Lily Hoang - Unfinished - stories finished by Lily Hoang

Kitty’s father picks her up and takes her back into her room. There, he puts her into bed. “Sleep tight, Kitty. We have a big day tomorrow.”

Kitty closes her eyes and tries to sleep, fully knowing that tomorrow will be too late.

Deep into the night, Kitty fights: stay with her daddy or save the moon.

Kitty sighs, sucking on her lower lip, and grabs hold of her pink suitcase.

This is the story of two sisters, and let this much be clear, before we get too far ahead of ourselves: they are not superheroes and should not be treated as such, but they are superhuman.

The two sisters are different, not only from each other and their parents but also from everyone else too. And the parents — for what it’s worth — are utterly normal.

Like all children and people who are fundamentally different, the two sisters hid. The two sisters pretended. And even when the circumstances became dire, when the two sisters ought to have shed their flaky fake skins of normalcy, when the two sisters were called to rise to the stature of heroines, they couldn’t.

This is the story of two sisters and the way they hid their secrets, the way they let the entire world fall to ruin.

One is called Ana, the other May. Their parents wanted a third, a boy, but alas, it was not in their cards. So they contented themselves with Ana May. They thought of the two sisters as a singular unit, as if one was necessary to make the other complete. They never bothered to add contractions to differentiate or combine them.

Yet somehow, the two sisters grew to be very different creatures. No matter how the parents tried to instill singularity, the sisters were sisters. They were not the same child. And so they were a constant disappointment.

Ana

Two sisters, and she is the older. Usually, it is a burden being the older, but for Ana, she could have been any sister.

The parents call her “Bug” at times. Other times, they would be more creative and call her “Buggy” or “Bugarug.” They would say, “Buggy May! Buggy May!” And Ana — excited — would yell back, “Buggy may what? Buggy may what?”

But the parents never seem to understand her question, so they simply walk away.

The parents call her “Bug” or “Buggy” because like a bug, she was always creeping, her body like paper flattened along the ground. She never wanted to walk.

Eventually though, she caved into the pressure of being normal toddler. The parents were overjoyed. They’d figured their daughter was going to remain a little buggy forever, and no one likes buggies, no, especially not the type of buggy Ana was: something more akin to a centipede or scorpion than a caterpillar. Caterpillars, at least, have potential.

The day Ana decided she would walk, it was as though someone pulled a string through her skull, and she suddenly could dance, a little marionette girl. And like a puppet, she propelled herself through the air, stopping only occasionally to rest along banisters and light fixtures. When Ana walked, she catapulted herself from furniture to furniture, her toes rarely grazing ground.

The parents thought it peculiar: one day their daughter would not leave the ground, the next she wouldn’t let her twinkling toes touch it.

Ana didn’t know how to tell her parents. She had no way of articulating it: If she could, she would sink herself into the earth, just to be ignored.

Instead, Ana made herself even more of a scene: jumping here and there one moment, a flattened coin the next.

May

Two sisters, and she is the younger. May watches Ana’s body cut air, and she looks for droplets of blood as evidence that her sister is real. May scans the room, and Ana is gone. Ana is always gone, and May is always here.

The parents, when they are jolly, run around singing, “Ana may! Ana may!” and jubilant, May screams back, “Ana may what? Ana may what?” It was a game they played. Ana becomes the noun, May becomes the verb, but there is always an element missing. May is not an active verb. May is an auxiliary verb, a connector, but she connects to nothing. The parents never seem to understand. They simply walk away, bored.

There was supposed to be a third child, a boy, but he never came. The parents don’t say it, but May is certain that she is to blame. And it’s true. She is to blame.

The irony, of course, is that Ana is the verb. She is movement. She is constant action, and May just sits there like a lump. Watching Ana, May becomes tired.

Ana

Two sisters, and she is the older by two years and five days. By the time May was born, Ana was already scaling walls, her body barely visible against the patterned wallpaper. The parents thought perhaps she was a chameleon because of the way she managed to blend. By the time May was born, Ana was more than unobtrusive: she was transparent.

May

Two sisters, and she is the younger. When May was born, the mother was in labor for days and days. That is not the way it ought to have been, the mother knew. When she birthed Ana, it was easy. She inhaled and exhaled and Ana was free, but May was an entirely different story. After some grueling fifty-two hours of labor, the mother, exhausted, bit the doctor’s fleshy forearm until he agreed to remove the pain. The truth of it was that the mother could have cared less about the baby.

The day May was birthed, the mother lost liters of blood. The father had craters pocking body from where the mother had clung her wrathful hands. But May emerged lovely and full of inky hair. She had red cheeks. Her eyes were the greyest grey either parent had ever seen. The mother thought she was a few shiny teeth in her mouth, but the doctor said it was impossible.

The day May was born, she was a banshee. She could not be kept with other newborns. She had a room all to herself, one without a shred of glass, lest her cry become that shrill, and no one doubted it would.

Ana

At night, when all the lights are turned off and everyone is nuzzled against blankets, Ana crawls downstairs to the kitchen and pulls open the refrigerator door. She stares at the shadows on the linoleum, the way the bottles of pop and ketchup distort, cast in sapphire. Sometimes, as she stands there on the tips of her toes, she makes up stories where the world has ended — reduced to nothing after nuclear bombs thrown like pebbles across the pond — and this cobalt haze is a remnant of the fallout. She is quiet.

Ana wonders what she would do if there really was a war like that, if she would survive. Contemplating, she closes the door to enter darkness. She is careful not to let any part of her body touch the ground. Kitchens, she knows, are reservoirs for hidden mines.

May

Two sisters, and she is already tired. May stares, mouth agape, at her sister’s back as she creeps, moving like she owns her body, moving like she is unafraid of breaking. May doesn’t see how they could have been born of the same two beings, how someone so light could be a part of her. May thinks Ana is a sand dollar waiting to be crushed.

And May, only two years and five days younger, is immovable. Her head is a cement block, and her arms are so heavy she calls the mother to help her retrieve goods that are mere fingertips away.

Ana

Two sisters, and during the day, one of them prepares for war by pretending to be a little girl.

Ana understands that if necessary, if it comes down to it, she may need to use May as a shield. She wouldn’t be sacrificing her sister, she knows, because May’s body is solid stone. May is a small boulder. And she is still expanding. She will grow, and once she is grown, together, no war will be able to defeat them.