New Voices 2020

“Clear Skies Ahead”

by Alison Rodriguez My sister had the largest room in the house and filled it accordingly. From floor to ceiling, she stockpiled and hoarded until the floor couldn’t be seen and one could never be quite sure what color the walls were. Her queen bed was large and imposing, with its oversized box springs, mattress, and thick foam topper. The bed frame itself stood white and proud, covered from head to toe with a surplus of pillows, covers, throw blankets, and quilts.

Somewhere among the chaos was a lumpy, uneven throw blanket that I’d crocheted for her in Home Ec. The walls were covered with mirrors, photo boards filled with pictures of her and her current boyfriend, picture frames that housed her high school diploma and graduation portrait, magazine cut-outs of delicately pretty women and the buffest dudes imaginable, and a fabric Elvis Presley poster from our Aunt Norma, which stood out from the rest with its large size and blinding neon colors. At the foot of the bed, a large armoire, a mirrored dressing table, and a plush armchair were squished into the final three feet of the room before being met by the unrelenting force of the wall, outside of which there was a large oak tree and a slightly smaller sweetgum tree. And, when the winds got high and the rain pounded into the ground as thunder roared through the sky, these two trees held onto each other and swayed with reckless abandon, which always caused the little girls watching out the window to shiver in fear.

After the storm was over, we’d forget our fear and move on to arguing with each other while our parents’ louder, more dangerous argument reverberated through the thin walls that separated the living room from her bedroom, which was our safe haven when anything became too much to handle. We’d huddle on her bed, ignore what our ears wanted us to acknowledge, and focus on the movie playing on the TV above the mirrored vanity. We looked like two bears roused from their hibernation cycle, disoriented, bleary-eyed, and confused as we propped our knees up and slid lower into the bed to hide from our reflections. Our eyes would trail from the movie to the groups of ridiculously large tissue paper balls that were suspended from the ceiling and swaying at the will of the ceiling fan, which one tended to overlook until everything else had been looked at and digested because it was white and 27