If You Ever Muster the Courage to Drown

This morning my teenage sister Lilly crawled out of the reservoir behind our house; a stillborn clawing its way out a thrashing womb. She came home, kneeled on the scraped hardwood at the foot of our drunk dad’s recliner. Dad swallowed his remaining whiskey, placed his palm on the crown of Lilly’s sopping head. Water droplets fell from her hair like dead moths dropping away from the glorious fluorescence of a flickering porch lamp.

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I watched from our kitchen. Lilly and Dad stared at each other; newborn and father, stargazing from either side of an impenetrable veil. They both opened their mouths to speak, but neither of their wet voices arrived.

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Instead an egg on the kitchen counter rolled off the edge and broke open against the tile floor. Her shell splintered. Yolk oozed out across the linoleum, golden as God, screaming as it spread:

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“I badly want to die, but I’m afraid I’ll never return.”

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I got down on my knees. No one in our home was standing. I stroked the expanding egg yolk off the floor with my tongue, swallowing the entire viscid pearl.

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I prayed: please, please let me return as a lake.

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