rUPERT'S sISTER*

Rupert Thompson had a clubfoot and coal black hair. I was not invited to his tenth birthday party, as no such party was to occur, his father having spent his pay on horses and Tankary Gin. Rupert’s sister had wide spaced eyes and a pug nose and chewed elastic bands, her eyes squinty and vacant. Rupert’s father, slough in his newspaper chair drinking gin gimlets from a coffee cup, paid little notice of his daughter, preferring that she didn’t exist, was a figment of his wife’s imagination, an aberration. The first time I saw Rupert’s sister she was standing at the end of they’re hallway framed in a dark halo, her jaw working an elastic band furiously, a thread of spittle cupping her chin. I invited Rupert to my tenth birthday party and let him have the second piece of my cake; I gave the first to his sister.