is… it’s just less.”

“And I think less is what we need right now.” Logan tapped the railing he leant on to draw my attention to it, and together the three of us looked out at the perpetual crashing of the waves on the shore.

“What do you see, Lis?” He asked.

“Why’s it always Lis? Why’s it never ‘what do you see, Kana?’” Kana asked with what I assumed was mock irritation. It was hard to tell sometimes. Logan smiled.

“Fine. Both of you, what do you see.”

“Um… The moon is pretty,” Kana answered weakly.

“Good enough. Lis, what about you?”

I formed a square with my fingers and trained my vision on the sky, on the stars faintly visible beyond the lights of the world around me. “I see… I see infinity. Look at the stars, and the sky and the world and space and everything; and there’s more that we can’t even see. It goes on into infinity. At least I think so.”

Kana was silent for a beat. “…Okay, can I go again?”

“Next time.” Logan nudged her. She nudged him back harder. “Lis, I think you should try photography.”

“Why?”

“That way you can capture things right away. It might not be exactly the way you see them, but at least you don’t have to wait for me to draw them. And most people take pictures of what’s important to them; I want to see what’s important to you.”

“Hm. Maybe.”

“Think about it.”

“I will,” I promised.

I looked at my siblings with a hint of a smile. Kana placed a hand on my head. I tilted my face upwards, into her touch, towards the stars, towards the sky, towards everything.