Qui tacet consentire videtur. Silence gives consent.
Veritas odium parit. Truth creates hatred.
Willow flower
You know how you can know some thingsbut forget you know until it’s time to remember.Mom met her third husband Billy whenshe was a teacher helping convicts get their GEDs,and he was incarcerated at that prison.When he was paroled, they wed in the backyardwith the petunias. Plighted their troth,as they said, while I sang a song, lyricsfrom the Song of Solomon. And theninto the house with my actual sister, who at fourteenwas skinny as a willow in flower.Eight years older, I was far away, gone, useless,just the three of them in that house.Billy had looks and strength, a crewcut and a drawl.And my sister was a teenage votress of chaste Diana,goddess of a whole moon of not wanting it.Billy chased her, and as in all the old stories, she ran.But my sister constant, she constantly didn’t wanthis goat breath on her neck. She’d rather dieand after that she would try, several times.Later, Billy said it didn’t happen (a thing the godsalways say), and Mom said it happenedmy sister should have run faster or changed into a tree.Later, Mom said she never said this, would neversay such a thing, said they were both drinking,said she didn’t know, said about herself that she wasa terrible, terrible mother, inviting us to contradict her.My sister didn’t tell me for twenty years. I didn’t know.That year I had been at a seminary (for fuck’s sake),chaste votary of pale Jesus, while my sister ran away,lived on the street, and I didn’t know, didn’t hearwhen Mom and Billy broke up. And when he wentback to prison for holding up a Circle K I wasmopping the marble chapel and studying Latin,