faint lines of distinction

            It's nine in the morning and my sister Dani is on her fourth cigarette. She's a breakfast smoker; she frontloads the nicotine, she says, so that it lasts until lunch, when she's stable enough to get out the mirror and do lines. I tell her nicotine doesn't work like that. She flits her hand at me, the summer gnat.

            We've got the mini-dish TV setup and she watches an obscure style channel. Women roll down the runway, pivot and turn back, roll down and back, down and back. Dani, transfixed, dribbles smoke out her nose.

            "Oh." Dani says. Disdain. "Liz Beth. Liz Beth."

            Liz Beth. Liz Beth Taubin. Elizabeth Bethany Tarabinski, crimped and curled. Her look is the look after the one that replaced my sister, which is to say it is a return to form; essentially it is my sister's look, or was her look, although it looks better on Liz Beth than it did my sister.

Dani was too alien. Everybody agreed. Although too alien was it for a while. She went all over, wherever they have an acre of windswept town square planted in the middle of a foreign city. She's as exciting a person now as she was then.

            "Bird!" Dani says, dragging hard. "Fucking Birrrrrrrd!

            Liz Beth.

            Here is what I'm asked by people who learn of her relation to me:

Is it hard not to sneak a peek? To maybe think of her during my most inward, sexually inspired moments, when I am at a loss for another girl?

To which I think:

As in right now, as she sprawls out in panties across the sofa, a cigarette ash suspended between the designer label and her ass crack, her hair wrapped up in chopsticks, her finger wet with a wake-up shot of blow?

No.

"We should kill her," Dani says. A butterscotch Dum-Dum, not a smoke, now muffles her sound. I nod from the kitchen and watch my morning ramen noodles boil.

"You understand I'm serious," Dani says. "I have the money to hire somebody."

"Those China figurines are worth millions alone," I say, pointing to a rack above on the wall.

"Those things are worthless. Jorge, like, gave me those as his rent payment.'

"And what did Jorge get for that?"

"A far too proper burial in Westchester County."

"What he gets for fucking with you."

"Hey," Dani says, thrusting her wet, white pinky high to wiggle, "it'll get ya."