Emily's Seams
Chapter 12: The Black Box

There she was. My little baby sister. Dead.

I knelt down beside the tub. The bloody water had spilled over onto the yellow linoleum floor and it was soaking into my jeans. It was warm.

I didn’t even think as I reached for the faucet and turned the water off. I reached up to her beautiful, childlike face. I brushed her matted bangs away from her forehead. Her large blue eyes stared at the ceiling. They were empty. They looked like glass.

I touched her lips. Her cheeks. Her nose. She was still so beautiful.

The tears hovered on my eyelids and blurred my vision. I brushed them away angrily. I needed to see her.

Her body floated easily in the bath. Her round breasts, far too much of a burden for any fifteen year old, broke the surface of the red water. She had twisted herself to fit all in the tub and one long, white thigh stretched above the water.

I don’t know when my aunt got home. I don’t remember hearing her scream and scream. I don’t remember the police breaking down our door. I don’t remember any of it.

Julia had been pregnant. I remember being told that. The autopsy showed that she had been six weeks along. I wanted to run away. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to scream. I wanted to drive straight into a telephone pole. Anything but this. Anything but missing her.

I settled on burning Mr. Greene’s house to the ground.

As I watched it burn, I realized that I wanted to be caught. I pictured it perfectly. As they dragged me away to be locked up, I would scream endlessly about Mr. Greene’s part in my sister’s death. How he might as well of handed her the razor blade the first time he told her he loved her.

Dumb Emily might have made that happen for me but she had not been at the wheel that night. Mr. Greene’s house was a big, cheap looking stucco mansion set up in the outskirts of town. No one was close by. As I doused the front porch in gasoline, I screamed and shrieked as if I had gone completing insane. I threw rocks at the windows, hoping that the breaking glass would help me somehow. It didn’t.

I knew there was an out of town game. Mr. Greene would be there, cheering on his troop of chumps across the basketball court. Mrs. Greene would also be there, smiling proudly, pointing out Daddy to her son.

Daddy. Mr. Greene and I would have been related.

I thought the fire would make me feel better. I guess in a sense it did but not in the way I had been expecting. As the fire licked through the house, invading every bit of their home, I felt like it was going through me too. It was like the flames were eating up every memory of Julia, every feeling of Julia and turning it to ash. A heart made of ash didn’t work as well as the one being burned within me, but it also didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel anything.

The world took on a washed out appearance after that night. My friends never existed, my dreams turned to dust. There was this empty husk of an Emily left behind. People think that killing yourself is the only way to give up. I probably once agreed with them. I know now that this is not true. There are so many ways to give up.

But even though the engines failed and I nosed dived into an existence void of emotion, a black box survived. And that’s where my beautiful Julia waited. This black box was indestructible. The only thing I could do to keep the memory of my baby sister from trying to paste together the ashes of my broken and burned heart was to bury the black box I had hidden her away in.