Sandy Olson-Hill

METAPHORS

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"Cath, did you feel different, you know, special? Like a woman? " Erin finger traces a heart onto the bedroom wall paper. "Where would I find the?"

Her sister, Cathy, interrupts, points. " Box under the bathroom sink," then shrugs, yawns from the bed to roll the pillow over her head. " It's no big damn deal Erin, besides, why aren't you asking mom about this?"

Across the street, with an eight ball of Olde English idling beside him on the driveway, Andy leans a meticulous hunger over his El Camino looking for infractions. Ignoring the peeling bumper stickers, he peers into the mirror, into the moment when the boy lauded with beautiful supersedes the politics plastered on his truck.

In her mother's bedroom door way, Erin stands, offered coffee in hand. Her mother looks up to smile beyond her. "Is your sister awake?"

"Mom, I want to ask you something."

At the need in her tone her mother fidgets. Her glance travels, feigns interest in the background cadence of the television, then back to frantic, roaming the room looking for a fix, for a place to land other than her daughter. "Can't it wait until my stories are over?"

And she is swimming while her mother turns her back to walk to the cottage.

To look across the street, Erin watches through the window. Ignoring her mother she waits for intent to crawl cowardly into later and the small, the ordinary to mean between them. In his driveway Andy smokes, balancing the intoxicating, cool smile lit between the curious and quizzical. Cathy is a sensual prowl towards him until he stumbles. His cigarette sparks his shirt, his skin, his smile into the smoke shedding. Erin watches as her sister enfolds him. Erin watches her sister wrapping him up as hers.

Beneath Cape Cod's wet sand shifting she slides under, red mud current bruising waves, hands into the air, grasping, fear inside her head, fear inside her lungs, her heart beating.

Rain between the window; breath hot upon her mother asks, "Isn't that your sister with the neighbor boy? What are they doing? Is that rain?" The weather interrupts her mother's channel cruising through the moment. From the bed, she says to no one in particular, "I think it's going to thunder." Through the window the storm gathers its anger.

Until Erin is under, suffocating, water cuts the sky in, halves the sea, above her the sun shows how it's done. How the sky, of silence, sounds what it is to drown between the clouds.

Sandy Olson-Hill's fiction and poetry has been published in WordGathering, Big River Poetry Review, SpecsJournal, Our Stories, Dead Flowers, BlazeVox, and Brushings, among other Literaryzines, newspapers, and journals . Awards include: Academy of American Poet Prize and Open Doors Short Fiction Award. These fine days in between submitting word works, Olson-Hill fosters pets, and works adoption events for Fureveryourspetrescue and placement services: animal activist work she is proud of.