How the Story Ends
by Gabi Soleimanipour
Whenever the phone rang in the middle of the night, I thought it
was the authorities calling to tell me that my sister was dead.
Even after the last apologetic mutterings of the late-night
telemarketers faded away into static I would find myself lying awake in bed and
staring up at the ceiling, wondering who would come knocking on the door in the
morning. My sister never brought her keys with her. She was always forgetting
them, leaving them abandoned in the strangest places - the top shelf of the
freezer next to a carton of vanilla ice cream with the lid missing; buried in
her top dresser drawer beneath a heap of push-up bras and lacy socks; shoved
underneath the swimsuit edition of “Sports Illustrated” that held a permanent
position under her mattress.
She’d picked the lock once, and in the morning I’d been greeted
by a twisted bobby pin jammed into the workings, and the sight of her sitting on
the counter without a shirt on and an ice pack pressed to a series of bruises
along her collarbone.
“Rough night,” I commented nonchalantly as I started filling up
the kettle with cold water from the tap.
“It was worse before I got here. Can you pass me the mistletoe
from the cabinet?”
When I was younger she used to tell me stories about the
monsters that lurked down alleyways and crouched in the shadows with slavering
mouths and unblinking eyes, monsters that would swallow you whole and spit out
your bones to cool on the pavement. Sometimes she would talk of fire that burned
blue and moved as though it were alive, burning any living creature that stood
in its path or followed in its wake, or else massive lizards that lived in the
sewers and grew fat on rats and pollution. I had always treated the tales as
fantasy. Everyone knew there were no crocodiles underneath New York, anyways.
That was mere tourist drivel.
As I grew older her stories grew less and less real, but also
took on the grit of a harsh and unquestionable reality. There was no blue fire,
but the monsters in the alleys were unquestionably real, their hands always
groping, their mouths always open and hungry.
“You used up the last of it on Sunday,” I said, sticking the
kettle on the stove and wrestling a pair of mugs from the bottom rack of the
dishwasher.
“Damn. Where’s the incantation I told you to write down?” asked
my sister, hopping off the counter and rubbing at her eyes. The bruises didn’t
look as bad up close, the blackened skin already changing to a sickly
yellow.
“Probably buried underneath the pile of bills on my
desk.”
“Again?”
“I’m beginning to think that there’s some sort of temporal
inevitability that every piece of information you ask me to record will
eventually wind up sitting underneath one stack of papers or
another.”
“Balls.”
“Basically,” I agreed.
And then, of course, there had come the first of the midnight
phone calls, the voice of a man I didn’t recognise crackling through the
mouthpiece with panicked tightness. He might have been crying, and when I met
him later and saw his red-rimmed eyes I thought that he looked the sort of
person who cried an awful lot, though not without good cause. And there were a
lot of good causes worth crying for, in those days, or so they told me. I was
nineteen, just into my second year of college, and I’d wondered if they were one
of those hippie groups that were all for saving the whales and eating low-carb
diets that tasted the way they smelled.
The Authorities, they called themselves. It was a name torn out
of an urban fantasy novel, more than one of which had graced my bookshelves in
the past few months. I hadn’t believed it, of course, looking upon it with a
type of troubled disdain, the same way I had begun to look upon my sister’s
stories, and later in life her late-night escapades that always ended some time
in the early morning with blood on the kitchen floor or an unidentifiable muddle
of brown and red clogging the bathroom sink. I had never asked. I didn’t think
there was a point to it, not when my sister would already be in the shower with
the undoubtedly drunken strains of song wafting out into the hallway along with
the mist. I assumed she was just one for bar brawls and thrilling car chases,
living at full speed.
I worried what would happen when she
crashed.
She had almost crashed the night of the first call, or so it had
seemed.
“Sister. You’re her sister,” the man had said on the other end
of the line. There was a faint whimpering coming from somewhere beyond his
voice.
“Who is this?”
“We’re the - the authorities, you’re her sister, she said to
call you, said you’d understand.”
“Understand what? Are you the police? Who’s that crying?”
“She said - oh god -
she said - she said to tell you that she’s sorry. About the stories. And that
she never got around to finishing them for
you.”
“The stories about the monsters?” I had asked.
“Y - yeah.”
“That’s - that’s okay,”I mumbled. “They weren’t the sort of
stories that needed to have an end, anyways. Tell her not to pick the lock again
when she comes home. I’m worried it’s going to break.”
“Yeah, I - I’ll tell her.”
Then the line had gone dead, and the next time I’d seen my
sister was when I’d walked into the bathroom three days later and found her
lying in the bathtub with a coffee mug full of whiskey in her hand and a crop of
freshly-stitched scars on her stomach and thighs.
“So what’s the story this time?” I asked, sticking the ice pack
back in the freezer. “More shadows? Lizard
spawn?”
“Would you believe me if I told you that half of the city
council members are lizards?”
“Try one-quarter.”
“That’s how many, then. They’re trying to raise the sewage
levels, pump a little power down the drains, say hello to evolution several
thousand years early.”
“Quaint. So how does it end?”
My sister smiled. “You know how it ends.”
The story ended with blood on the floor and lying prone in
bathtubs drinking gin; it ended
with lying awake at night wondering if another call would come in and wishing
that the ceiling wasn’t quite so blank as it was; it ended with an absence of
mistletoe and incantations trapped beneath piles of bills and papers that reeked
of bureaucracy.
“I do.”
It ended with me.
by Gabi Soleimanipour
Whenever the phone rang in the middle of the night, I thought it
was the authorities calling to tell me that my sister was dead.
Even after the last apologetic mutterings of the late-night
telemarketers faded away into static I would find myself lying awake in bed and
staring up at the ceiling, wondering who would come knocking on the door in the
morning. My sister never brought her keys with her. She was always forgetting
them, leaving them abandoned in the strangest places - the top shelf of the
freezer next to a carton of vanilla ice cream with the lid missing; buried in
her top dresser drawer beneath a heap of push-up bras and lacy socks; shoved
underneath the swimsuit edition of “Sports Illustrated” that held a permanent
position under her mattress.
She’d picked the lock once, and in the morning I’d been greeted
by a twisted bobby pin jammed into the workings, and the sight of her sitting on
the counter without a shirt on and an ice pack pressed to a series of bruises
along her collarbone.
“Rough night,” I commented nonchalantly as I started filling up
the kettle with cold water from the tap.
“It was worse before I got here. Can you pass me the mistletoe
from the cabinet?”
When I was younger she used to tell me stories about the
monsters that lurked down alleyways and crouched in the shadows with slavering
mouths and unblinking eyes, monsters that would swallow you whole and spit out
your bones to cool on the pavement. Sometimes she would talk of fire that burned
blue and moved as though it were alive, burning any living creature that stood
in its path or followed in its wake, or else massive lizards that lived in the
sewers and grew fat on rats and pollution. I had always treated the tales as
fantasy. Everyone knew there were no crocodiles underneath New York, anyways.
That was mere tourist drivel.
As I grew older her stories grew less and less real, but also
took on the grit of a harsh and unquestionable reality. There was no blue fire,
but the monsters in the alleys were unquestionably real, their hands always
groping, their mouths always open and hungry.
“You used up the last of it on Sunday,” I said, sticking the
kettle on the stove and wrestling a pair of mugs from the bottom rack of the
dishwasher.
“Damn. Where’s the incantation I told you to write down?” asked
my sister, hopping off the counter and rubbing at her eyes. The bruises didn’t
look as bad up close, the blackened skin already changing to a sickly
yellow.
“Probably buried underneath the pile of bills on my
desk.”
“Again?”
“I’m beginning to think that there’s some sort of temporal
inevitability that every piece of information you ask me to record will
eventually wind up sitting underneath one stack of papers or
another.”
“Balls.”
“Basically,” I agreed.
And then, of course, there had come the first of the midnight
phone calls, the voice of a man I didn’t recognise crackling through the
mouthpiece with panicked tightness. He might have been crying, and when I met
him later and saw his red-rimmed eyes I thought that he looked the sort of
person who cried an awful lot, though not without good cause. And there were a
lot of good causes worth crying for, in those days, or so they told me. I was
nineteen, just into my second year of college, and I’d wondered if they were one
of those hippie groups that were all for saving the whales and eating low-carb
diets that tasted the way they smelled.
The Authorities, they called themselves. It was a name torn out
of an urban fantasy novel, more than one of which had graced my bookshelves in
the past few months. I hadn’t believed it, of course, looking upon it with a
type of troubled disdain, the same way I had begun to look upon my sister’s
stories, and later in life her late-night escapades that always ended some time
in the early morning with blood on the kitchen floor or an unidentifiable muddle
of brown and red clogging the bathroom sink. I had never asked. I didn’t think
there was a point to it, not when my sister would already be in the shower with
the undoubtedly drunken strains of song wafting out into the hallway along with
the mist. I assumed she was just one for bar brawls and thrilling car chases,
living at full speed.
I worried what would happen when she
crashed.
She had almost crashed the night of the first call, or so it had
seemed.
“Sister. You’re her sister,” the man had said on the other end
of the line. There was a faint whimpering coming from somewhere beyond his
voice.
“Who is this?”
“We’re the - the authorities, you’re her sister, she said to
call you, said you’d understand.”
“Understand what? Are you the police? Who’s that crying?”
“She said - oh god -
she said - she said to tell you that she’s sorry. About the stories. And that
she never got around to finishing them for
you.”
“The stories about the monsters?” I had asked.
“Y - yeah.”
“That’s - that’s okay,”I mumbled. “They weren’t the sort of
stories that needed to have an end, anyways. Tell her not to pick the lock again
when she comes home. I’m worried it’s going to break.”
“Yeah, I - I’ll tell her.”
Then the line had gone dead, and the next time I’d seen my
sister was when I’d walked into the bathroom three days later and found her
lying in the bathtub with a coffee mug full of whiskey in her hand and a crop of
freshly-stitched scars on her stomach and thighs.
“So what’s the story this time?” I asked, sticking the ice pack
back in the freezer. “More shadows? Lizard
spawn?”
“Would you believe me if I told you that half of the city
council members are lizards?”
“Try one-quarter.”
“That’s how many, then. They’re trying to raise the sewage
levels, pump a little power down the drains, say hello to evolution several
thousand years early.”
“Quaint. So how does it end?”
My sister smiled. “You know how it ends.”
The story ended with blood on the floor and lying prone in
bathtubs drinking gin; it ended
with lying awake at night wondering if another call would come in and wishing
that the ceiling wasn’t quite so blank as it was; it ended with an absence of
mistletoe and incantations trapped beneath piles of bills and papers that reeked
of bureaucracy.
“I do.”
It ended with me.