Six Retellings of Sisterhood

Milly Maria Timm

Splayed in your bed together. Blankets on the floor crumpled and damp, August heat turning us pink and sweating in the dark. Done talking, we call desperately for sleep to take us, engineering our thoughts into dreams. Just us two, waiting. Outside the wind plays with the branches.

Going to California made you want to branch out a bit more. Tangle up with a man on his floor, him praising, you denying. Drunk on worship, he would blow two prayers into you. Beautiful, he would say. Caress the pink shell of your thighs. I want you to detect the selfish engineering in his breath. Leave him. Give home a call.

You decided a long time ago that singing was your calling because it was the only thing you knew to do. A bird on a branch couldn’t sing with such loss. I watch you now, engineering leather straps across your breasts, mesh and lace scattering your floor. I’m holding the camera. You tell me to swipe to the pink filter. I watch you grip one ass cheek in the mirror, then the two.

Your mama took our hands and split them in two told us to wrap them tighter around each other and call once in a while. Sometimes I see the blushing pink emoji by your name in my phone, like an olive branch. I picture you miles away sprawled out on your floor hands carefully exploring your body’s engineering.

You’re careful with the car and its engineering, treating the steering wheel as if it will turn into two snakes. The first thing you learned was how to floor the breaks and roll under the wheels, call for help with the knowledge that no one knows this branch of your highway, an emptiness that fades to pink.

I had a dream where my cheeks morphed to pearl pink flesh, petaling out from my lips in divine engineering. An oyster, plucked from salted foam by your branch outstretched from the shore. You held me in two arms, the ocean splitting from your torso. Gulls call as I wake, wild strands of hair plastered to the floor.

August heat turns us pink and sweating in your bed, two sisters engineering their bodies apart. At your window, crickets call. We stir, branch arms out to touch. Blankets crumpled on the floor.