by Norie Suzuki
Yet again, my little sister’s nose twitched involuntarily like a bunny’s. Little, meaning three years younger than me. Not little, as in cute. She had just turned sixty-five, freshly eligible for a nursing home where Mother stayed. Her nose-wiggling was the sign of her lightbulb moment, a warning that Sis was about to shoot out quirky ideas.
“Here, take this,” she said, handing me the newspapers.
“Are you crazy? Why bother Mother with catastrophes?” I tossed the tabloid with the headline, “Beware: Double Star Merger Creates Earth-Sucking Black Hole,” onto the linoleum floor and stroked Mother’s thinning hair. The pressure of a hundred years had compressed her body, and her organs were nearing the breaking point. A week ago, the caregiver, who knew I used to be a car mechanic, told me to imagine an automotive engine with flywheels and pistons and valves and crankshafts working nonstop for 876,000 hours. His analogy made sense, but I cautioned him to stick to medical terms when talking to Sis. Certainly, she’d erupt like a volcano for having Mother compared to a piece of metal. She would have flashed him a murderous glance, making the poor caregiver slip away like an Akita dog with its fluffy tail curled between its rear legs.
“Who said we’re updating her on fake news?” She picked up the tabloid and pressed it against my chest. “Watch me.” She rolled two sheets into a slender cone. “You do the same. Not too tight around the vertex or loose around the base.”
Whenever Sis came up with a bizarre idea, her one-track mind clicked into high gear, and her auditory function went dead. My questions would go in one ear and out the other. So, I acquiesced and made a tubular cone. “Do I get a brownie point, Boss?”
“Not yet.” With her veiny hand, she smoothened the edge of the base. “Make it soft. Nice and smooth.” When she was satisfied with what she got, she pressed the base of the cone against my ear. “Do you hear me loud and clear?”
“You’re breaking my eardrum.” I cringed, covering my ear. Mother yawned as if she were about to say, cut that out. I wished she would, or at least open her eyes one last time.
Sis wiped the drool from the edge of Mother’s mouth and gently pushed up her lower jaw, so her thin lips nearly touched. Sis believed that life on earth ends when our soul leaves our body through the mouth. She said our soul slips away like the swirling smoke we once puffed under our persimmon tree—the first taste of Father’s cigarette butt we snitched from his ashtray, which made us gag, gave us teary eyes.
She moved a stool to the opposite side of Mother’s bed and signaled me to sit there. “Project MMT,” she announced with her all-too-familiar guess-my-acronym air.
All I could think of was a multi-motor turbocharger, which I kept to myself. Why give Sis another chance to make fun of my limited imagination? Better to resort to the dramatic pause and wait for her patience to run out.
“Megaphone, Mega Thanks. A study shows that words of gratitude activate dopamine, a feel-good hormone,” Sis lectured me, clearing her throat.
Pressing her chapped lips against the tip of her cone, she thanked Mother for making her a bento box, raved about wiener sausages cut into the shapes of an octopus, a sunflower, and a bunny with sesame seed eyes. “Everybody wanted to sit with me during lunch. My one and only time of popularity.” Sis held Mother’s hand and said if she had ever married and had her child, she would’ve done the same, though being all thumbs, her octopus might have only six legs, and her kid would’ve grown up believing in a sextapus. She paused, waiting in vain for Mother to chuckle at her cheesy joke.
Mother wheezed, then grunted.
“Funny, right?” She tapped Mother’s cheek and told me to go next.
My mind drifted through my mental album. In my sepia memories, Mother was always on the go, smelled of soy sauce, cackled with her whole body. In each snippet, Sis appeared—cuddled in Mother’s arms or peeking her head out from under Mother’s floral-print skirt.
“Mother, thank you for reassuring me I wasn’t morphing into an alien when I got measles.”
“You panicked when you saw yourself in the mirror. After all, we all got measles one after another. Father took pictures of us with blotchy rashes on our faces, saying it’s unheard of— proof of a close-knit family.”
“Sounds just like Father.”
With a distant look in her eyes, she asked, “Did you know that if it weren’t for Mom, he would have shown those photo series at his studio where any passers-by could have seen us? We’d have been the school’s laughingstock.”
“Too bad, she…” I caught myself and stopped, remembering my wife’s warning: Don’t say anything negative about your mother; she’s in the active dying stage, and you’d better be nice to your sister. My wife’s cautioning me for the past forty-five years to think before I open my mouth had finally paid off.
“It was meant to be,” Sis said, nodding at Mother, who had burned the best shots Sis had set aside before the move.
We had agreed to sell the house we grew up in to pay for Mother’s nursing home. Sis insisted on a room with a garden view. When we finally found one and Sis co-signed the contract, she named the flowers blooming in the garden—dianthus, poppy, creeping phlox, anemone—as if she were checking all the “yes” boxes to convince herself she was making the right decision, that Mother would be better off in the nursing home than staying with her at their house.
Sis avoided talking about the incident. It happened while we were sorting through our childhood memorabilia in what used to be my room on the second floor, which had been converted into a storage room. I couldn’t believe all the knick-knacks Mother kept: the first DC motor toy car I made with cardboard painted yellow and brown to resemble a jaguar, the celestial map Sis and I drew, fighting over who gets to chart the Big Dipper and not the Small Dipper, arguing over whether Alcor should be piggybacked to Mizar or sketched separately. While we were filling up the burnable and non-burnable plastic trash bags, Mother piled up the film and photographs Sis had put aside and set them on fire. It was too late when the humid air carried the sooty odor to our window. When Mother saw us rushing toward her, she said, “Just in time. Have some roasted sweet potatoes.” She handed us a pebble, blowing on it, telling us not to burn our mouths.
Sis went along and played house with Mother, asking her for a glass of milk so Mother would go inside, and I could put out the fire. Sis acted as if building a bonfire with old photographs was something normal you do in the summer, like watering sunflowers in our backyard. Seeing me open my mouth, Sis glared at me and shut me up.
“We weren’t a photogenic family, anyway,” I said.
“Watch what you say. Mom’s listening.” Sis beamed at Mother. “You’re a beauty queen.”
I traced Mother’s cheekbone and chuckled. “You used to dance around her, singing at the top of your lungs, I’m a cutie-pie like Mommy. Pretty, pretty Mommy.”
Following my off-key burst, Sis chanted the song through her megaphone, conjuring up Mother, who played tag with us at a nearby park, showed us how to pump our legs on a swing.
Suddenly, Mother’s intermittent breathing and gurgling grew louder. Then, more erratic. Sis dropped the megaphone and crooned directly into her ear. Mother’s slender fingers, which were turning purplish, trembled. Maybe her feet were mottling, too, but I was scared and couldn’t lift her blanket. I grabbed my phone to play Mother’s favorite Sukiyaki song by her ear and groped for the nurse call button. When the song reached its refrain, Mother’s chest went still.
“Mom, take me with you,” Sis begged, wrapping her arms around Mother’s frail shoulders. “Don’t just stand there. Hold her.”
I wanted to tell Sis to let her go, but I couldn’t. Holding Mother’s lukewarm hand, I whispered, “Thank you,” with the intonation of a bye-bye while Sis rubbed her cheek against Mother’s. I didn’t notice the caregiver standing at the foot of the bed until he called out Mother’s name through his mask.
“Don’t go, Mom,” Sis cried. “Don’t leave me.”
Then Mother’s chest rose and fell. Stopped. Moved again. Continued moving. Mother’s heart pulsed in small ripples on the caregiver’s handheld device.
“See this? Your talking brought her back,” he said to Sis. “Hearing is the last sense to go, so keep at it.”
Luckily, the caregiver overlooked the rolled-up newspapers on the floor. If he had spotted it, he would have tossed Sis’s megaphone in the trash, worried that we might trip over it and break our bones. Seeing her megaphone in the wastebasket would have upset Sis. She might see it as a bad omen. I discreetly kicked the megaphone under the bed and handed Sis some tissue paper. “I bet what you said jolted her. She thought, OMG, I can’t leave yet.”
“A nice rehearsal. Very much like Mom.” Sis blew her nose and scoffed at herself. “Do you remember the earthquake drill she made us do?”
“Sure. That crazy late-night drill of grabbing our helmets and backpacks in the dark, then running and huddling under our persimmon tree.”
“You make it sound like an ordeal, but I loved snuggling under a big blanket, the scent of Pop’s cigarette and Mom’s sweet facial cream tickling my nostrils. On a clear night, we even enjoyed watching the Big Dipper.”
Sis balled up her tissue and tucked it into her pocket. She might keep it in her memory chest with the spoon we used to feed Mother hydration jelly a week ago, when she still had the strength to swallow.
“Do you think the new homeowner still keeps that persimmon tree?” Sis asked.
I shrugged, not having returned to our old neighborhood since we sold the house.
When I left the nursing home, Sis was reading a book on a folding bed beside Mother’s. “Afterlife: Becoming a Telepathic Communicator,” the title read. I was about to tease her and ask if it was her new project, but as I watched her underline some words with a fluorescent yellow marker, I decided otherwise.
On my way home, Sis’s wailing clung to me like stubborn car grease that wouldn’t come off. “Take me with you. Take me with you.” It rumbled and revved in my ears. Poor Sis. She had nobody else but Mother. Sis would be lost without her.
I should have anticipated what would happen to Sis and taken some preventive measures—Basic 101. Why didn’t I register her at a dating agency or get her a puppy? Maybe not when Mother’s dementia set in, not when Sis scolded Mother for wetting herself, for wandering at night, for accusing Sis of stealing her money. But what about when Sis made light of the situation, ridiculing the wet bedsheet as a piece of modern art with an organic aroma, or calling herself a Ms. Lupin at large? At the latest, I should have realized what was coming when Mother became incommunicado and eventually failed to recognize either of us. By the time Sis stopped joshing Mother, stopped turning their daily life into a sitcom, and became a hardcore pamperer, it was too late. I missed my chance to salvage Sis.
Mother’s final moment was nothing like the rehearsal.
“Can you believe it?” Sis sobbed, calling me late that evening.
Sis had dozed off with the book on her lap. She did not wake up until the caregiver bustled into the room with the monitoring device that showed a flat green line.
In some ways, I was relieved Sis did not witness Mother’s last moments. If she had, she would have repeated her plea alone. Just the thought of it made me sad, furious at myself for leaving the hospital. Plain stupid. I pressed the phone tightly against my ear and listened to every sound Sis made—the way I used to doctor the motor and crankshaft of a car in need of repair. I honed in on her fitful whimpering and subdued sniffling, knowing no words could comfort her.
A month later, Sis and I visited our old neighborhood. The trip was unplanned. Not one of those projects Sis declared with fanfare. The idea popped up while we were having our weekly Monday afternoon coffee at a local cafe.
It might have been the Indian summer sunlight warming our seats. Or the aroma of dark, roasted beans drifting from a percolator that resembled the one Father used to make coffee every morning before heading to his photo studio. Or Mother’s cosmos-print scarf Sis wore. Who knows what had allured us to hop on a bus? But there we were, standing in the alley that led to our house. Or rather, the house that used to be ours. When we signed the sales agreement at the broker’s office three years ago, Sis insisted on not meeting the buyer. She looked sideways when the broker mentioned the buyer’s name, describing them as up-and-coming lawyers with two toddlers and a toy poodle. Her cheek twitched at the mention of the dog. She worried about the poodle trampling Mother’s pansies, tulips, cosmos, and daffodils.
Down the alley, the lot next to ours had been split into two subdivisions, each with identical duplexes.
“They’ve torn down our block walls,” I said, leaning to peek through the aluminum slat fencing. There was a four-seat cedar picnic table where the flowerbed once was. A toy bat and a mitt were scattered on the lawn, as if the children had been called inside in mid-game.
Sis, who was a head shorter than I, nudged my arm. “Too bad they let those persimmons fall on the ground.”
Quite a few lay around the tree’s base, some completely crushed, others half-rotten, their skin split open. A waste Mother never allowed. She had given out persimmons to our neighbors and hung the remaining ones on strings like beads to make dried persimmons— sugar gradually surfacing on their soft, wrinkled skin, coating the persimmons in white.
“Bet they taste as good as before,” Sis said, gazing up at the branches hanging over the slat fence. Shielding her eyes with her hand, she studied the persimmons like Mother did while Father went up the ladder to pick the ripe ones.
“Which ones are ready to eat?” I asked.
“Mom would know. Not me.”
“Use your TC skill.”
“A what?” Sis knitted her brows.
“Don’t you get it?” I couldn’t hide my smirk. “Try telepathic communication. She’ll tell you.”
Sis grinned like when she played peek-a-boo behind Mother’s flared skirt and pointed at the cluster of persimmons. The twigs bowed under their weight. It wasn’t long before those persimmons hit the ground and splattered. I leaned against the fence, careful not to get my fingers caught between the slats. I stretched my arm as far as I could, but I only managed to brush the surface of the persimmon with the tip of my middle finger. Swearing under my breath, I stood on my toes and twisted my body, finally grabbing the twig with two persimmons. They would have fallen to the ground if not for Sis spreading Mother’s scarf.
“Saved,” she exclaimed, and polished each persimmon with her scarf. After comparing their glow, their weight, and their roundness, she handed me the smaller one. “Mother was right,” Sis said, crunching hers, slowly rolling a chunk in her mouth. “Heavenly.”
I nodded, trying to conceal the ache in my chest. Unaware of my muscle cramps, Sis strutted past the duplexes. I expected her to turn around at any moment and take one last look at the persimmon tree. Hiding my pain, I tried to stand straight, prepared to give her my brotherly smile. But she didn’t. Not even once. Sis strode forward. Like she knew exactly where she was heading.
Maybe I got it all wrong. Sis was not alone, though she might feel lonely. Even with Mother gone, they remained bonded. Like Mizar and Alcor she drew. Separate, yet orbiting close together. Sis understood what came with the bonding, what price she had to pay. Her cry was not a plea, but an acceptance of the solitude she would have to live with.
Would I beg Sis to take me with her if she died before me? Would I plead with my wife? Probably not. For better or worse, I’d stay in my orbit, safe from any collision, safe from the pull of a black hole.
Leaning against the aluminum fence, I waited for my muscles to relax. High up on a branch, a magpie pecked at a persimmon, peeling its skin, digging deep into its flesh. The persimmon, whose inside had been exposed, clung to the twig and glistened with life in the late afternoon sunlight.
I massaged the side of my ribcage and called out to Sis, asking her to wait for me. But the magpie’s screeching drowned out my cry. So I hobbled, trying to get closer to my little Sis.
About the Author:
Norie Suzuki (she/her) was born and educated bilingually in Tokyo, Japan, where she writes and works as a simultaneous interpreter. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Her work has appeared in Baltimore Review, Cutleaf Journal, The Offing, and elsewhere. She received third prize in the T. Paulo Urcanse Prize for Literary Excellence in 2024, and her work will be included in “Best Microfiction 2026.” She loves biting on a Granny Smith apple, which has a nuanced sour-sweet taste.