Second Annual Wild Violet Writing Contest Winners (2004)
Fiction
— Third Place
Sara Beth Jonassen's short fiction has been published at Toasted-Cheese.com, Wild Violet and her short story "Biting the Peach" can be seen in the upcoming Spring Issue of Gertrude magazine. Currently, she is in the process of revising several short stories for manuscript compilation, and completing a first draft futuristic novel with an elderly heroine. Further short fiction and novel excerpts can be viewed at her web page, SBJonassen.com.
What
it Might Mean
By Sara Beth Jonassen
“Which color?” my big sister, Joanna, asks, pointing at a bunch of hair-ties hanging from the canvas draped over the booth. They have two puffs each, like mini pompoms, affixed to the elastic. Clumped together. A variety of colors, like gumballs pressed together inside the dispenser.
I say red or black and Joanna looks at me with an expression of ridicule, her lips pressed, her eyes squinty. “Really,” she says like a statement, then points a finger. “Cuz see, I was looking at the hot pink.”
I am immediately aware of my error. Of course, hot pink, no debate on the matter. It’s just that I would never wear a color that flashy, the way Joanna would, and I guess that’s what big sisters can teach you. To be a brassy, beautiful woman in whatever fashion you choose.
Joanna then, twirling the hot pink mini pompoms on her finger, asks, “Would I ever wear it though?”
We are strolling through the booths of the street fair on Second Avenue, beneath a dreary gray sky (that appears to be withholding a tremendous amount of rain) after Joanna’s final performance in The Tempest. I look at my big sister, fingering through piles of hair clips, hairpins, headbands and bandanas, her large body sweaty and sparkling still from stage makeup. And me, sweaty and sparkling still (deep inside) from the power of her performance. Her Ceres.
The air above Second Avenue is charred and smoky, like the whole city is on fire. A thin guy manning a grill turns over a turkey leg with steel prongs, sending another wave of mouthwatering aroma up in grayish smoke. Those partaking in the true spirit of the street fair are Latino; they swagger down Second Avenue with their hands clutching long, curvy tumblers of margaritas and piña colodas, their baseball caps on backwards, the throbbing of music reverberating in their sinuous hips.
“You should get one of those big-assed piña coladas,” Joanna says. “You look like you could use it.”
“Seriously.”
“Well, then?”
“I don’t know.”
There is so much that I want to say to my sister now, after her last Sunday matinee, but there are no words for it. I feel breathless, deflated, to have left the spell of her performance, to have returned to the real world, where fairies and goddesses don’t materialize out of thin air to bring joy and abundance, to seduce boatswain and ship master, placing them under their erotic, womanly spells. I feel depressed. Not because Joanna is pointing out a headband topped with dwarfish dolls wearing tiny straw hats. But because, out here on the avenue, Joanna is full of sorrow that I can’t touch. Because she isn’t Ceres anymore, isn’t radiant with beauty, power, and magnitude. She seems small and downtrodden again, that’s all, and I’ve known her differently for the past three hours, inside that darkened theater.
“How much?” Joanna asks, pointing into a basket of fruity-looking hair ties. The skinny woman behind the hair accessory booth stoops over, tells my sister the price: $1. Joanna lifts the best one from the basket. I want one, too, but my hair is short. It has a pair of fabric cherries sewn into it. She also likes the hot pink one, like miniature pompoms, and I can already imagine them tied-up in her kinky-thick, barley-colored hair.
She is 31,
my older sister Joanna, and I am 26 — but she will always be the
18-year old to my 13-year old awe and envy. She is a great big woman who
doesn’t recognize her beauty and power. Like Ceres. Or like
our mother. With large, fleshy arms that encircled us like pillows. And
the magnitude to become the thing we feared most.
