Breadcrumb #590
JOE DEMES
With the hand not cased in honeycombs of plaster and bandage, my sister takes pictures of herself crying in our bathroom mirror. This has been happening regularly: crying, capturing, choosing, posing, editing, captioning, waiting, responding, repeating. My parents say it’s hormones; they think this is a good sign. Recently it’s become audible—her crying—hence their now knowing she is crying, hence thinking her body is recalibrating, hence a good thing. She has been gaining weight again but her bones are still frail; this is the sixth break in a few years since she left the pro circuit, or the let her go—depends who you ask.
When I pushed open the door her face was streaked; along her jawline, tears hung like cherries. I was caked with sweat and whatever the grey stuff on my legs from puddles I couldn’t avoid was, and said I needed the shower, that it wasn’t a rush but could she come knock on my door and let me know when I could use the bathroom, because I needed a shower and to stretch. This was my second workout of the day; I was looking to hit 120 this week, which meant two-a-days of at least ten miles. My shorts and shirt stuck to me grossly, wet scabs that needed to be peeled away.
“You rot,” she said, leaning at me, “Like drain water and horse shit.” She turned back to the mirror and click click click went the artificial noise of an aperture snapping shut. “I hope you left your shoes outside.”
“It’s some kind of farm animal, yeah,” I said, peeling off my socks.
“Run on the pavement instead of the trail then.” Click click click. “Don’t bring that in here.”
“It’s slick. I’d slip. That’s how that happens,” I said, pointing at her arm.
“Then don’t.” Click click.
“Right.”
“At all.” Click.
“One more time?”
“It’s gross, the smell, and if it’s too dangerous to be out on pavement, then maybe just don’t run.” She turned to me. “At all. Do you really need to hit one-twenty? What are you trying to prove?”
I fiddled with my watch, the plastic band slick with sweat and ridged. I looked through my mile splits, each time another reason why I’d be going pro once I graduated. Our parents were out somewhere, probably taking my grandfather for another doctor’s appointment. I looked gross, but I felt high from the pace I’d kept. It was cool out, finally; the dry season had passed, and pushing myself this hard didn’t feel like a workout. It had been fun. It had been fun and I had been having a good time, and now I was home and here we were, doing this little dance. “Check out mile six,” I could say. “That’s where I broke your indoor record, again.”
I heard it in my head, coming from a voice like but not mine, its tongue near my ear. It spoke in the way I wanted my voice to sound, not the way it came out in interviews and video footage. It was an easy voice to listen to and I knew it, so I turned around and grabbed the head from which the voice came and held it under mental water while its arms thrashed and slapped until it wasn’t slapping and thrashing any more, and then I dragged its body to a deeper part and pushed it off to let it sink away. I reminded myself of the word amenhorrea. I reminded myself that this was the sixth time she’d broken a bone and that it doesn’t hurt any less the more times you break them.
“It was cool out, finally; the dry season had passed, and pushing myself this hard didn’t feel like a workout.”
There, barefoot, in an oversized hoodie and track shorts, her hair in two tight braids, my sister looked more like the girls I ran with than someone twenty-five and living at home again, indefinitely resting, taking record of what had happened to her, had been done to her, and trying to recuperate.
“Can I have this?” I asked.
“I’m leaving, I’m leaving.” She tucked the phone in her sweatshirt pocket and made a sweeping gesture. “The shower is yours.”
She went to leave but I stood in her way. “If I sign with a team, will you hate me?”
“Oh sure, let’s unpack all this while I’m in short-shorts and my face is a balloon.”
“And even if it doesn’t happen, even if I keep working for it—”
“And why do you want it? Why would you, after what it did to me?”
“Why is it bad to want it?”
“The same reason it’s bad to wear their gear, like you do, and let sites profile you, like they do, and consider letting them pay you to wear their uniform, let them pay you to use your face in ads just like they did mine—”
“You know I’d send money home. Home includes you.”
“—which what does anyone do with so much of it? What must that be like, to know you can’t be touched up there in that castle you’ve built because that’s what a castle is: a money fortress. And the king’s crown is made of gold—”
“I can’t follow—I—look I just ran really hard and—”
“—and gold shines and shine distracts, it grabs our eye and soon we forget to ask who mined that gold and who forged that crown, whose hands made the castle—”
“Seriously, I can smell myself and I can feel my stomach eating itself.”
“—no one’s talking about my hand, this one right here,” she said, shoving the cast in my face, “or the other parts of me that they broke, because you’re the one they can focus on now, you’re the heir apparent, the future sub-4 miler they can call their own, to call away attention, when all I want is for attention to be called to this, to me, and everything you’re doing doesn’t make it seem like you’ve ever cared.”
The part of me I thought I’d drowned bubbled up from the surface and stared at me across the lake.
“Say that part one more time.”
She stops. “Say what one more—”
“Say the part again where you think I’ve never cared.”
“Easy: I don’t think you ever did.”
It glided along towards the shore, towards the forefront of my mind, no trace of a wake, no arms stroking or legs striking the water.
“Please let me shower before I really say something to wreck you.”
“Oh, I want to hear.” She got her face right up in my facespace but her eyes couldn’t focus on one thing, couldn’t hold my gaze. With siblings born close it might be uncomfortable, but besides her being so much older, this is athlete posture. It’s easy to read: the one who initiates is always compensating. Getting in your face is tryhard and sets you up to really look as small as your dick seems. She’s just another body at this point, another sack of meat that I can outrun.
Soon that part of me was swimming faster, serpentine, but when it reached the shore its stride was calm as it stepped out of the water and lay next to me on the rocks of the shore to dry. “Remember when she told you when you were twelve that she wished you had been twins?” it asked. “How she would have taken the chance to eat you in the womb? Taken all your life for herself? You remember.”
I asked her if she remembered, and it threw off her posturing. I could see the same part of her inside shrinking back into its own lake, trying to find something to dredge up from the bottom, but I started before it could get itself underwater.
“You knew it then and you know it now so I’ll say it now: I’d have eaten you. I probably already did eat a part of you. Maybe that’s why I’m so close to sub-4 and you only ever set that indoor record, which guess what? I fucking crushed on mile six today.” And this was too much but I said it anyway because it felt good, because I was heated and a hundred yards ahead of her and still had gas in the tank to kick: “Maybe that’s why your bones are frail.”
And I knew I’d gone too far because she didn’t say anything back. She went to leave the bathroom and I all but just stepped aside to let her. The tile was colder than I remembered it being when I got home and my sweat had already dried; the salt felt like a second skin, and I a snake ready to shed it.
I turned the water too hot once I had gotten in, then adjusted it to just south of room temp. I figured this must be what the lake in my mind felt like. Thick steam like a city crowd left runs of condensation all across my body.
I understand what has happened to her, and all the damage it has done. No one should have to work so hard just to have their body fail them and their feelings publicly executed on repeat, their career brought back down to square one because of it all.
“Except no one sees this” the voice I want to sound like mine said. It finished drying and began heading back towards the lake. On the shore, I was drenched. “No one sees how she is. And from day one she’s seen you as competition.”
When bad things happen to good people, sympathy comes easily; when they happen to bad people, the thing that comes easiest is to turn one’s back, or mock. My sister isn’t a bad person, but she’s become like this ever since she came home. Arrested development isn’t a good look on anyone, and gone are the days where I couldn’t keep up with her pace in workouts and in thought. We are more each other’s rivals than we ever were; I no longer look up to her, and she looks down on me for being guilty of wanting a thing at someone else’s expense, which is exactly what it means to want, or at least is a consequence of it.
Her door was closed. It sounded quiet, so I didn’t risk anything by knocking. The room to my door was loud as I opened and shut it; medals hung from the knob and clanged like cowbells. On the wall there was a poster that her old sponsors sent me ages ago, when I’d started making news in the junior circuits and she’d just gotten signed. Prefontaine stands in front of a trailer made of corrugated metal, looking past the camera; his shirt reads in red, USA MUNICH TRIALS, EUGENE OREGON; in blue, underneath the arch of MUNICH TRIALS is the year: 1972. The trailer’s curtains are red and its door is open but not inviting; the car next to the trailer is powder blue, and I wonder if it is the car in which he died. Pre’s hair is blond, his skin tan, his body fatless like mine, his mustache thin. The caption in the lower left reads NOT ALL CASTLES LOOK LIKE CASTLES and I thought Welcome to my castle as I stood naked in the middle of this bare room, just a bed and desk, a small closet to hang clothes in and my poster the only decoration, the only thing I’d thought to bring to this room while our grandfather stayed in mine, our grandfather whom my parents take to doctors every week, whom we have not seen in years, whose bones are also frail, whose mind is frailer. I thought of owning my own trailer and living somewhere where I could train year-round and not be in anyone’s way, and this makes my stomach feel less empty as I start my stretches.