| ORPHAN MERRY-GO-ROUND Her hand slowly pushed across the red and white checkered tablecloth. When it met his hand her fingers curled around it delicately; like the petals of a wilting flower. Upon feeling her touch his eyes slid up from his glass to her face as it tried to press a silence over the rest of the restaurant. Her lips parted slowly. "Tell me what you are thinking." It felt like the question would never come. It felt like the answer would never come. In one smooth pantomime he slid his hand from hers and replaced it with a sigh as he leaned back in his chair and glanced into a corner of the room. "I was thinking," he replied, "about what it would be like if tonight, instead of going home and going to sleep like I normally would on a particuarly normal day like today, instead of that if I took my pillow and put it at the other end of the bed and slept that way, with my head hanging out into the middle of the room instead of tucked between a wall and a bedside table." She slinked back into her chair like he did and looked away. "What makes you think today is a particuarly normal day?" It was a rhetorical question. She reminded him of someone he knew. Actually, no, she didn't. She reminded him of someone he didn't know. She reminded him of someone he'd never met before in his entire life. There was something in her face he didn't like and he knew exactly what it was. He stared right between her eyebrows and stared at that spot until he had stared a full three inches into her head. She hadn't smiled all evening; it was as if he hardly knew her. She was like a stranger to him. "You are like a stranger to me." He said it out loud. He cursed himself as he watched her eyes fill with water. They asked him a silent question. He opened and closed his mouth then shifted his weight forward, putting both of his elbows on the table and holding his head up by his temples. "I'm sorry. That came out wrong. What I meant to say was..." What he meant to say was that he had found her. He had finally found her, his sister. After all of the searching, after all of the phone calls, after all of the emotions he sacrificed to people who were just potentials, and after all of the years of losing sleep to a wortless feeling he was finally re-united with a sister whom he had never been united with in the first place. And she was sitting across from him in his favorite restaurant where they were supposed to be catching up on 35 years of not being brother and sister. "What I meant to say was that...that I'm not your brother." Her lower lip quivered and a large tear gathered up enough courage to roll down her cheek. "Why?" She put her face into her hand and sobbed quietly. "Why are you doing this?" He stood up. "I'm very sorry, please understand, I can't be your brother. I...I don't know what it is, I just can't. I'm very sorry." She shook her head as she looked up at him. "But the DNA tests were positive..." "Yes I know. I know." He pulled at a tuft of his hair. "No doubt you've been waiting for this day ever since you found out. So have I. I've always felt like there was something missing from my life, as if there was constantly a hole where there needed to be something strong. I figured...I figured that maybe, just maybe, if I filled that hole my entire life would fall into place. So I waited every free moment that I had for something to come and fix the hole in my life, to fix my life, to fix what was wrong with me." He waved his hand in the air and his voice cracked. "You just can't fix it. I'm sorry. Please don't call me." He looked into her face and saw himself for one last time before he briskly walked out of the restaurant into the cold city night. His eyes closed and when they opened he was at his house moving his pillow form one end of the bed to the other. He spent most of the night crying into his hands before falling asleep on the couch. |