Sibling Rivalry

I’m thirteen wearing my sister’s Happiness is a State of Mind t-shirt scooped from her bedroom floor, and a belt she’ll later wrap around my neck and threaten to tighten loop by loop. But our parents, the questions. Instead, she laughs, ripping a fistful of my hair that she keeps in a jar on her windowsill.

I’m forty-two and haven’t spoken to her in decades when I learn she’s bought land up north, plans to build cabins, attract tourists who hanker to hunt deer, catch fish they’ll never eat, skin rabbits and hang the pelts on their walls like trophies.

Photo Credit: Beret Olsen