Anna

Wine glasses shattered across the tile, what if they had been there all along?

Anna is the name of a porcelain doll with big green eyes. Anna isn't me. So mother gave me this to make up for the disappointment, or perhaps to help herself forget. God rushed. This is what mother says, when I cannot hear her. When I have wandered close, and one of her guests glimpses the secrets mother hides behind the chandeliers, the tailored cloth, guilty privilege. And now the party women in chiffon sheath dresses, they hold rendered glass above our tile, they don't see it slip from their fingers and vengefully shatter against unforgiving stone as I watch from the halls. Do I remember this?

In the darkness images stutter like old, scratched film across my drawn ruby curtains; I can see our parents' willowed figures dance between the shadowed wrinkles, I can hear muffled shouting from behind the window pane. If it is very late and I am very tired, I will pull myself from a sticky mess of tangled bedsheets and walk through the void of exhausted voices. Have you not grown bored of coming here?

I open this window to the gardens where night quiets memory, and sometimes I lift myself to sit in the frame that for once is so full of silence. Here there is a hand in mine, and she pulls me from the mist. With lights asleep we are free to live another life, and these are the times I can forget. She presses her tiny fingers against our closet door, parades us to a land of pretend. A scarf hangs from her shoulders, pink and feathered. Her future is written in ink. I touch the scar that traces her neck, and for a second I wonder if she knows when mother lies.