Short Story: And Down Goes Samantha

You always found her accident prone in a cartoonish kind of way. She lept forth from our mother three months too soon, so desperate to take life into her own hands that she almost lost it before it began. You weren’t born at the time, but you know that when she was five, she sliced off the tip of her finger in an impatient endeavor to serve herself some cantaloupe. When she was 9, you watched as she managed to get her pinky finger lodged into the chain and gears of her green mountain bike—while riding it—but to this day, you don’t particularly understand how that happened.

You never got to play that game in elementary school where your class pulls the parachute tight really fast because her class had launched a ball off of it that, like the meteor forced against its will to kill the dinosaurs, hurtled toward her face and broke her nose. They banned it before you started there. Because of her. She was Player 1 in her life, and there wasn’t a force in the world that could keep her out of the game.

She did set quite the example, albeit an outrageous one. She was the standard of resilience in the face of literal, physical trauma. Each time, she’d let her tears flow, and then leap back into life, into the game, without a second thought about her. She wasn’t someone who dwelled on things longer than necessary, if she did ever dwell at all, and she received the sun each day with animation. For someone that now doesn’t place much of a stake into astrology, she sure does act like an Aries.

You used to follow her around, timidly, quietly. You liked her a lot better than the other one, who seemed to find her supreme glee in tormenting you. And despite her joviality, she took her roles very seriously, both as a big sister and as a team captain. Despite her meager 4’10” stature, on a soccer field, you’d be hard pressed to find someone she couldn’t knock down. To watch her was to witness the spirit of David born anew, whether it be diving into the lion’s den, toppling Goliath, or playing left defender.

You wanted to be just like her. But you were always too shy, too afraid, and already at your young age too married to the fictional word to spend any time in the real world. So, yeah, you wanted to be just like her, but she also terrified you. Any one of those things that she had either done to herself, or had happened to her would have eliminated any and all desire to ever leave the house for you.

She dove for a ball in rocky grass trying to prevent a corner kick and got a raspberry down the entire length of her thigh, where you, while under pressure from the third base coach, chose not to slide to the home base because mom told you not to get your pants dirty. You later learned that she didn’t include sports uniforms in that directive, but you think even if you had been equipped with that knowledge, you still would have made the same decision. You were a calculated child. She was an absolute character, in her personality and in her approach to life.

So it is silly, kinda funny even, when at her game, you look up from your book long enough to catch the cartoonish way her breath leaves her mouth, captured by the cold into a single wisp that was swiftly and severely eliminated in a winter gale. People don’t think of cold when they think of the desert. They think sun, heat, scorch, burn, mirage. Depending on where you are in the world, you may think of camels and pyramids, or kangaroos and dingoes. Closer to home, you might think of the way that the hot makes light ripple over the bleached skulls of once mighty steer, as a tumbleweed rolls away to the tempo set by the rattlesnake’s percussion line. Nobody speaks of the way that frost shines on the spikes of a Joshua Tree in the morning. Nobody speaks of the hard ground at night.

And if it was cartoonish, the way that her breath rose above her as if she’d been a character frightened out of her body on Scooby-Doo, it was even more cartoonish to think about the sound effect that played in your mind when you saw her fall onto her head, bounce up, and fall onto her head again. BONK. Like some stupid cartoon of a coconut falling and hitting someone on the head. Like some stupid joke you can’t help but to share to yourself, that you don’t know will haunt you forever. When you think about it, you’re pretty sure that her head and the soccer ball bounced in the same arcs. It didn’t make any sense. She was like a shadow, only to be seen and never to be stopped the way that she would duck and weave through the tangles of the taller girls.

But then boom. Down goes your sister, lost within a flurry of legs, socks, and shinguards. Lost like Mufasa amongst the stampede of the wildebeest. Unlike Simba though, your soul is not crushed at the sight of a broken body. As she lay there among the shattered blades of frozen gress, she looks peaceful, unharmed, intact. Compared to the damage you’ve heard about her committing to her body, and the damage you’ve witnessed her take with your own eyes, this should be water off a duck’s back. She should get up any second now, and she should smile and laugh about it and keep up the hustle.

But she’s silent. She’s silent and unmoving, and people are running onto the field, and the blades of grass have sharpened the wind into lances. The other one has suddenly shifted from rancor towards the long time crosstown rivals to concern. To worry. But that didn’t make any sense either. Because if she was worried then that meant it wasn’t a cartoon you were watching, and though you didn’t know it at the time, you would never see your sister again.

Usually by this time, the coaches have the player roused and they sling an arm over the shoulders and help the player to the sidelines as friend and parent and sibling clap and cheer in the name of sportsmanship. But she’s still lying there. They haven’t moved her. Time moves different, and you are not freed from this lull until the hot red lights of the ambulance cut through the night, spinning around and around like the days passing around you while you’re stuck standing still.

Your dad takes off in the ambulance with her, leaving you and your sister behind in the care of the other parents from your sister’s team. The game continues without her. You’re waiting for your mom to get off work to come get you. You dive back into your book, some religious allegory fantasy your mom got for you in her attempt to discreetly guide you towards her god. You’ve seen through the thinly veiled message, but it’s interesting enough that you have fun reading it. But right now, as you read of a shining wolf that is destined to lead the charge of the light in a battle versus darkness, all you can do is hope and pray that someone or something can do the same for your sister.

So, unlike Simba, your soul is not crushed by her broken body. Instead, after sitting for what seems like an eternity in the hospital waiting room where pale pink tiles lie at the center of a repeating mosaic pattern, after hours of wondering, “Is she dead?” “Who is going to stop the other one from messing with me now?” “What happens without her?” your soul is crushed when you walk up to the hospital bed where your big sister is strapped up to a heart monitor with an IV in her arm, and she’s awake and you run to her to try to hug her and she screams and recoils in fear.

With as much fear in her eyes as there used to be joy, she makes the demand of you to explain yourself and what you’re doing there. Aghast, you look at the other one for some clue that you’re being pranked. At this point in your life, Punk’d was still airing live, and you’re desperate for Ashton to come around the corner. Because otherwise, what the fuck was that? “Concussion,” the doctor says. But you’ve never heard of a concussion making someone forget their family. You’ve never heard of a concussion making someone forget themselves.

The weirdest thing is that she’s not gone. Not entirely anyway. She’s just…reverted. The giggles that escape her lips are sounds that she has not made since you were mad at her for getting the parachute game banned. It’s been years since she spoke with this voice, but her body is the wrong one for it. She’s a child again, younger than you are now, piloting the body of your big sister.

The first time it happens, when she remembers you, you think it’s all going to be okay and that she’s going to be fine. Relief finds you like water into a dry creekbed after the first rain of the season. Until the next morning, when you go to say goodbye before you go to school and all of a sudden you’re repeating the scene from the ICU all over again…

She spends her days remembering and her nights forgetting. Her brain is as committed to devoting you to memory as Penelope was to weaving the burial shroud for Laertes to completion. This experience irrevocably changes your relationship to the movie 50 First Dates, which you had really enjoyed once upon a time. It does feel weird to think of your sister when thinking of this movie, but there’s mot much else that accurately captures the experience of shock of what it feels like to look at someone while you are so full of memory and to only see a reflection of yourself.