The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager

Author:Lindsey Drager [Drager, Lindsey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Archive of Alternate Endings
ISBN: 9781945814822
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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GRETEL AND THE WITCH

WHEN I AM YOUNG and don’t know much about the way lives curl and coil around each other and that we call this love, I ask my brother why he does not want the lips of girls. We are playing in the sandbox, that liminal space where other worlds are encouraged to open. He looks at me and I cannot break the stare. Our castles in the wet sand fall apart.

Years later, we find ourselves on our parents’ doorstep. My brother has not wanted the lips of girls for some time, has instead known the mouths of men. Now my brother is ill. There is a correlation, and our parents listen as we disclose this information. We are standing on the porch and I am wondering when our mother will let us into the home in which we were born and raised. I can see through the channel of the house to the back, where the sandbox still lives. It is empty like the top of an hourglass when the time is up.

As we stand there on the porch where we shared popsicles and chalked stick people, where we wiped the dirt from each other’s feet before entering the house, our parents don’t seem to understand. We try to explain in soft terms: love, men, risk. I am thinking they are not listening, but soon I see my mother hug her heavy middle. I see the skin on her face turn a kind of pale green. She is standing in front of my father, and when he tries to speak she holds up the back of her hand to his chest and he stops. He says her name, and she moves backward, pushes him into the house. He says her name again, over, her name, and my mother is shutting the door very slowly. There is our family on the porch and then there is just my brother and I, the closed door a lesson in how to be alone.

What we do not know is that this scene has been unfolding across the country. I try to imagine the parents in bed at night, in that space before sleep when the mind follows its own set of rules. Do they think of the boys they once greeted with side hugs and half smiles? Do they think of the bangs they once pushed from foreheads, the chins they once held in their palms? Or are they able to revise the past, erase the child from their history as if he never was?

My brother and I walk away from that house, the home in which we were raised. And like two characters in a story, when we step off that porch the rest of the yard shifts into the set of a production; I watch the world around us shift from the familiar site of our childhood yard into a dark and indefinite wood. We are no longer adults, but children who must use all our cunning and savvy to get to the center of the labyrinth, compelled by we know not what.

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