The Big Injury

Another dream. 

I am standing in the in the too-bright white of a box store vestibule.  People push through me going in the store and coming out of the store.  Behind me, shopping carts rattle as new arrivals pull carts from the crashed-together rows.  Looking through the glass doors, I just saw my brother-in-law talking with a checker.

My brother-in-law is the store manager.  It’s possible that my sister is inside the store.  I am standing out in the too-bright light because I don’t want to see my sister.  Not that sister.

Stop.

Reality: I have a big injury.  A permanent injury.

My mother died in 1985 and my sister disconnected from our entire family.  This occurred all at once.  I don’t know why my sister did that.  Nobody does.  Maybe money.  I was in China when mother died, when my sister fled.  I was supposed to get married and gather my whole family around when I came back home.  Instead, I got my big injury.

Begin again.

I don’t want to enter store.  The light hurts my eyes.  I don’t understand how my sister could just go away.  She was my friend.  When I was a kid, she let me stand in her room and listen to rock music on her radio.  I loved rock music.  We were there, together, listening to the radio when we first heard that Bobby Kennedy had been shot.

Sometimes, on school nights, I watched her rolling small tin cans into her hair and clipping them into place as curlers.  That always fascinated me.

That sister took me places.

I once chanced to meet her at a store in Missoula ten years after the big injury.  She avoided me, would not talk to me when I tried.  Her eyes were cold like the eyes of a plastic doll.

The shopping carts rattle behind me.  Someone taps my right shoulder.  I turn and find my sister.  Her eyes are warm.  We melt together, sobbing.

I wake.

The big injury is throbbing inside me.

--Mitchell Hegman