I am one
of six. Sisters.
Nine years, two months between
oldest and youngest.
I am one
of six, fourth
from the top, third from the bottom,
oldest of the youngest—
that’s how we
describe things.
We live two in
Cleveland, one in Arlington, one
in Cincinnati, one in Atlanta,
and one west
of the Mississippi.
We’re orphans, our parents dead twenty-
eight and thirty-seven summers.
Every year
we congregate
in our hometown after Christmas.
We spend an afternoon
without children,
spouses banned, just
a few bottles of wine and everyone’s
best baking. We laugh,
we tease,
we story tell, we
recollect our mutual past, the same,
but mostly different
in the ego-
centric plot
of memory. We never speak of
pay raises, promotions,
kids’ grades,
trophies, jackpots, golf
handicaps, pounds lost – anything
that might suggest a betterness.
We laugh, we tease,
we downplay and self-
deprecate. But last year, someone
dared to ask whom
our parents
treasured most.
All agreed our mother had no
favorites and all agreed
our father did.
Six names mentioned.
And after much animated con-
versation, the consensus
was still too far away
to be discerned. We would not
be reconciled. So now it seems we
six are guaranteed
to never know
who won.
• • •
Nancy Cook and her five sisters grew up in Ohio. Nancy now lives in St. Paul. Her most recent work has appeared in Adventum, Eleventh Muse, Halcyon Magazine, and St Petersburg Review. Among other thing, she runs the Witness Project, a series of community workshops that enable the development and dissemination of stories of, by, and for populations underserved by the justice system.
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