Sissy Spacek Chemo Patient (pt 7).

When Faye comes back she doesn’t have the baby anymore, and Jackie can’t imagine where she took it; she starts to explain her reason for this action that is still startling her every time she remembers what she’s done, but Faye waves her off. What will you do with it, she asks and Faye says ask her no questions and she’ll tell no lies: Jackie heard this said a lot when she lived here to so many people who came looking for so many things they couldn’t get anywhere else.

Faye goes to the kitchen sink and washes her hands. Monica thinks she’s pregnant but I don’t, she says. So maybe this works out in our favor. But you need to leave, if they got a look at you, well, you kinda stand out.

Jackie stands. I want the rest of him.

Son of a bitch, her aunt says, and leaves the room and comes back with a baggie filled with ash. You know he was my kin too, Faye says, and Jackie is sick to see tears in her eyes. He wasn’t just whatever you got him mixed up in. He was a good boy. You both were so good when you were little.

Jackie snatches the packet away from her, but she can’t seem to make her feet movie. Don’t you know what you did, she says. Don’t you know what you did?

I don’t give a shit, her aunt says plainly. You want it to be another way but it’s not. The perverts liked you two and we didn’t go hungry ‘cause of that, and we didn’t lose the house later on because they liked you two going at it like rabbits and you would’ve done that whether I taped it or not. You’re not normal Jackie, so you can get off your high horse, little miss knows every fucking thing.

A slow smile spreads across Jackie’s face.

That, she says, is the first time you have ever used my name.

Big deal, Faye says, waving her away. Do your stuff, know it all. I’m gonna go do mine.

Jackie lets the screen door slam behind her, giving her aunt’s house a cursory glance over her shoulder. When she came back from Chicago without her brother, she came here at night and poured gas around it but could not bring herself to light it.

Her steps click in the dark as she walks. Baby, I am committed to the part, she mutters to no one, gripping the ashes tight, but these heels are cutting my dogs to pieces.

She stops; she rips the bag in half and throws two handfuls into the air, coating herself in a cloud of grey that glows in the streetlight and tastes like burnt toast. And with great effort and a bitten-back sob, she erases her brother from her mind. Jackie Rose is a one-shot creation, an original unique in detail, exquisite and priced beyond measure.

And she never had any kin.

Jackie flips up her collar and goes home; rhinestones fall at her feet.