Homecoming

The morning Sara steals for Honduras from Houston with the benefit of English, a brown thrasher, more oatmeal than boulder, darts through the briar like a startled fish, snouting about the thick thorny thicket for beakable blackberries knowing there’s none. A small rain. The slow sound of a spigot that spritzes palms open to cleansing runs down the broken-white-brick where the littlest of my two little sisters takes her life far from the bonnets rolling blue through Texas. If three years pass, she might return as a wife, mother, source of pride - but certainly this: the same stupid sister no brother could miss.