My Sister

Some time in the nineties they started to line up. The fist fights and irritation campaigns faded away. They were comrades—siblings-in-arms. Counterculture shock troops bred to attack the establishment and undermine the zeitgeist of rap-rock and x-box. She an industrial punk (piercings and buckles), he a self-aware nerd (suit jackets and faded jeans). The brass tacks of civilization disintegrated around their sarcasm and public drunkenness. Girls fawned at his above-it-all snort. Boys dug their needy talons into her hung-over Sundays on the couch. Alpha without even trying. They boiled water and ate Ramen noodles from the pot together over holidays, wholly unaware that they had transcended their isolated roots. Their mother was a polymath, their father was a genius, but no one told them. A volatile specter of worthwhileness surveyed them from afar. They were unaware.