Sister Sonata

My sister turned herself into a jewelry tree at thirteen. Earrings, nose rings, brow rings, tongue ball, titty rings, navel rings. And scarring too. Deep purple galactic swirls across her stomach and back, and when the light hit them right they sparkled and rotated like hurricanes licking the Virgin Islands. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee became her favorite musicians ("my burden so heavy, I can't hardly see?"), replacing the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. "Sonny and Brownie are an institution," she'd say. "Poster children for the modern age." Then she'd crank it up and stop living.

Our parents couldn't take the stress of her change. Couldn't justify the body mutilations to the neighbors or the country club, and certainly could not take her newfound anger and disrespect. My father would ask me, "Paul, why is she so angry? What does she have to be angrier about than I did when I was her age? Why does she act like her generation is the first to suffer?" But I couldn't answer him, for I wondered the same thing.

Things came to loggerheads by her sixteenth birthday. Mother had bought her a new violin. Before her sudden metamorphosis, Sister had learned to play the violin (and well) to the accolades of our parents' envious friends. Mother hoped that the brand new instrument would, perhaps, bring her daughter back from her black funk, or at least keep her from putting another hole in her tongue. Sister took the violin, unstrung it, and punched a hole through its belly, then put her arm through it and wore it up by the shoulder like a badge of courage. She took the strings and wrapped them around her neck and paraded around like some asphyxia's wet dream. Mom lost it, broke down and sobbed so uncontrollably that I had to call 911. Dad smacked Sister across the room and threw her out.

That was fifteen years ago.

An emaciated drug-monkey with Elvis sideburns tried to give me clues. "Last time I saw her," he coughed, dragging on a holographic cigarette, "was a couple months ago at Eddies Data BBQ with some mutant friends of hers, licking net sauce off a dead pig's ribs, and spinning music out of her body like some goddamned symphony. Do you remember..."

He went on about a bottle of vodka he had bought for some underage kids, but I wasn't listening. Eddies Data BBQ, the finest virtual pork shop in the tri-state area. All the flavor without the fat. Some biotech guru from South Haven, Mississippi had come up with the idea. Take textured data matrices shaped into prime ribs and sauté them with the binary code of barbecue sauce recipes. Flavored Zeros and Ones. Delish! Trouble was, the taste of all that smoked data created pork junkies. People would eat nothing but that and die, eventually, of real starvation. Progress has its martyrs.

"...she's probably not there now, though," the drug-monkey chimed in again. "Sunday being the Sabbath and all."

"It's closed on Sundays?"

"No."

"Then, do you know where she might be?" I asked, putting her photo back in my pocket.

He shook his head. "If she's on the ground at all, or somewhere uploaded."

"Thank you," I said, and walked away., blending into the haze of the hot Memphis dog-day.

*****