the feeling you get when l'apel du void is not enough.

the feeling you get when l'apel du void is not enough.

My sister was twenty-five when she jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. She awoke at seven-thirty that morning, took a shower, did her hair, makeup, and came downstairs into the kitchen at around eight thirty for a quick, final breakfast. She smiled at me from across our oval shaped wooden table as she ate a bowl of granola flakes cereal. She wore around her bright green eyes a black mascara. It highlighted and widened them. With her short, black hair and stout nose, she was reminiscent of a house cat. Her lipstick color had been born when she was fourteen and she discovered the glamour of the twenties through The Great Gatsby. She had loved the clappers; they were airy, easy, and she imagined they wore the reddest rouge imaginable. They embodied their enormous passions on their lips.

She pushes away her half-empty cereal bowl and rises from her chair – and she smiles so brightly, gloriously, as she hovers over to my seat and kisses me on the cheek. It had never been so tender and bashful and ashamed. She left a vibrant red kiss mark on my cheek. I licked the back of my hand and rubbed it against the lipstick. It wouldn't come off with water.

She was getting married to a big wig rich man. His name was Peter. I hated him for everything he was going give to my sister and everything that he was going to do to her. She had, since she had met him as a nurse to a patient, wore a scent of privilege my parents had never doused her in.

But I enjoy blaming Marty; it's easier to think he was the reason she fell. I refuse to blame myself. I was the perfect sibling. Even when I was young I shared the spotlight. I know that she valued not having to be the much older child fighting for their parent's love.

There are hardly-bloomed tulip flowers still smothered in morning dew, crystallized and reflective. She doesn't look at them as she picks up her blue plastic bowl and places it in the old, plastic dishwasher. She forgets to empty out the milk so it spills over the other dirty dishes, sprinkling over them a milk that will drop down their sides and stay. Residue will remain and the milk will soon sour and our dishes, when we have believed they had been scrubbed clean will, if someone pays enough attention, still stink of the milk my sister forgot to wash out in the sink first.

My sister had taken two cinder blocks from under the backyard deck. She had cut down the tire swing the night before and removed the rope. She tied the cinder blocks together and then tied a noose around the other end. The moon was half-mast and the stars were staring as my sister, unobstructed by the clouds, placed her cinder-block ball and chain in the trunk of her black Volvo sedan.

I think that my parents should have not began taking sleeping pills. They did it so that neither of them would have to lay in bed together wondering if they were going to have to have sex or if the other one was even still attracted to their aging bodies enough to perform at all.

If they hadn't taken those sleeping pills, maybe they would have heard her sneak into their rooms the night before she jumped.

My sister leaves quietly after saying goodbye to my mother – father was still showering. She acts normally. There are no tears for her to cry or hugs to give to anyone. There are no discernible differences between a regular day and her jumping day.

My sister drove twelve minutes to the bridge. She stopped in the breakdown lane and left her car keys in the ignition. The cars slowly trudged forward – the bridge was saturated with morning traffic. She could almost hear the music of the other cars through her windows that she never opened. My sister only used the air conditioning her car. She always wore sunglasses too. They looked like an old lady's wing-sided spectacles. She told people she liked them because she hated the sun in her eyes and loved how they tinted the world orange. My sister sat in her car, staring our at the bridge. The jump alone may kill her, but she wanted to be sure of it. She turned to the passenger side seat and stuck her hand (with that pretty, lavish diamond ring) into the darkness. She rummaged through the purse a moment, her hand tracing the bottom for something specific. Moments later, a bag of blue pills emerged from the depths. They were my parent's sleeping pills. My sister brought the bag in front of her face and stared at them, noticing every crevice in the tiny ball of compact chemicals. They were Ambiens. She turned the bag over and shook a few out onto her other hand. She swallowed them. She did it again. And she did it again. And she did it till they were all gone from the bag. She had probably eaten over 25 – my parents were midway through a pill cycle.

My sister realized her time was short.

She left the keys to her car in the ignition. She thought that calling a tow truck would cause those people crossing the bridge even more of a delay. My sister never wanted to be a burden to strangers. Her family, though, remained a different story. After the fall she left us jackasses, strapped with bags of raw emotion on our backs.

My sister opened the door to the car and hurried to the rear. There, she opened up the trunk and pulled out her cinder-block death dealer. She moved to the side of the car, hiding from her possible saviors driving bumper to bumper. She had minutes – her brain began to race as the medicine slowly caused her stomach to cramp. She was sweating in the sun. Her cat eyes began to sink and drizzle down her face. She faced the river with wide, melting eyes. She placed, with great, great difficulty each of the blocks on the side of the railing. She climbed up and side on the side, her satin black dress with red rose print shimmered like black diamonds in the wind. She felt so weak as the medicine began to kill her. Her stomach began bubble up. She could feel the need to purge. She was losing consciousness. And she pushed herself (and the cinder-blocks) off the bridge and into the deep water. The gravity soon pulled her down to the bottom and she crashed, but felt nothing. No longer could she feel anything and the last things she could see was only black and blue. And some kind of bright, sunny day somewhere above her.

And the cinder blocks kept her weighed down as the water fully penetrated her lungs. Her eyes were closed and unresponsive. Blood seeped out through the various breakings she encountered upon hitting the bottom.

My sister's assemblage lay submerged, a noose around her ankle, floating in the currents, her arms flailing, the bubbles dipping furiously out of her mouth.

She was still wearing her perfectly applied waterproof rouge.