For a year I thought my sister had an eating disorder. Turns out that I was wrong.
This is how is started. Last autumn, my younger sibling just stopped eating. Gradually, at first, so that you wouldn’t notice unless you were paying attention, which I—three years older, and her brother, at that—decidedly was not.
Leda began by only half-finishing her meals, avoiding breakfast, then stumbled into the habit of conveniently forgetting her lunch when she set off for school, or else claimed that she’d buy something at the cafeteria, and never did.
When our Dad finally noticed the habit he started dropping her off at the school gates so that he could watch her carry her food into the premises— a pointless venture, seeing as she’d dump it in the nearest trashcan, or give it to another student as soon as she could.
I didn’t get involved, then, figuring that if Leda wanted to go on a diet, then it was none of my business. But she was never particularly heavy to begin with, and when the weight loss really got going I started to wonder how I might bring it up without sending us both into an orbit of embarrassment.
Eventually matters progressed to the point that the other kids at school started nudging each other in the corridor as she sauntered past, Leda oblivious, buried in her headphones, a hoodie perpetually half pulled down over her face. She was so gaunt by that point that I could probably have closed a hand around her thigh, and her cheeks had drawn in like some old folk art piece of a witch you’d see on someone’s stoop around Halloween.
Things had gotten bad at home, too. Every meal was strung with thunderous tension, ending either in screaming matches between Leda and my father over an untouched plate, or else excruciating silence, Dad and I trying not to watch as my sister pushed the same forkful of potatos around the edge of her plate.
The day I burst into the bathroom to find Leda spitting food into the toilet bowl was when I finally snapped.
“You’ve gotta do something, Dad,” I said, cornering him in his home office; I was irritated by his mumbled excuses, his bloodshot, avoidant eyes. “She’s gonna end up in the grippy sock ward if you don’t get her some help.”
I understood, grudgingly, the agonising position that my father was in. He’d wrangled every feminine issue from periods to the bra talk entirely alone, vanishing into his study afterwards with the expression of a man ready to put a noose around his neck and kick the chair from under him.
There were no female friends or relatives on call for such occasions; my mother had died of an aggressive bone cancer when I was ten, passing only a month after her diagnosis. She was gone so abruptly that it was like watching the epilogue of a documentary, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it captioned statement: ‘where are they now?’, black screen, end tape, too fast for any of us to feel our grief in its full gravity, or to prepare ourselves for the years of unrelenting misery to come.
Somehow Leda had always held onto her memories of Mom better than I had— “remember that time she drove us all the way to work before she realized we were still in the back of the car, and they let us stay in the office?”, or, “remember that time she came Trick-or-treating with us and ended up with more candy than we did because that one weird neighbour kept flirting with her, saying she looked like our big sister?”
All that I had left of our mother were the palest fragments, like how tall she was, or the sound of her guffawing laugh, the tattoo of a wolf on her arm she’d gotten when she was sixteen that I used to tell her looked cross-eyed, when really it was so faded that you couldn’t make out the face at all.
I guess Leda really needed Mom more, and that was why those recollections stuck. That, or I merely found it easier not to remember the best times of our lives because I knew that they would never come again.
Months passed, and Leda didn’t get any better, although she and my father had figured out some kind of understanding between them that he wouldn’t make her sit at the dinner table anymore. She skipped school a lot, hiding out in her room, or at the houses of a few other kids with problems that she’d fallen in with.
I could see Leda drifting further and further away into the sad and hungry thing that was taking her, and I didn’t realize how deeply it was getting to me until one day I went through a collage of old pictures of us together on my phone and burst into tears.
We were close, when we were kids, inventing all kinds of made-up games with a host of imaginary friends that each had their own names and back stories— even Mom and Dad used to play along, sometimes getting into it even more than we did.
It’s hard to say when that intimacy ended, whether it was the usual brother-and-sister-growing-apart phenomenon, or something more. Leda never stopped being the weird kid, and I ended up in a middling popular crowd; I’d been relieved that she kept to her own oddball friends, the nerds, the theatre kids, and the goths, a universe apart from me.
But looking at those old pictures before Leda got sick—apple-cheeked, throwing up peace signs and ‘rock on’ gestures in every frame—sent me into such realms of mourning that I thought I might never come out of it. I moped around for weeks, at a loss as to what to do with myself.
Then, on an otherwise banal Thursday evening, the cops came around, wanting to speak to my Dad and Leda, and after that my sadness unfolded into something else.
I remember hovering in the kitchen doorway, eavesdropping as an officer that looked like an aged-out surfing instructor asked questions in hushed tones about a day last October, before Leda’s illness began. My sister sat, staring at the gravel chips of her fleshness knees, glazed-eyed as a lobotomy patient, mumbling infrequent answers as my Dad twitched with a panicked, neurotic restlessness, his narrow, rattish features greasy with sweat.
“I had no idea about any of this,” he kept repeating, as the officer looked blandly unconvinced.
As it transpired, Leda wasn’t in any trouble: rather, the trouble had happened to her.
One afternoon, my sister had taken a shortcut home from school through the same sketchy scrub of forest that some of the kids at school called ‘Shitneyland’, rumoured to be a popular spot for drug dealers and those interested in outdoor sex. Being that it was still broad daylight, Leda hadn’t anticipated running into either guest, and like most teenagers was of the regrettable thinking that she’d turn up, unscathed, no matter her situation.
There had been a man there, acting strangely, as men hanging out in the woods are wont to do. Leda had kept up a brisk walk past him, and was almost out of the area when the stranger had put a hand on her shoulder, pulling her back into the trees, into the dark.
The details were as frank and as undecorated as that, their baldness as vicious as a slap. Apparently there had been some description given of the man, however, for he had recently been seen again in the area, and the police wanted to know if Leda could help with the investigation.
The worst thing about that living room talk was the absolute chaotic awkwardness of it all— my father, stuttering and blinking like he’d shot up sometime in the past half hour, our sheepdog Britney leaping around everyone’s legs, yapping in joyous obliviousness to the severity of the situation, Leda picking at the skin around her fingernails, staring through the floor, an unyielding mute.
If it had gone on another minute I would have screamed, I felt it in the trembling of my fists at my sides.
In the end, I burst out of the kitchen and ushered the officer from the house, glaring back over my shoulder as my father darted into his office with a bleakly comical velocity.
The minute the cop was out of the front door I went to sit by my sister on the couch, watching her tiny jaw tense against the interrogation she’d evidently sensed would come.
“Who the hell is this creepy fucking guy?” I asked, as gently as I could, given that I was trembling with rage. “I swear if I find him I’ll knock his fucking teeth down his throat.”
Leda glanced up, her vague eyes sharp with a sudden agitation. I’ll always remember how quickly they changed, the pupils eating the irises like dying stars, the blue gone to black.
“Don’t,” she said, firmly. “Just leave it alone, Johnny, alright?”
She looked frail, and feral, almost, her hands like little fox claws in her lap. Yet in some strange way I was scared of her, the way I remembered being frightened of my mother, in the end, screaming at the nurses to be allowed to die on her own terms as the cancer gnawed through her hollow bones. There’s a ferocity in people that are that close to death, an indignant anger at the degradation of mortal suffering that drives them mad.
I knew, looking at my sister then, how serious her illness was, and felt myself engulfed in such desperation that I sat for a long time in silence, aware of her vast, black, lunatic’s eyes upon me.
Then I got up and went to confront my father, an advent that had now become a grim routine.
“You’re a fucking asshole,” I snapped, kicking the wheels of his computer chair as he sat, wincing, with his back to me. “You knew what happened way before that cop turned up, right? And you didn’t do anything! You let things get this bad!”
“You don’t know what I’ve been doing,” my father protested, holding up his hands in submission. “Leda hasn’t got any worse recently; I’m trying everything I can.”
At that moment, I hated him, this thin mockery of an adult with his blotchy, balding scalp, all blundering anxiety, his flapping inability either to seek justice for my sister, or to help her eat. As far as I was concerned, my father had sat idle at his laptop as she had cliff-dived into wounded obsession, had perhaps been the reason Leda had taken that dangerous road home, lacking the parental steering that might have set her on another path.
“I’ll never forgive you for this,” I snarled, unmoved by the cringing servility in my father’s eyes. “And I bet Leda won’t either. You’re a shitty dad.”
I marched out of the room, slamming the door so hard against the wall that it dented the plaster.
That night I had the worst night’s sleep I’d known since I was ten years old, wanting my dead mother in the night. I dreamed of her, mainly, drifting snapshots of her smiling in a white bed that became flowers, that became earth, kissing me until my face came away like ash in her mouth.
Sometimes I dreamt of Leda, a little girl lost in fathomless trees, beckoned down to their roots by a figure I couldn’t quite see.
From time to time I’d jolt half-awake as though I’d tripped over an unseen step before plummeting back into another weird slumber, repeating the pattern so many times that I can’t be sure if I ever really woke up at all.
Another dream, again of my mother, tall as a drifting balloon, and just as weightless, tearing off the head of a beaming orderly with her teeth in silent slow motion. This image unsettled me in particular, something about the beatific nature of the killing, the detail of my mother’s face, clearer then to me than it had ever been in memory.
That time, when I awoke, I didn’t go back to sleep, getting out of bed with such haste that the blankets wound about my ankle and almost tripped me. Half-laughing at my dozy absence of co-ordination, I decided to make a trip to the bathroom, if only to splash my face and have a rousing word with myself in the mirror.
It was as I stepped out across the landing that I saw the door to Leda’s room was open, the space within, though dark, clearly empty.
Most likely she’d either gotten up to make herself secretly sick, or else snuck out to see one of her weird new friends; both had happened before, and I regretted not having tried to intervene. Running a hand through my tousled hair, I turned back to my room, intending to get dressed and head out in search of her.
Then I heard it: a low, throaty groan, a sound either sensual in nature, or of pain, or both at once; even then, I’d heard of such things, even stumbled upon them in my boyish ventures on the internet. It was coming from the direction of my father’s bedroom, and as a muttered, indistinct word followed I understood that he was not alone.
I stopped in the hallway, my gut a pit of sour consternation.
Dad hadn’t found another partner after my mother, was too chronically shy to attempt the dating world all over again. If there was another person in his room with him then it could only be my sister, and I knew that I could not in good faith leave her alone if one of them was unwell.
The other possibility of what she might be doing there nudged at me as I stepped towards the door, breathing its sickly warmth against the back of my neck. I did not let it in, my mind a careful blank as I wrapped my fist around the knob and peered into the room.
Two figures lay together in the semi-dark, colored only by the nauseous tungsten light of my father’s bedside lamp. My Dad lay across the mattress, white as a pig’s belly, and perspiring so heavily that the air was thick with his unwashed reek. Apart from a pair of sad, greying sleep shorts, his legs were bare, my sister crouched on all fours between them, her face pressed to his upper thigh.
Hair fell about her slender back in damp, filthy clumps, and as I watched her spine jerked and spasmed like a clay figure in a poorly done stop motion picture.
I fell sideways against the door, my balance capsized by bilious horror.
“What the fuck is this?”
“It’s not what you think, Jonathan!” my Dad protested, weakly, though not even attempting to rise from the bed towards me. “After what happened it’s the only way! I’ve been doing this for months; I tried to hide it. She asked me to. At first I said no, but I had to give in; I’m losing my mind, you’ve got to believe me—”
He pushed at Leda ineffectually, unable to dislodge her from his leg even with all his strength. It was only when I said my sister’s name that she looked up, her eyes drenched in the black of that afternoon, and I saw that her face wore a grin of blood, that her little feral hands were slick with it.
A vein in my Dad’s thigh was open, seeping its contents in a lazy stream upon the sheets.
“She’s been eating,” said my father, wearily. “In her own way, she’s been eating all along.”
The Morgue 