Vestigial by Nicole Tsuno
Associate editor Heath Joseph Wooten on today’s bonus short: Nicole Tsuno’s “Vestigal” speaks from an alternate dimension—the world of dreams, of organs, of puckered scars—asking questions about the nature of necessity as much as it provides answers. With precise, flowing prose, the story walks the line between dream and reality, hesitance and certainty, and—of course—vital and vestigial.
Vestigial
Since her appendectomy, my sister hasn’t slept. She wanders the house in a sailor white dress, eyes marbled by burst veins, the moon a glob in the sky. By morning she is wild-haired, which she counters by overplucking her eyebrows into fine twigs. Nightmares, she tells our social worker when asked. To console her, people offer her chalky pills, candy boxes throated by ribbons, plush sheep with marbled eyes. Each gift, my sister tosses into the corner of the room we share. I’m not the one keeping me awake, she says with a sigh.
Two months into her sleeplessness, conversations with adults begin with renewed worry, talks that my sister weathers with her legs drawn to her chin, her face as smooth as her knees. You’ll always be taken care of, one woman tells her, reaching for her hands. Did you know humans don’t need appendices? another asks. We evolved not to need them. Why do you think some land birds can’t use their wings?
At eight, I was capable of something my sister wasn’t even at eleven, which was telling people what seemed logical to them—small, digestible truths. I thought smiling overrated as a tactic; I give their tongues something to latch onto. She’s afraid of waking up with fewer parts than she went to sleep with, I explain, after my sister leaves. The adults all soften to her after that, which is to say they leave her completely alone. No one can protect you from having your insides on the outside, at least not with any degree of certainty.
At three months, to compensate for her lack of sleep, my sister decides that I will have to hibernate. She says it like it’s a universal law, the net conservation of sleep hours. She locks her hands on my shoulders, her pupils jagged like splinters. If I did this for her, she’d let me touch the pucker of her scar. I could even open it if I wanted, unstitch her like we did our Build-A-Bear when we forgot what color heart we put inside.
When I agree, she layers all our blankets and jackets over my body like cake striped with jam. She gives me the best pillow, fans my hair out over it. I’ll be here when you wake up, she reassures. As I fall asleep, I can hear her pacing the length of my bed, blanket draped over her shoulders and kissing the ground like some small nobility.
The only rule is that I must tell her every detail of my dreams. I don’t often remember them but I quickly learn that not having a dream isn’t an option, so I make them up. My sister waits for me to resurface, prompts me with the raise of her faint eyebrows.
I was wandering in a forest, I begin.
She nods, as if she expects it. You were wiggling your toes a lot. What was it like?
It was dark, and there were yellow eyes strung up between the trees.
As a reward, she hands me a sweating glass of water. What were you doing there?
I was lost.
Lost or forgotten? There’s a difference, you know.
After she’s done interrogating me, she takes notes and I have one hour to eat and bathe. Our nightlight picks up the white in everything, so I dine with one eye buttoned-up. I stand in the shower, dazed, watching my puffed hair collapse around my shoulders and slither down like wet snakes.
By the sixth month of hibernation, I don’t have to lie. The dreams come to me easily, like falling or forgetting.
Wolf teeth gnashing around my wrist, sparkling like a crown. Closets full of flannel, only flannel. The injury insurance guy on the billboard between Elm and Main, fingers whose sour I could taste inside my cheeks just by looking. Being force-fed candy until I purpled all over. Being force-fed anything by the injury insurance guy. Surgical gloves reaching for me as I struggled out the window, asking forgiveness of the night air.
To all of these dreams my sister consults her notebook before shaking her head. That’s not it, she says, her patience slipping. You have to try harder.
Grocery ads breed on our driveway and at nine months, I trip over them when I begin sleepwalking. I travel from bed to the garden and back again and wake up with my hair galaxied by burrs, a dry stalk gripped in my fist. At ten months, I start sleeping on the floor, the impression of my body in the mattress now too deep to be overcome.
It’s one year when I finally break, watching my sister’s tears through a pool of my own saliva on the floor.
Her hands shake as she sits me up. What did you see?
I found her, I say.
What was she doing?
She’d just woken up. It could be true.
My sister pushes her palms together, a small smile playing on her face. I knew it. Where is she?
The words stick to the back of my throat. What I don’t say: how, when I secretly fed my sister candy in her surgery prep room, our mother watched the truck stalled on the street below. How, when my sister started counting backwards, our mother asked how long the surgery would take, if she could run a few errands. How, when she left, she looked back and smiled, her face like a Halloween pumpkin, tealight shafting out from the spaces between teeth.
What I say: You ask. She told me it’s her turn to be awake.
My sister lies down beside me, her cheek softening around my shoulder, eyelids beginning to shudder. My hand spiders up her shirt until it finds her scar and stays there until her breath evens out into sleep. I clear the fatigue from my eyes and ease up the first stitch with a fingernail, ready to find what we could live without.
Nicole Tsuno is a chronically ill writer living near Seattle, Washington. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Bed Zine, Bending Genres, Cotton Xenomorph, No Contact, The Offing, and perhappened, and she is a fiction reader for Split Lip. Some of her favorite things are as follows: dogs that look like their humans, anything peach, and toilets that play music. Find her on Twitter: @nicoletsuno.
