It’s no disease that puts bruises on a woman’s face and breaks her ankle and leaves her for dead in a boat, I know that for sure, but Marta and Ma ain’t telling me that one of our neighbours did this coz the sibling herself can’t remember, one of them blows to her head making her forget everything. She forgot so much that even two days later when the clouds had dried away, the sun burning us once more, and she was well enough to sit up, it was hard to make her believe it was her sister wrapped in the shroud we were setting to burn on the funeral pyre.
She wanted us to unwrap her face so she could see for sure, but Marta said no one should go looking on faces that’ve soaked in sea water, not if they want to remember that person as they once were.
‘Stone-cold dead,’ I whisper to the sibling even though she don’t speak our language, and take her hand so she won’t feel so alone. Me beside her chair, her not even able to stand to honour her dead sister. She looks up at me, maybe sees my bandaged head, matching her bandaged ankle, and maybe thinks we’re a little bit the same, her and me. I wanna tell her I lost a da too, way before I was old enough to remember him, but now’s not the time even if she could understand me.
She squeezes my hand as the flames leap higher and heat billows out at us. Squeezes it real hard and both our hands get slippery with sweat.
Marta speaks of the dead sibling, about how strong and tall she was, and how she came to work and did her work single-mindedly, whatever it was for, we wish we knew, and how she never deserved this unknown fate. Marta says the sibling left alive is called Gerra, and that it is hard to be the surviving sibling with no siblings left. And it’s the after-times, so we all know that the old people lost family in the rising sea and the diseases, and homeless wars afterwards. So we understand the tears rolling down their tanned and wrinkled faces. We lost family ourselves, me and Jag, even though we was too small to remember them.
Then Marta offers Gerra the crown with the sun on that her sister wore, and chicken soup with canned creamed corn. There’s nothing like a good tasty soup to fill the hole in your stomach, which is real close to the hole in your heart that you get when someone dies. We all watch her eat it, watch the tears streaming down her face, watch each mouthful bulge and slide down her throat like it was dry lumps of flour, her never once sobbing for her sister, not even sobbing about her leg which must be aching so bad. Then people carry her back in a sturdy chair to Marta’s cottage to rest.
‘What do you think happened to the brother?’ I ask Jag.
‘Prolly et by sharks,’ he says, coz that’d be the worst thing Jag can think of, him being so terrified of sharks.
