Willa

I'm not just wigging out at losing Georgia, or because Dolly fell. My family disentegrated long ago, and in the middle of that carnage, or at least standing, back to us, a slight side-step away, stood Willa. Willa was the middle girl in a family of three daughters in an era when girls were stupid and frivolous. Ignorant silly bitch cunts! A river of abuse, beginning with the word and the word it was god, flowed solely to Willa's door, or so she thought. She met it, she toyed with it, she reciprocated. In those innocent early years of civilization to my Gidget, Georgia was surely the broken-hearted Judy Garland, and if Georgia was Judy Garland, then Willa had to be Carrie. The explosive self destructive withdrawn powerful ultimately broken and triumphant Carrie. (What, is it strange I haven't spoken before of her?)

Willa always hated me. As far back as I can remember, minus a few moments of attempted sisterly-affection when I reached high school, such as the time Veronica and I got Willa so drunk (six years older than me, she had never touched alcohol) and then left her puking in the bathroom as we ran off to join our night in progress on the eve of Willa's wedding.

I remember the time she hit me (hard!) on the head with her clarinet. And yes, it is true that she did push me down the steps - and there were a lot of steps! But that damage was small compared to the holes that Willa could rip with words. She was a master of mimicry, held near-genius acrobatic-levels of word-mincing and stood ridiculously agile at ridicule. More than the Prince of Cats. O, she's the courageous captain of compliments. She fights as you sing prick-song, keeps time, distance, and proportion; she rests her minim rests, one, two, and a third in your bosom: the very butcher of a silk button, a duelist, a duelist! A gentlewoman of the very first house, of the first and second cause. Ah, the immortal passado! The punto reverso! The hay!

A whore. A hurt baby. A sinking ship bringing all in her wake, Willa. And so it goes. First blood must always be drawn by Willa.

Dolly, in her memory-affected state, doesn't make "Father Knows Best" attempts at fostering sisterly devotion any more, and the thin strings that held our little fingers together from room-to-room on Christmas Eve no longer provide comfort, or warmth. We will go down the long staircase together. We will wake each other up. We will be true blue. We will not be afraid in the dark. We promise.

And perhaps it will still come to pass. Perhaps we will all go together. Perhaps one day Willa will love us.