Towers

*NOTE: the author of this piece wishes to remain anonymous.

CW // Death

Collage by Mary.

My sister Kate is the reason why I can’t look at the sky today. Before she jumped out of it, she had asked me to go along with her, to which I jokingly responded that I did not want to die. “The fatality rate for skydiving is one out of every 500,000,” she said. “You are not special enough to die from it.” And then her parachute didn’t open. And now I can’t look at the sky.

Well, at least I can’t look at it for very long. I try to now, and I can tell that it is gray and stormy. I am trying to look at the sky because I am standing next to this old, gothic church which is so tall that it’s kind of scary. The wind whistling through the spires almost sounds like a voice whispering. I shake my head to clear the thought out.

There’s this old lady standing next to me. “You know why it’s so tall, right?” she says. I don’t. “They designed it to be as tall as possible. The higher the tower, the closer to God.” She laughs long and hard. “Because God’s not down here… He’s up there!” 

There’s something off about her eyes. But it’s hard to tell because they’re squinting as she is laughing with her entire body. I think if God really is up there and he won’t come down to hear this lady’s laugh, then he’ll come for nothing. 

She keeps laughing and then asks me if I believe in God, and I say that I am trying to because she seems nice and I don’t want to upset her by telling her the truth. Which is that as much as I want to cling to something resembling faith in God, it’s so much harder nowadays that most of the time I don’t bother trying anymore.

“What is it you see when you look up there?” she says. 

I look for a second and the clouds start to giggle. 

So I look back down and nervously pretend to play around with my phone because I don’t know what else to do with my hands. When I decide I’m done, I see that the lady is staring at me. Her eyes are mirror balls, like mosaics made out of little shards of glass.

I want to tell her that I don’t think I could ever build anything that tall. That I’m tired, and my palms are callused, and I don’t believe in anything that much. That the bones of this church, too, will one day grow frail.

“It looks kind of haunted, doesn’t it?” I say. 

“Oh, it is.” 

“You seem like you know things,” I say, without thinking. 

Her laughter starts back up again. I laugh with her even though I’m not sure what’s so funny.

“I think that building things for the sake of having beautiful things is nice,” she says to the church. This eighty-something woman sounds like a child. But she seems like someone I would want to be friends with, I think. 

It’s raining harder. The droplets of rain are whispering something to each other now but I can’t tell what they’re saying. If there was ever anyone else here, they aren’t anymore. 

Kate would always tell me how recovering drug addicts would go skydiving because it would give them the feeling of euphoria that they craved. She was not a recovering drug addict. She wasn’t really addicted to anything. I mean, I’m happy that she’s not here right now to see the shit I put into my body. She was there with me in the doctor’s office that one time, though. When they were asking me if I was having hallucinations but I couldn’t pay attention because the walls were breathing too loudly. 

Kate loved things, but she kept enough distance between herself and what she loved so that they never turned into her demons. For instance, she used Tinder to casually swipe left and right on people, whereas I would fall in love with everybody who sent me even a half-decent message. 

She did the same thing with places. She would always refer to the house we grew up in as “home,” and she would never use that word to describe any other place. Even when she moved into her college dorm, and then her apartment, she would only refer to them as “the dorm” and “the apartment.” 

We shared a room for many years there, at home. I was very used to living with her. She would fall asleep quickly at night and wake up easily in the morning. When I couldn’t sleep, she stayed up with me and pretended that she couldn’t either. 

Thunder is roaring now and I remember where I am when the clouds in the sky start to scream.

I look back at the old lady and she is being washed away. I mean, full on deteriorating. Her skin is peeling back, like how I imagine it happens to corpses in graves. The rain is coming down furiously. She’s laughing the whole time. 

I should be scared, I know. In the movies, there’s always that moment where the main character stops what they’re doing and realizes that they want to go home. I think I’m having one of those now. But I know that’s a lie I’m telling myself. Because I know I’ve been waiting for something my whole life, hoarding little hints and winks from the universe. Kate was too, but she was always more patient than me. I should be absolutely terrified, but my blood is singing with it, like a fire burning cool and blue beneath my feet. This is worse than fear. I want to cry, but I can’t, so I scream as loud as the sky. I grab onto this lady’s hands, which are more callused than mine, and I scream harder. 

But then her hands turn to water too. She leaves with the rain until all that is left is a faint etching on the pavement that looks, if I turn my head sideways, like a map of wrinkles. 

The sky will stay bruised for days. In every eye, I will think I see kaleidoscopic glass. I will go back to the outside of that church and wait for things to feel real again. I will look up until I think I can feel the last of her laugh, still floating through the steeple like prayers. ◆