I Got All My Sisters With Me

If all religion is born of cult, a new way of life takes genesis between the white walls of Gina Morris’s bedroom. This is a holy day of celebration—Denice Morris has just returned from her two-week honeymoon in Hawaii with her new white husband, Nikolas, and, like fanfare announcing her arrival, posted an image of herself on her couple’s Facebook, Deni and Nik Hiller, swinging from a tree in her backyard. And from the looks of it—from the tautness of her forearm, the tight grip of brown skin against unseen skeleton, the intricate web of bones making up her collar, the unbending spine of the tree—she has lost weight.

Gina knew, intuitively, in an unexplainable way, that this was coming.

She notices it first in the middle of the night, after giving up her battle against sleep using a sword in the shape of a cellphone. Even before her fingers caress the screen, scroll, dig, wait for the update she knew would come to come, she senses it. The lightness of Denice’s new step, levitating on the sand and above the water; the weightlessness of her head, thrown back mid-husband-induced laughter; the tiny bassinet made from her hands pressed to her stomach, which could carry no-thing, no-body. It was her voice each time they had spoken on the phone that confirmed Gina’s fears–her clipped speech, glazed vowels, every word ending on a lilt, with no solid place to land, speaking her own name like an unanswerable question. Gina had not yet touched her sister, yet searched with her eyes for the shawl of skin that no longer existed on her body, and yet, she can feel it. Denice is thin now.

She calls her sister Noelle with the news first, her cellphone searing the skin surrounding her neck with quiet flames. Noelle was the only person she could call, who would answer the way she wanted her to. You know Nik don’t feed her, G. And they would snigger on each side of the line, clamp their hands over their mouths, assuage any ounce worry for Denice with shots of jealousy, tipping the glass down their throats until they threatened rupture.

But Noelle does not answer. Gina knows she is awake because Noelle was constantly, chronically awake. She traipsed around the streets like an owl in woman’s clothing, slinking around in the night and passing the bags that took permanent residence under her eyes as fashion, as choice, as incentive for a night’s life of magic. Noelle is a stripper.

How she came into such work was beyond Gina’s and her other sisters, Bianca and Imani’s, understanding. She was the skinniest, out of the four of them–skinny, which is to say one who is in possession of much skin. Thick, plump, endless brown skin, everywhere and anywhere it could fit. A body like a handbag. Her existence was beyond Gina’s comprehension, and Gina had plenty of experience with skinny women. Enough to know that she herself was just fat. She could shove back a layer if she tried, press her stomach inwards, pat it down and out
quick as a cigarette, while Bianca carried her weight like a backpack–along her arms, the sides of her stomach, which jut out like two hills and oscillated like a pendulum while she walked. Imani had big bones. She was tall, and her fat matched her height, inch for inch, pound for pound, the shell of an athlete. But Denice–Denice balanced the scale. Denice was voluptuous. Curvy. Slim-
thick. A man’s woman. Junk in all the right places, wrong only in front of the elderly or in the slums at night. Best when with Noelle, navigating her world. Gina had seen Denice be many things in her life. They had exited the womb together, arms tangled between each other, spent eighteen years under the same roof, two after college, and during none of those 24-hour moments had Gina looked at Denice and thought, that thing you have, I want it. Had Denice ever, ever
been thin.

The word makes Gina’s tongue curl, go metallic, taste blood. Denice’s newfound
featherweight presented yet another difference between them, distancing flora from fauna. She knew the stages one must reach before total separation: First, your petals shrivel. Then, the animals that once populated your habitat run away. Then, the soil rejects you, and the rain stops falling, and you are left only a seed itching for a palm to squeeze you back, like you had once squeezed the Earth. You know Nik don’t feed her, G. And still, Gina wants to suckle on such hunger. Feel its sweet and bitter between her lips. Roll it like a sugar cube between her cheeks. Cling to it like the branches of a tree, until it cracked and splintered in the center.

–Juanita A., 15, CT