by Joseph Musso
She drinks almond milk and grows her own vegetables in a backyard garden. When she was little, she wanted to be a ballerina and wear pretty clothes in front of an audience. Later, she wandered into literature and politics and spent more and more time alone. By night she studied Yeats and Blake and Dickinson and the Brontë sisters. By day she plotted how to make the world better. She wrote love poems in the high attic with the single-eye window that looked out on the romance of the land. She built clocks in the basement of her mother’s house in the country with the petite and precise fingers of an olde German clock-maker. She is my sister. The sweet girl who raised me when our drunk mother was out chasing men every night. The 13 year old girl who went without supper so her eight year old brother could eat. The sister who has always protected me, and still does, by never making contact with me. The FBI follow me everywhere I go. My mail is read. My computer hacked. My wife left, and took the kids. How do I know my sister drinks almond milk? How do I know she grows her own vegetables? Go fuck yourself, that’s how.
Joseph Musso lives on the east coast with his best friend Jack—a most soulful Chocolate Lab. His books include I WAS NEVER COOL, RED SOMEHOW, and APARTMENT BUILDING.