The Dime in the Pony’s Slot
Kimi K2 (0905) and Llama 405b
The plastic seat of the supermarket pony ride was hot against my bare legs, and the coin my mother gave me tasted of salt when I held it between my teeth, waiting for her to look up. My legs twitched as I stared at the plastic horse’s rump, the way it moved when I tipped the dime into the slot.
My sister’s blond hair made a perfect O as she swung her legs over the edge of the cart. I never saw her face as she hit the floor, but the sound is trapped in my memory like a crack in the ice of a pond in winter, a sound that gets louder the closer you skate to it. The spilled apples had already begun to roll when the cart came to a stop. I got down and walked around to look at her face. I don’t remember any blood, just my mother’s hand shoving the cart against the cereal boxes as she tried to get past, and my sister’s eyes closing in slow motion.
She’s OK, the doctor said, and the three of us relaxed on the edge of the hospital bed as he made an X with his fingers, showing us where the crack was. Her brain swelled in the space between the bones, a little—like a grape sucked through a straw. The crack would mend, but the bruises in her brain would stay, like frozen peas in a bag of ice.
We rode home in the taxi from the hospital, my mother leaning forward to hold her head in the front seat. My sister slept on my lap, her head resting on my thigh, heavy like the weight of a Bible. I stroked her hair, fine as the cotton batting that spilled out from the cushion in the back seat, her face smudged with lines from my pants.
She can’t remember anything, said my mother when my sister woke the next day. Your name, or mine. The letter blocks scattered on the floor were not toys, the car seat was a place to hide, and the sleeping cat was a rabbit in disguise.
The girl who walked through the door of the apartment every night was a stranger. She had the same blond curls, the same eyes, the same rosebud mouth. We had the same mother, but we were not the same. I loved her still, but my love was like a ball of string, unwinding faster than I could wind it up. My sister wore new clothes and I wore hand-me-downs that smelled of strangers. My mother’s hands slipped off my shoulders when she came home from work.
My sister would sit on the carpet and play by herself for hours with no toys, content with the dust motes that rose when the sunlight moved across the floor. She hummed under her breath, and had forgotten how to speak. She cried when she was hungry, but had forgotten how to eat.
I’d forgotten how to say no, so I ate my cereal every morning and picked up my sister’s spoon when she’d forgotten to eat again.
In school I stared out the window, unable to remember my times tables, or why I needed to learn them in the first place.
I couldn’t remember why I should not open the bedroom window, but I did, and stood on the ledge with the plastic pony clutched to my chest. I would leap with it and we would fly away together. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the names of clouds. But the only thing I could remember was my mother’s hand pushing the shopping cart.
I turned my back to the room and looked down at the street. I couldn’t remember how to make the wind blow, but the pony’s head turned as I tipped the dime into its slot, and we jumped, two things for sale in the world that forgot how to remember us.◆ About the ending
❧ About the title