On the Return (What Goes Around Comes Back)

The sister who waited in the airport lobby did not, at first, recognize her sibling. Her eye caught briefly on the figure creeping toward the gate, ocular-snagged, she would later realize, on the scarf. After watching the last passenger pass the shuffling, bent creature that had stopped halfway as if overcome by the exertion of dragging the wheeled bag, she was arrested again by the scarf and this time the thought full-through. It was the one she had given Lureen at her departure. Her eye began to excise details from the corpus of the specimen before her. The creature was bent, but bore the general proportions of limb that her sister had, if one applied a mental stretch to the caved torso. Her bearing suggested absence of something henceforth integral, as something, not spine, stomach, heart, but at least as vital had been sucked out, leaving all remaining parts to collapse in a heap, disconnected in the sack of her. Her, and now she was certain it was a 'she,' owing to a few details of dress not customarily seen in unison applied deliberately to a male. Such pedestrian items would not please anyone set on flamboyance of any sort, thus nobody wishing to enact femininity, but would be chosen by a drab church lady in the effort to get gussied up for a funeral or a picnic, or a picnic following a funeral at which the hair-oiled, financially secure widower would want to succor in one not too limber-limbed. Lureen looked around at those gathered to fetch the disembarked, giving, for the first time a view of her face. She'd not left six weeks prior a young woman, nor even a particularly youngish older woman, but had been a semblance of vitality, whereas the visage of the woman Wendy now observed looked not so much to be her elder sibling as her parent. It wasn't just an accumulation of wrinkles, or dulling of the eye, but something less definable and more devastating. It was more like the whole body was uncannily shrivelled or compressed, and atrocious collapse or disintegration was nigh. Excerpt From: Graham Harman. “Weird Realism:.” iBooks. Lureen's gaze wandered over the assembly without stopping on her sister. She looked vague. Not exactly confused, and not drunken, but somehow unintentional, somehow un-reasoned. She reached down with a great deflation, as if she'd lost another internal bit in the exertion, another infinitesimal constituent having vaporized before Wendy's eyes. The woman before her was disintegrating. The scene before her eyes gave way to one that played again in her head and had for the past week, but this time the effect was a queasy slide into a thought she couldn't form, but which was, nevertheless an unknowable surety at the liminal place that feeds the dream not recalled. The woman who had a husband Lureen stalked for so long, plotting to win his affections and secure her own retirement had appeared in town. Wendy's eye had passed her over in the grocery store queue sans recognition until an incongruity hooked her in. It was a scene converse to this one. A few threads of glinting silver caught the light in the long, dark curls that tumbled down the back of the young woman in front of her. It struck her instantly as a lovely incongruity. Silver glints in the locks of a woman so lithe and youthful were a current novelty that had an inarguable charm. That was what she was thinking when the woman reached across the conveyer to take a chocolate bar from the display of impulse items there. The woman in front of Wendy was someone she'd seen before, although her looks had undergone a transformation of a reverse kind her sister was now exhibiting. The transformation was complex and felt strange, unnatural. For the appearance of age to regress was the stuff of dark legend, suggesting midnight rites and blood spilled in places far beyond the stain of light pollution, yet this was still more sinister. Discussions in church of the dark practices of devil cults and rock musicians didn't contain description of anything like she was seeing. Etherial was a the only word she could find, but it lacked in both physicality and mystery as a description. The woman in front of her turned full face toward Wendy, and her breath caught in her craw as she croaked what was intended as a 'hello." The necklace she wore was strange. A small metal capsule that looked utilitarian and hung at heart level. Charisma was what hit Wendy upon first seeing this woman a few years earlier when her sister had told her a tale about seducing the younger woman's husband, during, she later found out, a time when he was suffering a drug-hazed psychotic episode. She'd felt disloyal for wondering that a woman such as she would have an unfaithful husband at all. Then, Lureen had let slip the man's medical travails, which explained it from his point of view, but it would never make clear the hatred Lureen had allowed herself to express for someone who had done nothing more than stand in her way. The more Lureen talked, though, the more she questioned her ever having loyalty to such a creature as her sister. It wasn't clear until Lureen's soliloquies of id made clear that this man was out of his mind on drugs and that Lureen saw it as her opportunity. Lureen's hatred, oft expressed in the most stark terms, terms that would have been surprising- given the fact that they seemed to bear so little relation to any sort of cause- coming from a dive-bar speed freak, but from someone who generally comported herself with church-lady primmery, it was disconcerting. Wendy was unaware that the woman, whose name she no longer remembered was now a widow, nor that a sigil for her sister lay inside a sorceress's box of magic. But she was witnessing the effects of that reality, even as Lureen wheezed her way from Italy back to Medford wracked with pain and decomposing by the second. Halted by some vague fear, she heard further sounds below. Indubitably there was a sort of heavy dragging, and a most detestably sticky noise as of some fiendish and unclean species of suction.