The Weaker Sister

What on earth was mine?

Our underground domicile’s concrete walls mapped with veins of mold and ice, the drip-drip-drip of dirty melt from the ceiling into four rusty pots, the gray shapes the water made when we flung it out against the frozen drifts. The pissy lemon tree I grew from seed that squeezed out one dumb lemon—no more, never more—every two years. Dad always made us eat it all, even the bitter peel. We kept a single seed from each lemon and traded the rest and felt a little bad about it, knowing from experience that they were mini-pissies and wouldn’t ever sprout. But you never could know for sure, Dad said, and anyway we needed the ration tickets.

The fire in the living room on months we weren’t conserving wood, the way the heat expanded inside you until you were sure you’d never felt more satisfied in your life. My two pelts, a short and a long, both sewn by Vee from the matted fur of the last bison Dad shot before the die-off. My leather boots. The strings I used to tie the ends of my paltry braids, one white, one red. The hand mirror in the plastic frame with smiling black-and-yellow blobs Dad called black-eyed Susans molded into its corners.

The glossy PlanetCorps brochures and applications and sundry additional paperwork, the application questions annotated by yours truly, all stacked up under a rotting book called The Secret in the wooden crate next to my mattress.

Three pairs of long woolen underthings. Six pairs of socks, three per day in the harshest months. Two holey woolen sweaters and two synthetics that Dad said must be more than 200 years old, trace remnants of embroidery spelling OLD N VY clinging to one of them. (Here comes Old Envy, Vee would always say when I wore it, rustling up in me a poisonous feeling of recognition. By all logic, it was Vee who should have envied me. I was the strong and brave one, the loud and shrewd one, the one who safeguarded our futures. And yet.)

The pictures of Mommy, shrunken already with the sickness by the time I was born. In my favorite, Mommy’s sitting in bed and smiling down at me (a thin, tall infant with the blank black eyes of a startled bat) and Vee (at two, a solemn beauty with a heart shaped face) on her lap.

We had in our possession six Mommy pictures: Two for Vee, one for Dad, and three for me. Because I am the baby, and everyone knows the baby is spoiled.

The day the ConstructCorps boys came back from Auxiliary 23, Vee was mixing wax in the smaller of our two pots on the Bunsen and Dad was outside blowtorching a layer of ice two feet thick from the outside of the underground domicile. This was the story of my young life circa 3076: Dad forever fighting the ice, my sister waging painful war against her facial hair. Everyone I loved hacking away at something wild and unsavory with weapons that were not up to the job.

It was obvious to me by then that there was no hope of winning. Because no kind of spring was expected to sufficiently melt the ice, and Vee’s follicles were unstoppable and unrelenting. But believing myself to be a good daughter and sister, I played along.

“Leora. Torture time.” Vee flashed the dull pearls of her teeth and beckoned, the scuffed red bowl cupped in her hands, the hot wax billowing steam. Her hair fell in shining black tangles around her shoulders and I could imagine someone wanting to wind it around his fingers, a ConstructCorps boy who was small and hirsute like her and who would overlook her shadowed face and see her pretty eyes, her softness. “You ready?” she said.

I grunted my assent and moved to the kitchen window to check on Dad, steeling myself for what was required. Out the melted center of the glass, the stand of fossilized spruce trunks shook in the bright morning freeze. Beside them was our papa in his black welder’s mask, blowtorching the ice wall with herky-jerky arms, his yak pelt dripping from the spray and flapping against