Four ways to lose her, one way to let her go

Rafi Overton, fiction, 2024

"My short story employs a dream-within-a-dream to iteratively strip down an older sibling's rage and shame and confusion and discover his loving vulnerability and fear for his younger sister. Through the protective ethereality that dreaming provides, I grapple with the dangers we face in romance and how we can give grace to imperfect people."

Her fingers curled around mine impassively, and I knew it was the last time. In my palm, a cowrie shell, its squiggly mouth redolent of a penned sketch of waves in the fringe of a notebook. Its pearly body freckled in maroon. “Isn’t it pretty?”

Jenna’s sigh was chiding. “I don’t know, Terrance. I think it’s kind of ugly. I mean, what are all those freckles? It looks like a creature’s been hemorrhaging blood.”

I think we’ve reached the final shell now. Which means we have to make it through alive.

Mama and Papa are lying face-first on their polka-dotted towels, her in her lilac two-piece and him in his cartoonish bigfoot swim trunks. The sun is burning their backs and peeling their necks, but neither seems to care, because they’re free as children for a week. Too free. Something’s bound to happen, I think. Something always does.

Jenna is seated in her Adirondack chair with a Hello Kitty plushy, reading about puffins. She wears a one-piece, being below the age when girls start showing skin. I like her like this, innocent and secure. She’s my baby sister, and I don’t want any boy to hurt her.

But boys aren’t the threat to baby Jenna out here at Quinault Lake. Bears and water are. We come here every July, and every time Sis wants to run astray and explore the woods. When she was two, she only spoke three words: “I go, Mommy”. Those were enough to make me snatch her in my two arms and tickle her till she got bored and fell asleep.

I don’t know, though. Sleep is dangerous, too. I wonder what nightmares Sis has when she naps, if any. At her age, all my dreams were about Mama catching me stealing from the cookie jar above the fridge, and spanking me—she doesn’t spank Sis, God bless that little girl. Now my nightmares have turned dark. I just awoke from a most awful dream about a terrible fate befalling Sis.

I.

Mama and Papa were red like tomatoes from being too long in the sun, and both of them were cranky. “We’re leaving now, kids,” Papa grumbled, heaping his polka-dotted towel in the plastic bin without bothering to shake it out.

“Come on, Papa,” Mama snapped. She only called him Papa when she was angry and wanted us to be mad at him, too. “See what Papa did?” She rolled her eyes at us beseechingly, shaking the sand straight on us.

Sis shrieked. “Dada! Mama got sand in my eyes!” She wanted to cry, but the sand was drying her eyes out, so she whimpered and scratched at her face with her hands.

I couldn’t bear it when Sis was hurting. Wrapping my arm around her, I opened a bag of cookies and stuck one in her mouth. “There, Jenna,” I said consolingly.

“Hey, Terrance!” Mama snapped. “Don’t feed your sister all that junk.” She snatched the bag away and tossed it in the lake. “Y ou’re just like Papa.”

Papa lit one of his fancy cigarettes he only used for special occasions. “Don’t mind her, girlie,” Papa whispered through a cloud of smoke. “She tells me to quit smoking, and look at me!”

“Hey!” Mama stomped after Papa, who ran into the wood, belting out his sarcastic laugh.

Sis was crying now; I hugged her to my bare chest and kissed her on the forehead. The next few moments happened very quickly. I smelled strong smoke and heard Papa yell, “Fuck!” Then my peripherals lit up with a red blaze and Sis escaped my arms and ran to the lake. I ran after her but was too late. To my horror, I saw bubbles rushing to the surface. Then my baby sister’s body surfaced too. I dove into the lake and held her to my chest. The water felt soft and the air like hot sand. That was probably just the sensation of coming to.

II.

In my dream, I had been flailing in the deep, looking for Sis. She had wanted to play Marco Polo ever since she had learned about his exploits in geography class. I told her that he wasn’t a great guy, that he had hurt many people on his travels. But she just gave me this confused look, so I dropped it.

Sis was a mystery to me. Sometimes, we had the deepest conversations that one could have with only the vocabulary of a six-year-old. Other times, she was a moron. I can’t imagine I was ever that smart or that dumb. But when we played in the water, we were on the same level. She knew how to evade me, and I was blind.

When she went past the buoys, I called out that it wasn’t funny anymore. She needed to come back. Did she know that I meant it? That I worried about her? Girls are confusing. They never let you know what they know you know about them.

I couldn’t see Sis anymore. When I saw an explosion of bubbles, I swam toward it as fast as possible, but there was only a dead seagull on a rock with a note tied to its neck. Was the note real? I thought I had merely dreamt it.

III.

In my dream, Mama was furious with Sis. She ripped off her expensive silk dress—died a rich shade of blue—and whacked her on the ass with it, time and again. I knew it was a dream, because Mama never spanked Sis. Not in real life. But she kept hitting her, yelling, “Why did you let that boy talk to you?”

Papa had gotten out of his chair, clearly uncomfortable. But he was too lazy to say anything, so he just eyed me apologetically, as if to say, “I don’t approve of this.”

But I was furious. I wouldn’t let Mama hurt Sis. Hurling myself in front of Mama, I hid her behind my arms. “This is not the way to show her you love her!” I yelled.

“Oh yeah? And is this?” Mama removed a handwritten note from her waist that clung with moisture.

“I want to read it again!” Sis snarled. Hissing, I snatched at Mama’s hand. I knew it was a dream and therefore real-life consequences didn’t apply. But Mama tore the note in two and hurled it into the ocean.

I clutched Sis in my arms. “Hold on, Jenna!” I cried. “We’re diving in the deep end!” We plunged into the icy sea and fell downward, downward, downward, until we reached the bottom. At the bottom was a fantastic coral reef, on which lay a golden-haired boy about Sis’s age. Sis reached out to him, but he was dead. He had a pen sticking out of his throat.

I thought Sis would be crying now, if she were not already inundated with water. I helped her to lift his body, which felt surprisingly light. I wondered then, as we floated upward, if it was true what they say about souls. If your body gets lighter when you die as a consequence of your soul escaping it. If so, did it all come down to souls being less dense than water for them to float in the right direction?

We swam upward with him, but when I emerged, I realized to my horror that I was alone—neither body nor girl accompanied me. But then the reality struck me—it had just been a dream. Groaning, I tried to recall what I had been dreaming about.

IV.

The dream came back to me like the vague after-shadow of the moon in a drifting fog, and it was all so muddled. I reached my hand into the stream of ghosts. Tried snatching each of the pieces. Putting them in order.

I saw starlight. Not the sparkly kind you see outside the window of a jazz club. The type that hangs restlessly over a graveyard. Then constellations. A bizarre, twisted dragon—no, a swan, it’s polka-dotted tail twisting around me as I reached for her.

Looking down, the fog was a reflective mirror below me. The swan was an inflatable flotation device. “Jenna?” I cooed.

“I’m here!” Her head bobbing up and down with the swan. We were spinning around and around in the waves.

“Jenna, I know you’re ticklish!” I spurt. The mist is still all-consuming. I reach through it to find fingers; they are mine. Tickling my baby sister. “Stop!” she gurgles, giggling.

I continue. Massaging her shoulder, where she gets tight after dance practice. “No I said STOP,” she yells.

I stop.

“Sometimes I say something, you don’t listen to me.”

My chest is heavy, constricted. “It’s called sarcasm, joking.” I say quietly. “Adults use it when they don’t want to say what they mean.”

“I don’t like it.” The heaviness of her words and of my chest become tangible, and the raft goes down, inch by inch. “And I don’t like how we’re sinking. You need to get out. You’re too heavy. You’re pulling us down.”

“No,” I shout, suddenly swept into a fearful rant. “Fuck, no. I’m trying to protect you. Some motherf— and you told me what happened, do you think it’s crazy I want to protect you? Can you imagine if it happened again? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—but can you imagine? Stop trying to be strong and distant. I’m not the one who— I’m trying to save you. Stah— I’m sorry, just…”

Raft flips over. Sis goes under. Gurgling. Spitting water mixed with starlight. I reach for her. Can’t save her. Mist surrounds me again, until all I see is stars. “Jenna,” say loudly. Not believing. Not seeing sense. Not seeing truth from fiction. “Jenna! Jenna! Don’t go! Don’t fucking leave me!”

one.

My eyes flutter open, as salt in my eyelashes sprinkles into my irises and burns them with searing heat. The first thing I see after rubbing my eyes is Sis scampering with awkward motions toward the lakefront. I don’t miss a beat. As though this reality is a continuation of a dream, I race after her, yelling, “Don’t go into the water, Jenna! You’ll drown! I’ve seen it happen four different ways!”

I grab the girl, who, squirming and pouting, crosses her arms and looks at me. This nine-year-old girl, with her Hello Kitty plushie and her Hello Kitty one-piece, pipes up, “Don’t be a pussy. The water is two feet deep. It can’t hurt me.”

Then my jaw drops, and at the same time Sis confirms my worst fear. “And who is Jenna?” she interrogates. “Why did you call me after your girlfriend?”

“It’s his ex-girlfriend,” Papa calls, nose still buried in the towel. As Mama twists herself into a seated position, he rolls over and puts on his glasses. “Let Heidi go into the water, Terrance. She needs to take risks and explore. You don’t want your baby sister to turn out like Jenna did.”

As Heidi plays in the shallows and chases seagulls, Mama walks up to me and slaps my ass like she hasn’t in five years. “I’m sixteen, Mom!” I protest. “You can’t treat me like a child anymore.”

She grunts. “You’re acting like one.”

But then she notices a gray hue populating the far side of the lake. She sniffs the air. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Mama knows that. Mama knows when shit really hits the fan—tossing a cigarette, without extinguishing the embers. Orienting yourself by the stars. But sometimes, when I lay in bed, listening to her and Papa battling it out, I think she gets too lost in the haze, too absorbed in her own ruminations to see what’s black and white.

I don’t know, though. Nobody ever appreciates when I get close. As my sand-caked eyelashes flutter with the weight of the oppressive afternoon, I recall the last time I felt watched by the thousand eyeballs of the night.

Perfect teardrops rumbled from her lashes, like strings of beads. Her eyes batted them away, batted me away. It took all her might to pull my hands from her face. “You don’t love me,” she said. Her voice a tragic melody. “You love my tears. You love building me up into something whole from something broken. You love looking at Miss Insecure because it makes you feel like Mister Grace and Honor. You want tear drops, go taste the fucking ocean. If he does it again, that’s not your problem to solve.”

She tore off her clothes. Dove into the ocean. I never saw her again. In a way, it doesn’t matter if she drowned, or if I dreamed it. It doesn’t matter if I wanted her to be safe, or if I wanted to save her. It was all a romantic fantasy. I stood there, staring back at the sun until he shuttered his eye, and when the waves retracted, revealing all of the shells, I wondered if I’d ever know which one was truly hers.