If I Were My Sister

by Noémi Scheiring-Oláh

Honorable Mention, Neutrino Short-Short Prize, selected by Stephen Fishbach

If I were my sister, I wouldn’t sit on a curb at the back of a barely lit parking lot with a guy, who’s wearing a sweaty suit, and wouldn’t laugh at the ghosts of other bodies haunting the other cars, and laugh so hard I snort up beer bubbles, because laughing means we’re not empty breaths like them, we’re still full like a dinner table on our birthdays.

If I were my sister, I wouldn’t stare at the neglected cigarette butt clinging to the guy’s dry, crumpled lips, watching his mouth crawl into a half smile and the cigarette butt  traveling up with it. My mother says when that happens, you’re in.

If I were my sister, I wouldn’t be like my mother; our mother: the flesh behind the neon sign that screams GIRLS. I’d be at home right now, whining on the violin, or gurgling in English, or tapping out an essay on Nabokov’s Lolita from Lolita’s point of view, and how her love is a rag doll, stuffed with goose feathers—held down and plucked.

If I were my sister, I wouldn’t keep staring at the cigarette butt glued to his mouth, my eyes zooming in on the galaxy of flickering stars, like in a French art film only my sister would get, and I wouldn’t listen to burnt-out tales of his guitar boy years, and would never notice the mist over his eyes as he speaks, and would never tell myself see? deep down he’s a sensitive guy, at which my sister would roll her eyes, but I keep staring at the cigarette butt as he drags out its last sparks, like a vacuum of need, and he peels it off  his lips with two fingers and leans in to kiss me, but I press my hand on his pudgy chest and push his body back, not thinking about what he’ll do next, even though if I were my sister, I’d think about my future, and I reach for the burnt sponge of the cigarette butt and pluck it from his fingers, and lift it to my mouth, and crush it between my teeth.

I chew and chew and chew as swirling smoke worms up my nose and burns my throat and scorches my guts and seeps into my blood, and I chew until the remains of tobacco come loose on my tongue, tasting of another tongue, a tongue that said my sister’s name out loud all night, mispronouncing it, like the doctor my mother, our mother, told me about after she limped home and threw herself down at the kitchen table, sitting like a sack of bones under a yellow lightbulb, blinking through the white fog that thickened around us as she crushed cigarette butt after cigarette butt after cigarette butt on a pink, plastic baby plate meant for my little sister, leaving the heap of ash still burning like a ghost.

Noémi Scheiring-Oláh is an autistic writer from Hungary. Her stories have appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Literary, Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Molotov Cocktail, Maudlin House, New Flash Fiction Review, and elsewhere, and have been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and The Pushcart Prize. She’s a fan of stray cats and underdogs. Tweets and Bluesky: @itssonoemi. Virtual home: noemiwrites.com.