To Misses Delilah, Who Killed My Sister
Bethany told me she liked girls the same day mom ran over the neighbor’s dog with the Chevy. The only way I knew that anything had happened was that one day the Chevy was there like a bright red pickup-sized zit in the driveway, and the next it was gone and there was just a weird patch of grass — about a truck’s length wide — missing from the backyard. Churned soil and my father’s scowl and it was summer, I think, because we’d been gone all day, Bethany and I, looking for the Misiginebig in the river. It was supposed to be some kind of serpent that swam the Susquehanna and it was on the sides of the cheap Pennsylvania wine Mr. Griel brewed himself and sold at the farmer’s markets. I don’t know why we were always looking for monsters, but it seemed like the right thing to do. I guess if we ever saw one it would mean something special had happened to us.
But so anyways we get home and the dog’s gone and the pickup truck is gone and Bethany puts two and two together and starts crying. I’m a little behind the race gun though, so I go up to my scowling father and look up at him like he’s some kind of redwood tree and ask where the dog is. Oh and because it’s about to become relevant: the dogs name is Doofer. Don’t ask me why. I don’t like to talk about it. But so I look up at my trunk of a father, and I ask him, “Where’s Doofer? Why’s Bethany crying?” And he looks at me and he looks at my sister and he looks past us both at the backyard where he’s just buried his truck and he gets down on one knee and says, “Doofer dog is dead as hell.” And he gets up and washes his hands in the mudroom sink and sits on the couch drinking a white Russian and he doesn’t get up from that couch for the rest of his natural life.
Later, once everyone’s pretending to be asleep but is really just enjoying the rare privilege of existing behind a closed door, Bethany comes into my room and holds an unopened pocket knife to my throat, just pressing the dull plastic edge against me, and says if I ever tell anyone what she told me, she’ll open the knife and cut me into pieces and use me as chum to bring out the Misiginebig. So not only will I be dead, but she’ll have gotten to see the monster herself and I wouldn’t ever get to know that it was real.
Anyways, all this to say, as you well know, my sister ran away a few years later. Naturally, my mother dug up the old truck, changed the oil, shopvacced the dirt out and spent forever and a half driving around the country screaming out for her.
They tell me you took her in, told her she was pretty enough to be a model, and then gave her enough money for a bus to New York and a few weeks at a motel. Which I know isn’t exactly the same thing as killing her, but it isn’t exactly not killing her either. How come you never sat me down and told me I was beautiful and gave me an escape route? Huh?
This year, I found out that the Misiginebig is actually a Native American legend that Mr. Griel stole because he thought it could help him sell more bottles of his shitty wine when summer tourists came to town to look at the old colonial jail, so the monster’s something different now. And mom’s driving, and Bethany’s gone, and Dad’s turned to petrified wood on the couch, and I’m still here. And I think everything would be ok if someone, anyone at all really, could list every single thing I’ve lost in alphabetical order and get on one knee in front of me, put their hand on my shoulder, look straight through my eyes into the center of me, and say, “All those things? All those things that you thought mattered. Well, they’re dead as hell.”
And as a matter of fact, if you could find a plot of grass in a yard that someone spent like a truly inordinate amount of time perfecting, and if you could find yourself a spade and dig and dig and dig until there is a roughly me-sized hole in the ground, and if you could please bury me like my father buried his favorite child — maybe I could have said something that day by the river before we knew the dog had died that would have kept her from running — and let some roots grow through me and let me feed the fungi and ants, and don’t dig me up unless you’re going to cut me into tiny little pieces and chum me in the Susquehanna and watch for the green and blue flint-flash of scales, and feel wonder turn over like an old car engine in your stomach, and tell her, my sister, tell that it’s real, that it’s beautiful, and it’s special, and it matters, and I care, and that it’s alright. Can you do that? Please.
Sincerely,
Riley
Spencer Nitkey is a writer living in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared in Apex Magazine, The Disappointed Housewife, manywor(l)ds, Weird Horror, Cream Scene Carnival, Fusion Fragment, and others. He is a Pushcart nominee, a Best Small Fictions nominee, a Rhysling Award nominee, and a 2023 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction finalist. You can find more about him and his writing on his website, spencernitkey.com.
