chapter three.

"Jericho has come,” said Evangeline. “Our brother has shed his wide-eyed inquisitions and come. His brow sits low over his eyes as though strengthened through narrowing. He pours protein powder on his breakfast. He tells us a story about escaping from special-ops during his training. He puts on sunscreen and sunglasses and walks shirtless down the beach. When we were little he would convince us to jump off of his bunk bed, and we did. He folded a quilt on the ground and said it would make it softer. He gave us helium balloons from the supermarket to clutch between our feeble veined hands and said they would slow us down. We tugged experimentally on the thin ridged ribbon to the elusive hovering orb. We shut down thought and pushed our feet off the dull blade of the bed frame into flight. The ribbon uncoiled like rope and snapped taut against the watching rubber. It resisted with a pop and then surrendered to gravity. We fell in a heap onto the frowning floor. It kicked us for our insolence. We didn’t fly.”

“Jericho has come,” said Charlotte. “His eyes are still blue but they are hard and shiny like a smooth black jar, except when he speaks to us. When he speaks to us the shell thins like the discarded cloak of an old snail. His teeth are white. They used to shine like an actor's but now Dad says that they look like a shark’s grin. He is darkened by the California sun. Two years ago he fell in love with a girl for the first time. One year ago she left him a jigsawed half in the cold stone-grey fortress of a school. Now he falls in love halfway with every girl he passes. When Mom was sick my aunts and uncles called him a demon and when they looked at him they shook their heads. One day he left our ammonia house and ran down the street. The night crawled in and the streetlights turned on, and he didn't come home. Finally the chill scuttled up the blades of grass and we found him insolently at our door. Dad told him we were worried, he had done something very bad, he's grounded for the week. The water gathered behind his whole face until it overflowed, and he screamed that he wished Mom were already dead. They said he was a demon. He hid in his room and cried. The day Dad told us that Mom left he was the first to believe, and the first to cry.”

“Jericho has come,” said Moriah. “He does not escape now, nor hide. He plunges through debris with a torch, he snarls when he is angry. He conquers mountains and leaps from boulder to boulder like a stag or a flickering flame. He says what he means when he means it; he does not filter through water. He has a beach house and a sports car in California. He wants to be a millionaire before he is thirty. He weaves together experiences with flame and he tells stories. He keeps a picture of Mom in his bedroom. He swims with sharks and learns to fly.”

“But nothing penetrates,” said Charlotte.

“And here comes Helen,” said Evangeline, “our little sister. She how she comes with light in her hair and birds printed across her shirt taking flight. See how the breeze in her skirt turns her into an ephemeral being. See her eyes wide like a doe’s.”

“She walks with confidence,” said Moriah. “She says, ‘I am the sun around which you turn.’”

“See her chin lift her mask of selfhood,” said Charlotte. “But her hand twiddles her hair tie and cries, ‘I do not know who I am.’”

“It is strange,” said Moriah, “that the planet’s center of gravity is not solid, but air and fire.”

“But water produces life,” said Charlotte.

“And what then am I?” asked Moriah. “Is earth then truly the most insubstantial?”

“The light fractures on the surface of the water,” said Charlotte.

“She is too young to remember the death,” said Evangeline. “It is for that that I love her.”

“She parked the car two years ago and shouted, ‘you think you love Mom more,’” said Charlotte. “She said ‘she’s dead’ over and over until the waves crashed on the sand and the sun sucked all the life away.”

“The earth is no longer firm,” said Moriah. “So I scoop up rocks for weapons.”

“Helen is here, and she smiles,” said Evangeline. “It feels like an afternoon breeze, and it smells like coconut.”

“I have erected a wall of rocks against Jericho, I am armed and facing Helen,” said Moriah.

“I serve them lunch and then retreat into solitude,” said Charlotte.

“I hold this rock, thus it exists,” said Moriah. “I stand on ground, thus I am this, not that. I must wage war against the lies of insubstantiality, I cannot scatter like sand. I must be strong so that I can say, ‘I exist’ and ‘I persist.’”

“Moriah is throwing pebbles into the ocean,” said Evangeline. “They pretend to be bullets but their arc betrays them. The wind nudges and teases them. It gathers together and pushes the waves toward the gravity moon. The moon rests behind the daylight. Charlotte sleeps in her room.”