My mother is nothing. My dad is an angel. My sister is Chinese and I always wanted to be her. I dreamed up convoluted ways to kill her - bleach injections for a whiter hide, a drowning with rope-tied hands, a dismantling of the insides squeezed into cat-shaped jars. I see Jesus watching me everytime I come around to these thoughts and he isn't waiting to point the finger. Oh no, he's a voyeur. So I sit in dark circles in our single room and put a whole bunch of keys in my mouth. The hard taste of teeth-jarring metal for the fix of asphyxiation, or perhaps just to stop me biting my own tongue. One has to prepare for such things as seizures. One wrist handcuffed to the radiator, the other free to finger my rosary and my belt buckle doesn't even make a noise as it scratches the surface of the table. Oh my god oh my god oh my god if my sister knew I could see Jesus she would spit blood just to kiss his pinkie.
The small dark-skinned boy who might have been my brother (but who knew, really? Who could tell?) tried to kill me everytime you locked me in, mother, with the changing locks and my key didn't fit the hole, it only fit inside the half-circles of my jaw. In the darkness he would traumatise me and try to strangle me until finally I convinced my dad my daddy and he punctured the boy's skull with a single hammer blow. It cracked split open like chocolate-covered ice-cream. We threw the body into the sea. The edge that lapped at the steps at the end of the garden at the bottom of the house in the green chalky vegetation that was our sunny beach.
But then you, sister, thought you saw Jesus in the back, hiding half out of the foliage, half in the black spots the moon doesn't quite catch hold of. Fingers stiff and pointing right into your insides. The up right down to the spasms you thought were euphoria or an epiphany. I wanted to teach you what your epiphany was but our mother told me not to be so hurtful. Your epiphanies are as good as anyone else's. So I listened and you were in love with this moronic stranger in the garden. I wanted to tell you what your Jesus does. That he watches me when I fist-fight. Yeah. But you don't believe in shadow-boxing and you never listened to my mouth anyway, with it's own heartbeat and bloodied belt-buckle smart. I say thankyou dad and kill it before it eats of itself. I dream of becoming Medea and murdering my own creation so nobody else can take it from me.
The boy's body didn't flow out on the no-tide. The water rose till it kissed our house of ill-repute and no foundations. It rose and rose and the body didn't get carried out to the gulf of Mexico. It just floated outside our back door and smelled of decay and became ashen grey and bloated like a wreck. And then my sister stopped seeing Jesus and we sat together and watched as the birds began to devour him.
