![]() ![]() She does not complain or cry, but still I look away from her as I work, not wanting to watch the dirt fall onto her blue wide-open eyes.Further promoting herself as smoking-hot hired help, Davis dances and caresses her frame while bragging in a separate clip, “The single dad of the kid I’m babysitting tells me I look especially good today & if I want to stay for dinner.” In the middle of the night I sneak out of bed, take my dad’s shovel from the garage, and bury her beneath the oak tree in the backyard. She blinks up at me like nothing has happened, like we are guilty of nothing. When I unzip my backpack in my bedroom that night, the Little Sister is still alive. But I understand that things are different now. I have not lost my parents, not in the way I thought I would. It takes me a minute to realize that he means the baby is dead. ![]() That’s the phrase my father uses: “It just went out.” At first I think he means that the baby got up and walked away. There was a baby, for a minute, but then it just went out. Then he carries me out to the car, throws the backpack in the back seat, and drives me home.īut my mother is not at home, and neither is the baby, because there is no baby. He grunts to me and speaks a few gruff words to Jim and Rhonda. It has been a thin, sour, uncomfortable sleep I am so dizzy with relief to see him that I throw my arms around his neck and weep. I awake early the next morning, to my father pulling me up off the bed by my armpits. This cozying does not make the objects look cozier it makes them look ashamed.” “ Rhonda crochets cozies not only for the extra toilet paper rolls, as I’ve seen in some of my friends’ bathrooms, but also for the phone and the phone book and the dog and my uncle’s guns and both of their toothbrushes. Then I return to the bed and instantly fall asleep. I carry her over to my My Little Pony backpack and zip her up inside. She is a beautiful baby but I know that this is not how babies are supposed to come into the world, and her presence gives me a dark feeling. I take her onto my lap and look down at her. She looks like a normal baby in every way except the color of her skin-a warm, translucent gold. I only try to picture the shape of this sister I have desired and already lost, this soft human curve of abandonment, and the pressure of my need turns her real, and suddenly there she is, lying beside me on the crochet-blanket-covered bed, looking up at me with blue eyes and kicking her fat little legs. I have invented characters in my mind before, fairies and pirates and things like that. That night in the cramped guest bedroom, fearful and unable to sleep, I create the Little Sister. ![]() Rhonda will crochet a cozy to encase me from head to toe, so that you can barely make out the lumpy shape of my body I’ll breathe through a woolly woven web, and will only be able to see the world in pieces, through the constellation of small apertures between the yarn. I see myself sitting here on the lumpy loveseat, becoming another permanent fixture of the house. When eight o’clock-my bedtime-arrives, I know with certainty that they have taken the new baby home to replace me and that I will remain with Jim and Rhonda forever. When my parents have not shown up or called by late afternoon, I begin to suspect that they are not coming back at all. Also no one has explained to me that it’s way too early, that the baby is not supposed to come for two more months. No one has explained to me how long babies take to come I have the vague idea that they just spring out, like a Pop-Tart from the toaster. I expect this to happen quickly-within, say, an hour. I sit all day on the sofa, the crochet pattern imprinting itself onto my sweaty legs, watching an I Dream of Jeannie marathon and waiting for my parents to show up and take me home. This cozying does not make the objects look cozier it makes them look ashamed. Rhonda crochets cozies not only for the extra toilet paper rolls, as I’ve seen in some of my friends’ bathrooms, but also for the phone and the phone book and the dog and my uncle’s guns and both of their toothbrushes. ![]() No, not “hobby,” exactly: her crocheting is a compulsion, perhaps some kind of illness. Uncle Jim is married to a woman named Rhonda, whose hobby is crochet. This story starts when my parents drop me off at my uncle Jim’s house, on the way to the hospital where my little sister is about to be born. She lives in Athens, GA, where she is working on a PhD. Amy Bonnaffons' work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Kenyon Review, among others, and has been read on This American Life. The characters in The Wrong Heaven seek to solve their conflicts and dilemmas, both spiritual and sexual, in all the wrong places. The following is from Amy Bonnaffons' collection, The Wrong Heaven. ![]()
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