Salt Gardens
By Carella Keil
My sister’s the one who ran away on a headless horse. She escaped with her bruises to a land that didn’t know her, built a room with sixteen walls and no ceiling. At night, the stars stab her like rain. She catches her tears in glass jars and grows beautiful salt gardens. My sister’s the one who lost her virginity over and over again to a desert of dry tongues prying her open, to men who couldn’t pronounce her name but taught her body the syllables of pleasure. She’s the one who bit off her lover’s lips so he wouldn’t kiss another woman. She threw her dreams over the precipice of her love, and when she realized she’d made a mistake, she dove down after them.
My sister touched down on a planet different from our own, sank to her knees in the sands of time. She watched the green sky and serpent-swift waves, laid down, and said “bury me.” She’s the one who dreams of jogging on beaches and sliding her hands along the backs of silver-blue dolphins. But, when she opens her eyes, she can’t turn her doorknob and step outside.
My sister’s the one who walks through mirrors naked and sees the skinny girl she once was, her dreams like angry clouds punching the mocking moon. Her thighs pulse with blue veins; her waist thickens with the years like a tree. She bears knife slashes up and down her arm. A tally: everyone who’s cried over her, used her, fucked her. My sister taught me every time you lie, you get a black spot on your heart. “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.” I tell her she’s not needy, she’s not selfish, she’s the victim. I tell her I still like her, I forgive her, I forget. The slammed doors, scathing words, endless angry rants, mangled family. I forget. The stolen clothes, torn photo albums, the broken leg. I forget. I forget. I forgive. I lie. The truth is, her black moods broke the hearts of anyone who could ever care for her.
My sister calls in the middle of the night. Says she touched a flame and now everything around her is burning. She wraps men around her like smoke, sets her apartment on fire, and fucks a man in the flames. She swallows smoke until she sees black, and her eyes glow like the sun during an eclipse. When she showers, steam rises off her body. She feels time rupture around her like wires bursting in electric sockets and she channels the currents.
My sister slides between the seconds and bends time. She speaks fifty different languages and translates insanity in each one. She tells me she can’t sleep because she can hear everyone else’s dreams. Like music. Her brain becomes a radio she can’t tune, every station blasting through at once. My sister trails poetry from the tips of her fingers. There is not enough room in her skull for her thoughts so she asks her roommate to saw her head open.
My sister wants to take a road trip to the back of beyond, but she ends up eating cookies and white bread in a room with blank walls. She swallows pills that make her feel heavy and her thoughts sink until her once-soaring dreams become shadowy whales buried beneath miles of indigo water.
My sister doesn’t want to run with the waves anymore, and the tide never tempts her because she keeps her feet far from water. My sister keeps her dreams underground. She lives her life in a bomb shelter, warding off any man who could love her, any friend who could help her, any hope that could change her. She cuts the notches into her arm, keeping track of the days that pass, and watches the numbers on the scale tick by like the hands of a clock she broke so long ago.
She never checks her watch, but waits for her alarm to go off and that magical music to ignite her mind again, for her fingertips to burst into flames and her poetry to trickle across the page like hot wax. My sister burns and burns and burnt my trust to a crisp.
About the author
Carella is a writer and digital artist who splits her time between the ethereal world of dreams, and Toronto, Canada, depending on the weather. Many of her published short-stories jigsaw together into a magical realism narrative, and she is currently working on the connective tissue for this novella. You can find her work in Writeresque, Solstice Literary Magazine, Deep Overstock, Stripes Literary Magazine, Nightingale & Sparrow, and Querencia Press. Forthcoming publications include Glassworks Magazine, Door is a Jar, Grub Street, Sunday Mornings at the River, Musing Publications, MONO, Superlative Literary Journal, and Troublemaker Firestarter, among others. Keep up with her on Instagram @catalogue.of.dreams and Twitter @catalogofdream.
