=The River Electra=

My twin sister had died. That was the reason mother gave for our emergency evacuation across the water. I knew instantly it wasn't true, but it was twilight, not a time for argument. "Where is dad then?" I was itching to ask, but didn't dare upset her by challenging her bald-faced lies. I feared she'd drown me, too. She was genuinely in mourning. But for who? For what?

On the other side of the river there was someone who would know. That was the idea, anyway. She was a fortune-teller who had a small robot that was supposedly programmed with all the answers to all the questions anyone could ever ask. Together, their fame had spread far and wide. But whenever you actually asked the robot any question whatsoever it just threw up its little mechanical arms in a "how-should-I-know" shrug and that was that. Love seemed like a miracle in those days, at least from far away. Closer up, it proved to be nothing but an atomic explosion.

I stood there for a long time, contemplating the odds. They were waiting for me in the woods, eight-against-one. The miserable bullies! The path behind me was closed off. I would never be able to re-cross the water of yesterday.   

It took me years to understand the true cause of my mother's sorrow on that terrible water journey. She was mourning her own death, of course, and also mine.

I could only go forward from this point on. At least that is how it appeared to me. At the time, I had a serious head wound. Well, I still do.

Years later, I run into my dad. He's pumping gas into the back of a big Chevy Impala at a service station in the Arizona desert. He tells me that I never had a sister. He tells me that I must have caught the "influenza of my mother's hysteria." He says he can see its after-effects on my face, the way it scarred me, like a psychic acne. He is lying, too, of course. Is this my purpose in life, to be the archivist of my parent's lies?

Shortly afterwards, my mother asks, "Have you heard from your father recently?" I answer economically, deflecting the question. How did she know? "Don't bother denying it," she says. "I can see it in your face." Is everything, then, written so plainly there? How unfair is that, that my face should be such an open book in a library of prevarication? "I hear he got remarried," my mother says. I wonder if that is who I saw sitting in the passenger seat of the Impala, this rumored second-wife. She was sitting ram-rod stiff, looking straight ahead, like a totem pole. I never saw her face. "I wasn't introduced. I never even saw her face," I say. What I still don't dare to ask is, "Was that my sister?"