The Actual Adventures of Michael Missing by Michael Hickins

Author:Michael Hickins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Actual Adventures of Michael Missing
ISBN: 9781936873395
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1991-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Last Donna

I used to have an unusually strong love for my sister Ruth, partly because I protected her when she was twenty-four and I was seven years old. She was married to a mulatto Haitian who thought beating her up was a good way to work off tension from a day of real-estating.

I have a vivid memory of one time in particular, because it was the one time I saw her try to get away, and it was the first time I tried to save her; it wasn’t the last for me.

I was at her home being baby-sat when he came in and they started to fight. He slapped her—and the next thing I knew, she was out the door and he was first calling and then running after her. I looked for a likely place to crawl under, and happened to glance at the tin sheriff’s star pinned to my breast. What the hell kind of sheriff am I? I thought, accusing myself.

They came back together, he carrying her from behind, she kicking the door open with her bare feet. I noticed that her foot was bleeding between her big toe and the next, where he had stepped his heel in. The color of the blood and the nail polish didn’t match—it was Fire Engine Red—and maybe this detail has also helped perpetuate a strange predilection I have for older women’s feet.

I told him I’d arrest him if he didn’t leave my sister alone. He told me to butt out.

That’s the way it stood until she left him, and then there were other messes she got into, and me trying to help. I’ve always gone for older women, maybe because there was something absent in my relationship with my sister, or maybe because there was too much.

“I’ll give you anything, Michael,” Ruth said, “except sex.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because I’m your sister,” she said.

But she should have been as astonished at her statement as at my follow-up.

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