The Sister Season by Jennifer Scott Page B

was how loud it sounded, especially in the middle of the night, when it seemed like the whole world was asleep.
    The last car had turned down the gravel road hours ago. The cousins, who were both all right, he supposed, but were kind of annoying in that I’m-a-little-kid-so-everyone-must-entertain-me-all-the-time sort of way, had been in bed for a long time. Grandmother Elise had finished washing dishes and shut up the house and turned off the lights. The creaking in her bedroom, just above the one he was sharing with his mom, had stopped and, unlike the night before, he had counted to one-thousand-Mississippi after he was sure everyone was asleep before he moved a muscle.
    He’d crept through the house on ghost’s feet, practically floating above the warped wood floors, and had, just like the night before, gone to the front room and sat in his grandfather Robert’s recliner. The one he died in.
    He had heard that people shit and piss themselves when they died, and he wondered, as he sank into the worn nubby fabric of the chair, if Grandfather Robert had done that. It didn’t smell like he had. And he doubted that Grandmother Elise, who was kind of nutty, but not nutty enough to be gross, would have kept the chair in the house if he had. But it might have been a little bit cool if he had. If he’d been all shit and piss and bulging eyes and purple tongue and veins in his neck. That was the way he wanted to go—repulsive and shocking. Something people would talk about for a long time.
    Just as he’d done the night before, he sank into the chair. But tonight he had more time. He’d left his pocketknife under his cot mattress. So he pulled up the footrest, positioned himself in what he guessed was the same pose his grandfather had been sitting in, and held his breath. Held it until his vision was grainy and his lungs burned. Held it until he felt so miserable he might have been having a heart attack and dying. Held it until he could feel his pulse in his stomach, imagined it getting slower and fainter. He stayed motionless. Still as a corpse. Not even an eyeball twitching. Soon his eyes were burning too, and one of them let a tear loose down his cheek. He wondered if Grandfather Robert had cried a little when he died. He’d never heard anything about people crying while they died, but it made sense that they might.
    He held it, held it, held it.
    And then let the air out in a rush that sank his belly and made the chair bounce a little and squeak on its hinges.
    He was alive.
    Damn it.
    He sat there for a few more minutes, trying to soak up death in his grandfather’s death chair, and then quietly eased the footrest down and slipped outside into the crystalline air.
    It was freezing. His stocking feet made the frozen grass crunch. A dog barked off in a field somewhere. But otherwise there was nothing. Still as a morgue.
    He wanted to walk farther tonight than he had during the day.
    Earlier, he’d taken a walk, but had only gotten halfway through the old soy field before the cold seeped into the bones of his feet and made him hobble back home in defeat, shivering under his jacket violently. Tonight he wanted to get all the way through the soy field and to the pond on the other side of the tree line.
    It wasn’t fit for skating. His mom had said so herself. You could fall through the ice and get trapped beneath it. You’d freeze to death before the sheets on your cot had even lost all your body heat. You’d be a frozen brick on the bottom of the pond before anyone even noticed you were missing.
    Quickly, so as not to lose himself halfway through the soy field again, he followed the old rows toward the tree line. Once inside, he could hear the wind shake the limbs of the trees, which sounded dry and brittle like bones. A perfect setting for a suicide.
    Much better than the men’s room at school, where he’d planned to take the pills his mom had confiscated, the one lousy day of his life that she decided to take an