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299 My oldest sister has a dark spot above her lip. It is black against the brown of her skin, and she carries her fear in her eyes. As for my second sister, she carries her fear in her stomach, hunching as she ages, her back curving as if in a storm of thick wind. My sisters were born in our mother’s youth and I in her middle age. Between us there passed many rainy seasons and children who died young, either in the womb, stillborn bloody and blue, or later on, falling from a high branch or lifted by the jaws of something terrible. I remember, in my earliest youth, gray dust frosted my sisters’ outlines against the stream before we all dipped our hands in and cleaned ourselves, cleaned each other, hair lacing through fingers and toes as we removed the fleas, nettles, filth. Our mother would part the hair at the center of our backs and lick at the dry skin to heal the itch that settled there. We’d shiver on the bank, dampened, and lean against each other for warmth—my small form between the two almost-grown forms of my sisters—until the sun could dry us. A few years after me, our mother bore the youngest child of her old age, a brother. She pushed aside the two oldest in order to care for the two youngest. My sisters left us then, for the clearings, quite a far distance from the rest of our group in the trees. I could see them from the high branches and I stole away to visit sometimes, to climb their bodies, to swing in the sun. Their hands felt like my mother’s: strong sinew of muscle in the fingers, large joint bones, smooth hair at the knuckles. And their smell was much like my mother’s: a fruit on Beginning Emily Taylor first place contest winner fiction 300 Ecotone: reimagining place the day of its greatest sweetness, before it spoils. They took me in their arms. They showed me how to find the roots in the earth that were good to eat. We share the same lithe muscular limbs, hair that runs from dark at the root to nut brown on the ends—angular faces with thick brows, smallish teeth, perfect shell-like ears at the sides of our heads. I touched their ears and sat with them in the clearing, and when they had their own children, I visited them to play with the babies. Then I’d go back to my mother and our family in the trees. I knew my mother could smell my sisters’ scents on me. She’d sniff deep, holding me against her when I returned. My brother would cry then, for her affection. Shortly after I learned to forage enough to feed myself, my mother died of bloated water in the leg. Pus and darkness poured out of the wounds. One morning we saw, in the dust, a trail of the dragged wounded leg where she had taken herself to the high river. She must have known that the stink of her sores was beginning to attract the hyenas , the big cats, the preying birds. Her smell had changed from sweet fruit to sour. Not rotten, but picked too soon. My brother shook in fear, in sadness, and I found a branch that would rock in the wind the same way our mother’s arms did. There we sat, clutching each other and feeling our mother leave us from the inside. We went to the high trees as the sun dipped into the canopy. I watched for movement in the clearing and saw my sisters there, finally, to the north of us. My brother reached for the hair of my back, the way he would with our mother, but I nudged him to the side, and we climbed down from the high branches to the lower ones, finally reaching the ground. The sun was gold at our feet. My brother rubbed at his eyes, tired from grief. We walked together, pushing aside green vines and thorns, hearing the peculiar sound of our feet crackling on dried plants. We...

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