She just cries and says she's thirsty for black current lemonade

And infatuation rushes through my veins, to my head, and it's really a poison, making me see red, then making me see black. (An unexplored part of the grayscale) I peel labels off generic soda bottles and roll the paper scraps between thumb and index finger until they become sprinklings of nothing. I pick at scabs until they scar me forever. I fight with my parents. Because they are parents. And they don't understand. Have they ever? Their dull lives, their dull marriage makes me reel with vertigo and retch with existential anxiety. If life holds nothing else, nothing more than what's contained in the nest they've created ...

I long for a fantasy union I know nothing about. Even less than what I do know about unicorns and the Loch Ness monster.

I have no idea what triggered this venom, what made it flow. But I am on a rollecoaster ride that leaves me mangled and quesy. And with a whiplash injury that makes me feel so old. Too old.

But not old enough to grab my sister by the hair. I don't care that she squeals like a piglet. I drag her to the bathroom, the one upstairs where the devil likes to hang out. I open the door and shove her inside. I hear a thud and a whimper. I close the door and sit down on the floor, leaning my whole body onto it. In preparation I've unscrewed the light bulb. So I know how dark it will be. And I know how much she fears the dark, how she sleeps with the light on. And if the monsters underneath her bed are too restless and too hungry, which they are on certain nights, she'll run down the hallway to mommy and daddy's bedroom and she'll lie down at their feet like a dog.

She's begging me from the other side of the door to please let her out. She'll buy me candy. She won't spy on my friends when they come over (but they never do anymore). She'll be the best little sister in the whole world. She'll let me cut her hair to practice becoming a hairdresser. She doesn't know I no longer plan to be a hairdresser. I no longer have any plans to become anything except a person with a life less ordinary.
She says it's really to dark in the bathroom and that it smells of poop from the drain and that the linoleum feels sticky underneath her thighs.

I tell her that the devil is in there, maybe behind the shower curtain.

She begs me; No. Please no.

I tell her that he's been looking for souls like hers; soiled souls. I ask if she's peed herself, if she's pooed herself.

She just cries and says she's thirsty for black current lemonade.

I don't hear the footsteps coming up those stairs, and then there's daddy, nearly ripping my arm out of its socket.

What the hell are you doing?

He opens the door and my sister leaps into his arms. Her cheeks are wet with tears and snot.

Maybe Juha really is the one for you, he says as he descends the stairs with my sobbing sister.

I'm gonna call the cops and report child abuse, you asshole, I screech. Then I go outside, onto the balcony, to smoke a cigarette.