Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans

Author:Danielle Evans
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Short Stories (single author), Fiction, Self-realization in women, African American women, African American, General, Short Stories
ISBN: 9781594487699
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2010-09-23T17:17:18.355000+00:00

While I was having imaginary conversations with my ex-girlfriend, Liddie was finishing up her first semester of junior year at Harvard. It was no wonder that even people who’d known me for the three years that she didn’t exist often mistook her for the older sibling. I always thought it was because of the accident, the one she swore that she remembered in perfect detail. Driving us back from the city, Dad had slammed into a car stopped in the middle of the highway. I was nine and sleeping and was carried out of the car in perfect health. Liddie, six and wide-awake, was hit by a piece of flying glass and put in the same ambulance as the children in the other car, two of whom died on the way to the hospital. Liddie was released a few hours later with twenty-five stitches across her forehead. They left a faint scar when they came out.

When Liddie was twelve, a plastic surgeon neighbor mentioned to my mother that Liddie’s scar could probably be surgically corrected.

“Great,” Liddie said, before my mother could respond. “And when we’re done with that, why don’t you just give me a boob job? Is there anything else you see wrong with me?”

“I’m sorry,” the woman murmured. “I know it’s a sensitive subject.”

“We were in a little accident a few years back,” said my mother. “I think Liddie wants her battle wound.”

“It wasn’t a little accident,” Liddie said.

“She was six,” my mother said, as if this proved something about Liddie’s reliability.

The truth was we all trusted Liddie’s memory, and she knew it. Anytime Liddie wanted a favor from me or wanted our parents’ permission for something she had no business doing, she’d lift her hand and push her hair back ever so slightly, so subtly you couldn’t call her on it. I blamed her—sometimes—for my mother’s cheerful denial of everything that was wrong with us, and for my father’s whiskey habit and nightly disappearances into his study. Without her, it might have been easier to forget what had happened. It was Liddie who knew most of all how fixated our father was on the accident, because she regularly brought him coffee and food at night, even during that year when she was boycotting cooking.

“Don’t you think he goes in there with the door locked because he wants to be alone?” I’d asked her once when we were teenagers.

“I’m just trying to get his mind off it,” she said. According to Liddie, our father had a drawer full of clippings about the accident. Alone in his office, each night, he drank and read them over and over.

“Maybe he wouldn’t dwell on it so much if you weren’t always throwing it in his face so you could walk all over him,” I said. She’d done it at dinner that night: flashed her scar at our parents when they started on her for mouthing off to her history teacher.

She looked at me, exasperated more than angry.

“It’s called love, shithead. You hurt people, and then you make it better.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.