Catherine

She calls me as she crawls on two legs down the wide, affluent, excessive isles of a pharmacy. She waked there for no reason other then to escape the deafening, drowning silence of a two story suburban home where the carpet matches the drapes and the drapes match the minds of the ones who pay the mortgage: always, always closed. She passes time by selecting, carefully, items she will never, ever use and throwing them decisively into a red plastic basket, and she carries this unnecessary weight just fine, gracefully even, all the way to the check-out line.
“I’m bored,” she says into the her phone, and through ways I still do not even pretend to understand I hear it through my phone pretty immediately as I drive away from a local mountain I had spent the entire afternoon climbing. “Oh, “ I say, my eyelids droopy and my heart still in recovery. “Wanna hang out?” she asks, and I mostly do, so Greg and I pick her up and take her far away to a small town where there is a thirty-two-year-old RV for sale. We need this RV to charge the states, we need this RV to fight the inescapability of time with windblown hair and carbon emissions.
We are almost to the RV and we are dancing to some random rap song that I am certain she hates. She throws up what she thinks are gang signs; her small hands move in the shadows of a setting sun, the zippers of her leather jacket jingle.
We never even see the RV. We find the road we think leads to it, but this is a small artsy run down town, the kind where where it’s ok to hoard a dozen rusted toilets in your back yard but not ok to consume one measly animal by-product. She begs us to knock on what we think might be the front door and tells us that she never gets to do anything cool like this.
We park and walk up and down the streets. All the businesses are closing for the day, but she doesn’t care because just seeing the closed signs is good enough.
We drive to a little Mexican restaurant and she orders a taco ala cart -plain- and a water.
“Remember when I was a little kid, and cried because I killed a moth?” she asks me out of nowhere.
“Yeah, I do.”
“I was like three or four, and I was outside watering the garden, and I noticed a moth. I didn’t know what a moth was, and I was afraid it was gonna hurt me, so I poured water on it, and it started moving slower, and I didn’t know what it was doing, just that it couldn’t hurt me if I kept doing that, so I poured more water on it. And then Mom came out and she was like, ‘What are you doing?’ and I was like ‘This thing was going to hurt me!’ and she was like ‘No honey, that is a moth. It cannot hurt you. It is harmless and beautiful, look at it.’ So I looked at it and it was, it was like kinda orangeish, and I started to cry. It was, you know, and moving all like, slow and stuff. It was dying because I killed it, but I didn’t know that then. I thought that was just what it did. So Mom helped me put it in a little cage that Derek had for like, bugs, remember that little cage thing? And I loved it so much. The next day I woke up and it wasn’t moving anymore. It was shriveled up kind of, and dried out in the corner and I didn’t know why. So mom told me it had died, and you and Derek helped me have a funeral for it. We put it in a coke bottle lid and put a leaf on top and a rubber-band around it, and we dug a hole in the backyard by the rose bush. You tried to make a cross out of popsicle sticks for it, and we buried it.”
“I forgot about the popsicle sticks.”
“Yeah. And then, like, two or three years later I decided to find out what happened to it, because I always saw the popsicle sticks by the rose bush every time I went to play outside. I dug and found the coke bottle lid and and the rubber band, but the moth was gone. There was only dirt in the lid.”
When we drop her off, I can think only of how much I love her, my little sister, who is not so little anymore, I guess, based upon the brand new red car that sparkles calmly in the driveway.