SISTER SEDONA

by

Chaz Siu

My mother waits at home, her arms folded, her gray eyes rimmed by sallow half moons and deep shadows. From behind our picture window with its expansive view of the red mountains above and the parched valleys below, she watches us clamber up the narrow dirt path.

We wander the desolate foothills for long hours that melt down our collective hope in the heat of the Arizona sun. I've trudged in the heat with my father and uncle since early this morning.

This is not the first time. My father swears this time will be the last, that they will have my sister committed. He admits it takes too much out of him and my mother to cling to their beloved daughter. He promises he will gladly forgive my sister and her many transgressions if only we can find her. Just this one last time.

We scour the sharp edges of underbrush, the sage, the gnarled juniper, the needled carcasses of dead cacti--for exactly what I'm not certain. I am the tow-haired son, I love my little sister, I will do what's best.

"You've got to get her help," I say to my father. "She's drunk more often than sober." My sister is my living contradiction. She is reckless in her life. Every time we lose her then bring her home alive, she is bathed and stifled in my parents' overwhelming love.

"You shut it," he says as he slashes through the thorn bushes with his machete. He looks at me and shakes his head, as if the obvious is not worth mentioning. "She's troubled, that's all," he goes on. "Nothing that can't be fixed. What would you know, anyhow? You're not yet grown yourself. Don't forget that."

"Hard not to," I say.

He gives me a look. "You go find your sister, boy, and get the hell away from me."

The love my father grants me as his only son is a beneficent love; it is incidental, an act of charity because I am related to him, because he trusts me to be the responsible one, the eldest. If I need anything, says my father, just let him know.

"Ah Jesus!" shouts my uncle from the top of the hill, "Earl, you got to come here. Right now."

The fathomless blue depths of my father's eyes are never deeper or bluer than at this moment. "Stay here," he says, "and don't move a muscle."

His feet kick up dust as he scrambles up the graveled incline to where my uncle waits.

As I smoke my cigarette and wait expectantly for the sound of my father's anguished cries, a golden hawk climbs on an air current and hovers above us, seeming to tip its wings, as if to acknowledge what it sees below, and tell us all what we cannot see from where we stand.

§ § §

Chaz Siu has published nonfiction articles in a number of trade journals, as well as fiction in Alien Skin. While no longer a closet writer, he still occasionally huddles in a dark corner of his basement in Chicago, warmed by banks of computer monitors that are filled with the words he conjures up. He can be reached at: chucksi@execpc.com

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