A Girl

A girl was there. Right where you're standing now. She was a young girl. Too young to understand very many things about the world. She was homely, maybe even ugly. Her head wide at the top and narrow at the chin, but squarish on both ends. A trapezoid head, mostly forehead with two eyes like most everyone. Green. That was a nice enough feature, the color, but they were wide set, with almost no eyelashes. Below them was a nose, her only really nice feature. Taken on its own it was really quite lovely. If archaeologists had found nothing but her nose in the sand, they would surely have imagined (and built a model of) a creature of unparalleled grace and stature. This is how rumors get started. Continuing downward, her upper lip was slightly cleft, revealing yellow teeth engaged in the charleston. She wore a yellow dress. Oh, her hair. Her hair was a rust color which, again, taken by itself was a nice color to look at, but in its current (and constant) state was fairly unruly, poorly cut, and unevenly distributed. Wisps of it were matted to her forehead, and she had clearly been chewing on the longer strands, the ends dry and shredded like hay. The girl was my sister and I was ashamed of her. I saw her classmates tease her, and sometimes came to her defense, though reluctantly and without any real conviction. My guilt for not standing up for her wholeheartedly led me to treat her with extraordinary kindness at home. This appeased my conscience somewhat, though I knew I was doing it for myself, and not truly out of goodwill or love for her. That day, when she stood where you are now standing, was the day she died. Our father called her from the barn to come help change the oil in the car. She loved learning from him and he had real love for her. He was good and treated her like anyone else, though he had to have seen that she was unfortunate and known that she was an object of schoolyard abuse. He left her alone a moment to unscrew the filter and his homemade jack failed. The car fell and her head was crushed beneath it. She didn't cry out and neither my father nor I heard the car fall. My father blamed himself of course and it took two years, but he killed himself over the guilt, driving the same car off a bridge. Not everyone believes it was suicide but I knew my father. I know how he felt the weight of it, as I feel the weight of things. The beautiful, crushing, self-absorbed, sentimental weight of things that could drive me to it too, given the right course of events.