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My little sister is such an annoyance. She’s so diverse from my parents and myself that she makes it difficult for me to tolerate her. She’s only twelve and already she’s been making all the wrong decisions and turning herself in a horrific disappointment.

Ever since I found out my mother was pregnant, I knew my life would change. Granted, I was a paranoid, spoiled, four year old girl with brown, frizzy pigtails and white lace outlining her dresses, but the instinct of a child was never to be taken for granted. First she took the affection of our relatives and then challenged me at everything. She was talented; she played the piano, painted, sung, danced. She could do everything, but she took it for granted. As soon as she was old enough to develop a personality, she rebelled. She wanted to know everything, experience everything from drugs to music to sex to alcohol to complete insanity.

“It was bound to happen.” They said.

“Poor girl was too perfect.” They were so wrong. I was perfect. And she had been the pure opposite of me. She had been evil. She had to be destroyed.

It all started a few months ago, at the country club. David Miller and I were walking in the garden and he was about to ask me to the dance we were having at school that week. Everything was going so well; my parents were having a wonderful time and Dominique hadn’t done anything to embarrass herself or me. But I knew it was too good to be true. David and I walked past the stables only to see Dominique allowing a boy wearing a waiter’s uniform to defile her atop a ball of hay. I let out a shriek but the madness continued; she would stop at nothing.

She was only twelve when everyone started calling her a harlot, when everyone allowed her insanity to ruin us. Mother and Father, after a long conversation with myself, decided that it had been too much and we called for a private tutor. She wouldn’t be allowed out of the house until the end of the year, they promised. My school hours, on the other hand, weren’t as horrid as I had thought they would be. Everyone, especially David Miller thought I was amazingly strong to have dealt with that delinquent for sixteen years of my life. Dominique quickly turned into nothing but a footstep in the back of everyone’s minds, in the long run, but I am getting ahead of myself.

Dominique had always been bizarre. During those complete days she had spent locked in her room I had time to remember how odd she had been during our childhoods together. She never liked to wear anything but black, while myself and the other girls adored colors, so that was said to be a bad omen. Once, Grandmother brought Dominique a magnificent red dress, right from the makers in France, and my little sister ripped it off, crying and screaming.

“It’s blood, Mamma!” she shrieked in her perky, petite voice. “I don’t want blood all over me!”

Nana never returned to us after that. We’d lost someone so dear because of Dominique; the monster hiding beneath human flesh.

She refused to eat for a long time, but she continued to become nauseated. Mother brought her to the doctor and just when everything started getting back to normal for us, when Father’s friends sent more party invitations and Mother and I were invited to tea, Dominique dropped the bomb. Dominique stopped at nothing! She would ruin us and desecrate our name, or worse, bring someone else to do her dirty work.

She was with child.

I did not know whether the news got out or not. Doctors always did speak when they should not have and I felt like I had to watch my back. I tried to figure out who was laughing with me and who at me. Paranoia struck hard and I begun detesting Dominique, whose room had been unlocked and whose punishment had been devoured by sympathy. I watched her every day, following her everywhere she chose to stumble through. I would watch as she gently slid her legs into the lake behind our house and as she calmly let the water wipe the blood from her arms; she was so scared of having something burgundy within her. I never told my parents she tarnished her bodice. I enjoyed watching her do so.

Mother decided it would be better for Dominique to have the baby and after she did, they would decide whether they would keep it or not. I had dreams about it. It looked just like Dominique had, and I remembered so specifically. I was four when she was born. Her eyes were brown when she first opened them but now they’ve been washed into a ghastly, vacant hazel. Her skin had been so pure back then and she had been implausibly untouched; perfect, even. But only then. Her hair had grown into the most beautiful, wavy blond locks that everyone adored. I had been so jealous of her in the past, but now she was filthy in my eyes. She had been the devil, herself, and I was glad to be nothing like her. If the baby were like her, like I imagined it would be, I hated it too. Every time I saw her enormous belly, I wanted to push a knife through it like she did to other parts of herself.

Her birthday had been coming up two months before the due date of the baby. I was about to leave for a party at David Miller’s home when I saw Mother handing her a large box. It was red underneath a foil-like cover. I assumed mother chose the box forgetting how the color affected my dear sister and so she decided to cover it with a thin fabric, which only altered the hue slightly. I waited, with the knob within my fingers, until she lifted the cover and threw out the white papers covering her treasure. Her eyes enlarged and her lips parted. She looked like a monster, with her hair untidy and her nightgown pushed from the rest of her bodice by her stomach. Her lips were pale and chapped but she licked them before taking her present out of its confinement.

“You’re gorgeous!”

I tapped my fingernails against the doorknob, impatient and infuriated at seeing her light up. She slowly lifted the doll, in awe at its beauty. Resentment burned in my face while my fingernails ceased their pounding.

She pulled the doll to her ear, opening her lips further and winking to our parents. She then stretched her arms out, forcing the toy to face her. “Hello, Fifi. I am Dominique Demonte. And this is my baby.” She turned Fifi to face her stomach. “It doesn’t have a name yet because it’s going to die soon.”

I shut the door and smiled. “Die soon, it will, my dear Dominique. Within the arms of those it has hurt.”

The next month past calmly. Mother and Father decided the baby would remain with us and so Dominique ceased leaving her room. That made it easier for me to observe her. She brushed her dolls hair and held conversations with her every day.

“We’ll take It to the park and to the lake all the time! It’s going to love nature, don’t you think so, Fifi? When we get older, It’ll beg me to go for a walk, but I’ll be tired. Old people are always so tired. Like Nana. Nana never walked. Sister pushed her around on an odd-looking chair.”

She would lean down and blink once, looking at a wall or at a spot on the floor, as if she’d been listening intently to the obviously quiet whispers of her only companion.

“No. You can’t see Nana’s chair. Nana gave me a bloody dress one day so Mamma disallowed her visits. Mamma’s very nice to me. More so than Papa or Sister.”

Fifi would respond with her blank stare and cold smile, only caring towards Dominique. Only meaning for Dominique to hear her words.

“I guess it is because Papa is very busy and Sister doesn’t like me very much.”

I was scared of her by then, reading me so easily when I could never understand her emotions. After brushing Fifi’s hair she would start brushing her own, facing the mirror, the only thing other than her bed that she had in her room. She felt cluttered when everything had been pretty and symmetrical. She even cut her clothing so that one sleeve would be longer than the other and so one pant leg would have holes while the other remained unaltered. When I observed her, passed by her room or went in to check on her under Mother’s orders, she would be staring at herself in the mirror, sitting on the ground with Fifi nearby. She had her nightgown held up by her chin and her hands were slowly caressing her engorged stomach. She disgusted me. Everything from her empty stare to her vast sin had made my insides churn. I couldn’t wait for the baby to suck the blood out of her. She had so little left of it already. I knew that when the baby came she would die along with it.

It was just a matter of time, now. I was so excited I could barely sleep. I lied awake breathing in the sweet aroma of ice seeping in through the cracks between the windows and the windowsills, remembering everything I would have my revenge for. The earliest I could come up with had been when she was seven and I’d been eleven. Father had run for Mayor and once he had his celebration ceremony, I’d grown sick. The media asked us whether or not it would be okay for Father’s children to say something about how proud they were, on live television. Dominique had the chicken pox; the wretched being surely had deserved them and once I heard about the news broadcast, I laughed at how she would have been forced to stay home. But the day before the event, I gained the same illness. Her vile, infectious coughs floated inside of my lungs and through enjoying her misery, karma had struck me. From then on I never voiced my opinions of her. From then on, we rarely ever spoke to each other again.

I remember the baby’s night in detail. I had been lying awake, tormenting myself with unwanted memories when my anger decided to walk me out of my room and maybe towards the kitchen for something soothing or a medication of some sort. Her door had been wide open and she had been resting against the corner of her room, naked and covered with her own disgusting fear; crimson. Her head lay slanted, cheek pressing against one of the walls. Her eyes had been drying of the tears whose descending I had been too late to witness. One of her hands lied, almost as if it had been numb, beside the enormous fetus in the center of a puddle of blood. Her other hand gripped tightly onto a porcelain half of the face of her only confidant.

I wanted to laugh. I felt the urge boiling within my chest, but when my lips parted, nothing came out. Fifi’s bodice and the other half of her face lied close by the door. Gazing at me through her one eye, she looked so miserable. No one would hold Fifi now. She looked so terrified. Who, now, would brush her hair and hear her nonexistent words?

I lifted my gaze onto where my sister’s twelve year old body had been weakening before my eyes. She looked right at me with the eyes that used to be brown, through the hair that used to be beautiful and golden. She smiled and the hand beside her fetus twitched. She was too weak to lift it. She was too weak to ask me why I hadn’t laughed.

“You’re not very smart.” I crossed my arms, holding myself in such a way she wouldn’t notice. It had been the cold that made my bodice quake, I assured myself. I didn’t care for the death of this monster. Her descending had no effect on me. I was better. I was happy.

Her lips parted again, but no words. I tried to remember the songs she’d sung before the lunacy began, but though I recalled the lyrics, the melody had been erased from my memory. I stepped with one foot, in through the portal of her domain and then stopped myself. Fifi lied just a few feet away, desecrated as had been my sister and her child. What to say when you are losing what you’ve hated all along? What to feel when there would be nothing left to hate?

“You killed your baby, Dominique. You won’t be able to talk walks in the park, and you could have. And you were so young.” I lifted Fifi from the ground and brushed her hair behind the existing half of her face. I walked towards my sister, towards the same puddle of blood on the floor that had been running through my own body. Fifi felt like water within my grasp and without hesitation I allowed her to whither into more pieces. If Dominique and It were to die, I would not let Fifi suffer. She was so beautiful, what with her perfectly curled red hair and her rosy porcelain cheeks. I took the other half of her face and ignored the ache it brought as it pushed into my flesh. I kneeled before my enemy and refused to see her as a victim. I brought the fetus into my arms and then placed it back into her body. Lying both of her paralyzed arms atop it I regained membrane of the weapon within my clutch. It would only take one shot. The porcelain had been as sharp as glass. I stabbed it right atop her left breast and pierced her evil heart.

“You killed your baby, Dominique. You’ve desecrated the family name. You’ve taken everything I ever wanted and still, you dare to smile at me?”

I felt a sensation within myself when a tear formed a trail down her cheek. Success; the end of a horrible nightmare.

“I hate you, Dominique. I hate how beautiful your name sounds. I hate how beautiful you are when you gaze at me through the eyes that used to be brown. You’ve ruined everything, Dominique. You’ve ruined the life of your baby.”

Her eyes remained open and though I couldn’t hear her pulse within my hand as I held half of Fifi’s face deep inside her, I couldn’t let her go.

“I’m glad you’re gone,” I told her. “I never have to hear you sing again. I never have to follow you and watch you drown the crimson of yourself. You were never anything to me. You were never anything to anyone except your baby. But you killed it. You didn’t even give it a chance to destroy you. You had to be better, just like you did with me.”

I watched as my tears dripped on her dead body and disappeared within the painting of her blood.

“Well, you lost. I get to watch you die. I get to be the last image as you leave to the hell that’s been waiting for you. Burn down there, Dominique. Burn the beauty off your face, out of your mind. Fire’s red, you know. I can’t wait to hear you scream.”

It’s quiet now, without her mumbling. Mother doesn’t bring home any more dolls. Father goes on with his campaigns and whatever it was that he always did. David Miller invited me to all of his parties, and every school dance thereon. Whenever someone is over for tea, I am asked to make an appearance and never asked about my sister.

But there’s always her room and the thought of her once living. There’s always Fifi’s tattered body sunk at the bottom of our lake. There’s always the bloodstain, hidden by the rug Mother placed whenever guests came around. There’s always the mirror, in which the reflection of the twelve year old desecration will never be again. There’s always Dominique, screaming as the flames eat her alive; wishing for the walks in the park and regretting having torn Nana’s red dress. There is always me, so content with her demise that it was sickening. I inhaled her vile, infectious disease.

I was with child.

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(c) Sylwia Wielgosz 2003.