My fingers fit perfectly in the spaces
between his.
At night he would wrap his arms around
my shoulders,
I’d lay my leg across his waist. He used
to whisper,
voice raspy, eyes closed in a
half-sleep;
I want to marry
you one day.
Those nightly exhalations filled the
balloon of my self-worth.
I remember the Christmas I found him
tearing money
out of holiday cards pilfered from
mailboxes,
littering the empty season’s greetings and
wishes
for happiness on the ground like trash.
Every Christmas without
my brother is miserable,
I want everyone else
to be miserable, too!
My ears were barraged with the sound
of hundreds of balloons popping.
The boy I fell in love with had been
destroyed,
using dirty needles as weaponry against
his own soul—
somewhere in the process, his hand began
to close.
The hinges of his fingers tightened into
a white-knuckled fist.
I wasn’t sure if he was fighting himself
or the white dragon,
but it didn’t matter. No room remained
for me.
Katie (Karma) Thompson is a Creative
Writing major in her last semester at WCCC. Currently unemployed, Katie spends
her time warming Starbucks seats and writing horribly depressing poetry and
moderately comical fiction. Katie is also learning to play guitar, a decisively
more mobile instrument of torture than her piano.
