"Dear god, you look terrible!"
These were the first words that Corinthia Kurtis had spoken to her baby brother in almost a decade and also maybe the first true words she had spoken to him ever. You see, during their childhood Ishmael and Corinthia where about as different as two people could possibly be. While he was unremarkable and often forgotten, she was a child actress.
She starred in everything from sitcoms to dramas to a retelling of the story of Sisyphus where instead of pushing a boulder up a hill, he was constantly chasing a small dalmatian through the streets of New York City.
Gaining fame at a young age caused her to develop a chronic lying disease. Anytime she tried to tell the truth, it would come out as a falsehood. She had to be put on medication that was made specifically for her and while it did fix the lying, it also caused her to be covered in translucent little spots. The most evident of these was a spot on her side which served as a perfect window to her left kidney.
She hated the spots, but she hated the lying more, so reluctantly she took them. She often had wished as a child that she could swap places with her little brother. Corinthia lived a tragic existence where any love she ever felt was artificial. Even her sweet old parents were not immune to this. They claimed to love their daughter and yet to her behest, she was forced to become the family breadwinner at the age of 7.
Eventually she grew sick of this behavior and at the age of 17 ran off to join the traveling circus where she performed as a clown and for the first time in her life she was actually happy, but there was still something eating at her and while her disease allowed her to spread falsehoods to others, she couldn't lie to herself. While she despised her parents entirely, she did miss her brother.
"What happened to you, where's your girl I thought she was gonna be here?" Oh boy, was Corinthia unaware of the can of worms she had just opened. For a moment Ishmael tried to decide which of the many terrible things that had occurred he should tell her about first. He decided he would start with Maria, that made the most sense.
"Well Maria won't be joining us." The way he phrased this was basically just begging for her to ask why, which she did.
"Why not?" Corinthia felt as though she had been lied to by Maria, which immediately soured her to the women.
"Well, she left this morning and took the car. I don't know where she has gone. I hope she's safe wherever she is." He genuinely meant that. Even though she had hurt him, he couldn't find it in himself to hate her.
"Well, that's a cheery piece of news. How are you feeling about that?" Corinthia had never learned how to comfort people and if she was being honest with herself, her brother being emotionally vulnerable made her extremely uncomfortable.
"Well, I'm not feeling anyways about it. That's what is really confusing me." It would have been so much simpler if he was sad or angry he thought. "Someone threw milk onto me this morning and that made me far more upset than Maria's sudden departure."
This response puzzled his sister, she began to worry that her brother had lost his mind in the time since they had last seen each other.
"Are you doing alright?" She asked this even though she had already made up her mind on the matter of her brother's mental health and nothing he could say would change her mind. She was often stubborn like this.
"I think I am." If he was being completely honest with himself, he was doing alright. In fact, he was doing better than he had in a long time. His brain was flooded with a thousand beautiful thoughts and just as many nightmarish ones, yet he found himself appreciating all of them in the same way a student appreciates every lesson that they are taught.
He decided to play a little game in his mind where he would let whatever the next thought come to him become the next words he spoke. For a moment his mind went silent and then something popped in.
"You know I've actually been considering becoming a practicing homosexual."
His sister was baffled by what she had just heard, not by her brother potentially being gay, no she had always suspected that. She was shocked by the fact he was so willing to let such an intimate truth slip out like a baby giraffe sliding its way into the world and plopping straight onto the ground. She let her brother's comment lay where it had plopped for a moment and then managed to sputter out a single word of affirmation.
"Cool." Ishmael appreciated the kind word from his sister but had the feeling that talking about emotions was something that made her slightly invisible skin crawl, so he picked up a menu and began to scan it up and down for an item he might like to eat. At this cue, Corinthia grabbed onto the menu and used it as a life preserver to hold her above the untraversable waters of her brother's love life.
The menu was full of greasy, artery clogging meals that would give you heartburn if you read the ingredients too quickly. Most of the items were named after famous celebrities from the time, but one item caught the eye of Ishmael. Something merely called "The McCarthy Red Chili Burger". He wondered what would cause an otherwise carefree menu to make such a potent political stance. The description also said it came with a side of loaded pork fries.
While Ishmael was thinking about the complex political machinations of a 50's style restaurant, his sister was attempting to find a meal not named after an actress or actor. Eventually she settled on the Oleg Popov Jalapeno Poppers. A waitress came over, asked them what they wanted, and once both siblings had made, they're orders they sat in silence for a moment.
The silence was shattered by a high-pitched little alarm going off on Corinthians watch, It alerted her that it was time for her to take her pills. She needed to take them every 4 hours or else her brain would start flipping what is true and what is fake. After she took them, a little window of clear skin formed on the side of her cheek. Fortunately, the make-up she had on hid it from view.
"What's it like in the circus? I hear business is good this time of year" Ishmael had not in fact heard this, it just happened that it was easier to create a new conversation out of a potential lie than it was of the truth.
"Well, the train we were all on derailed just east of Cincinnati. All of the people were fine and most of the animals too. The only worrying part was that all of the lions managed to escape into a nearby forest. Last I heard they were seen roaming the streets of Cleveland on Thursday night." Corinthia seemed rather calm about the ordeal. "I left almost immediately following the accident, figured life's too short to keep postponing my trip to come see you." Corinthia had been attempting to make this trip happen for the past year, but the circus schedule was so busy that she never could.
"Well, it seems as if both of our lives have become quite interesting as of late." Both siblings had a light chuckle and then took swigs from the glasses of water that the restaurant had provided. It had a bit of a metallic taste to it, Ishmael thought. He had never thought about water taste in his life, so he was very excited to have made this observation.
The siblings continued to reconnect for a long while. They ended up in a sort of conversation competition where they attempted to determine whose life was sadder. If there had been judges to give a decision, the winner would be determined to be Corinthia by a landslide, as while Ishmael had squeezed a lot of terrible things into the course of the last 24 hours, Corinthias life had been an unspeakable tragedy the whole way through. Her past was scarred by pills, clowns, and a lack of parental affection, while his was an empty void of bland nothingness.
By the time their food came out, they had seemed to have exhausted any possible conversations a pair of estranged siblings could have together. They knew where each other lived, what types of vehicles they each drove, how they liked to have their hair styled, and their opinions on how they were raised. When they spoke on that last topic, Ishmael noticed a deep sadness in his sister's icy blue eyes. It was almost as if that child, the child who had been taken out of school so that her parents could make a fortune selling her image to strangers, was still buried somewhere inside. Or maybe she was her. Ishmael had attempted to move on from that conversation when he noticed just how deeply it affected his sister. To change the topic, he asked for opinion on the recent phenomena of oak trees popping up all over the western coast of Anchorage, Alaska. She gave a small response to his question.
"I dunno." Corinthia had shrunken down from the confident clown she had become and regressed back into the scared, tired child she once was. At that moment she just wished the food would come out so she wouldn't have to think about her life anymore and in a miraculous moment of luck that may have been the first she had ever experienced, a waiter appeared and placed a plate of delicious stuffed peppers, which she quickly began to eat.
Ishmael was not as quick to consume as his sister. He looked down at the messy burger that sat on his plate. He pondered just how miraculous it was that it had been able to be made. For every plant and creature used to make it to evolve so perfectly that they would lend themselves to create something so delicious. He also thought of how wild it was that humans had become such a dominant species that they were able to worry about what the food they ate tasted like.
Of course, this does not apply to everyone. Billions of people are barely able to get food on the table for themselves and their families, but Ishmael was not aware of this as he had just learned how to reflect inward and wasn't completely sure of what the outside world was like in its entirety. After fully considering the ramifications of the creation of a chili cheeseburger, he took a bite of the anti-communist patty and euphoria washed over him. The experience of tasting food was one that he found so good that it had caused him to get stuck in an almost trance-like state. For a moment in time, he achieved true peace, but that peace was annihilated the moment the scent of the fully loaded pork fries made contact with his nose. Moments after the scent registered to his brain, he found himself wolfing down as much food as his mouth.
What a site the two siblings were. Greedily shoving food into their mouths, it would've horrified an outside observer, yet they were both happy for a moment.
Sadly, as all moments do, this one came to an end. They finished their food and paid the bills. Both siblings were sad to say goodbye. They wished that life had taken them in directions that would've allowed them to be a tight knit family, but life often doesn't give people what they want. If it did, then Corinthia would not have latent sadness eating at her soul and Ishmael would have been put into the class for exceptionally smart children.