Crunch.

I love that noise. I love the way pretzels sound when you crunch them. Or when you rub them together. Have you ever tried rubbing two pretzels together? If you do it long enough, you’ll end up with a pile of powdered pretzel.

My sister and I used to make pretzel powder and pretend it was fairy dust. Those days seem so long ago… That, of course, was before she died.

Her death came as quite a shock to everybody. She never told us about her heart condition. We never knew… never even considered that the reason for her ashen face was something more serious than being out of breath from a brisk walk…

Forgive me… I’m tripping over myself again. Damn it, why did God have to create humans with emotions?? If it wasn’t so fucking therapeutic… Well, that’s what my shrink tells me anyway. Frankly, I don’t believe a word of it.

So here I am, dressed in a black suit and a bowtie the color of moss on a rainy morning at the end of summer, mourning the death of my younger sister. It doesn’t feel real to me. It feels like another of my stories, another daydream. It’ll pass when the fog lifts from my eyes. It’s not real. None of this is real. The thousands of flower petals dusting the ground of the cemetery, the relatives and friends milling about awkwardly with nothing to say, the brown cat lurking near the fence. It has a slight limp… Sara used to limp like that on foggy mornings just like this one.

But whether the fog is real or just my eyes playing tricks again, I can’t tell. I lean casually against a gravestone, fingering a rose I plucked a while ago right out of Sissy’s coffin. Have you ever tasted roses? They’re almost as nice as powdered pretzels. I find myself nibbling absent-mindedly on a blood-colored petal. It tasted like sweet lettuce, exactly the way Sara always described it to me. God, I miss her. Now I’ve even started acting like her. Eating flowers, reminiscing, crying… Apparently it’s times like these when you can really tell who you’re related to. The walls come down and your true personality is revealed.

But I don’t like it. I shove the remaining bits of the torn flower into my pocket and shuffle away. My feet rustle through the wet grass. Nobody’s bothered to cut this grass in quite a while. No wonder… I wouldn’t bother cutting grass in a graveyard either. Who’s there to enjoy it but corpses anyway?

I can’t simply abandon the funeral like this. I can’t go back to my drafty, cramped hotel room yet. I can’t run away from the world and pretend Sissy and I are still young kids, like we were back in the days when we never fought and believed in fairies…

Fairies. I miss them, you know? Missing Sara is normal, but to miss something that doesn’t exist, that never existed to begin with… It tingles my spine just thinking about it. That, too, is strange. I’ve never had my spine tingled before. Maybe it’s the result of hanging around so many corpses, both living and dead.

I go inside the church. It’s a tastefully decorated place, complete with all the modern conveniences a half-mad mourner could want. There’s a snack machine on the second floor. I go there without thinking… or rather, without thinking about where I’m going. My feet lead the way, then my hands guide themselves to my wallet and pull out some change. Next thing I know, I’m opening a bag of pretzels.

How ironic. Pretzels. Pretzels and fairies and the corpse of my fucking lying bitch sister is outside. I hope she rots. I know she will.

Damnit, why did she lie to us? Why didn’t she tell us she was sick? DAMNIT, SARA, WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL US?!

I’m tired. The events of the day have worn me, probably beyond recognition. I flop down onto the stone steps outside the chapel and angrily tear open the bag of pretzels. I take one of them in my hand, snapping it in half as tears begin to form in my eyes. Shit… not again. I hate crying. It’s so demoralizing. I was always the brave one. Ever since mom and dad died when we were kids, I’ve had to be. For sis.

I rub the two bits of pretzel together. They still make the same wonderful scraping noise I remember from those endless games Sara and I played. I pull the abused rose out of my pocket and pull one petal from it… one that isn’t too creased and tattered. I set it on the stone floor, then pop the remaining flower into my mouth. Sara always said to eat flowers whole was to taste sin.

She was right.

I turn my attention back to the spot of perfumed blood on the floor: the petal. I hold the two pieces of pretzel above it and begin to rub them together. An ironic smile touches my face as tears spill down my cheeks, unheeded. I put every drop of my frustration into grating the entire bag of pretzels into a fine, powdery dust. By the time I run out of pretzels, I have moved the rose petal to the top of the plastic bag to hold all the crumbs.

I finally stop crying, too. That’s a bit of a relief. But now I’m sitting in the middle of the floor with a pile of pretzel fairy dust in front of me. God knows, and must have arranged it this way, why nobody’s come into the church in all this time. I don’t even know how long I’ve been sitting here. I look at my watch. It’s past the prearranged time set for people to be officially allowed to leave. Good. I won’t have to deal with as many walking corpses on my way out.

But there’s one thing I have to do before I go. It’s such a sudden and violent compulsion, I am startled by it. My face set and full of resolution, I take up the pile of pretzel dust and take it out into the graveyard.

Luck is with me. Everybody seems to have gone. I go to Sissy’s grave and kneel by it. To Hell with designer pants. I’ve ruined more expensive and irreplaceable things in my life. Sara, of course, is one of them.

I don’t want to think about the day she left, the day she packed a suitcase and set off on a flight across the country just to escape… Escape what? I never knew. Now, I never will.

Sara’s gravestone shines. A mist has begun to fall as the sky darkens in preparation for the night. I dig my hands into the dirt at the base of the stone. Soon I have a hole about 8 inches deep. I put some of the pretzel dust into it and cover it up again. I raise my hand to give the stone a final, tender caress, the way I used to run my hands through Sissy’s hair when she was alive. She had the most beautiful silvery-gold ringlets you’ll ever see – a sharp contrast to my eternally shaggy head of rusty copper hair.

I pick up the plastic bag with the rest of the pretzel dust and rose petal on top of it. This whole ordeal has become a divine ritual. I am a holy priest, taking the ashes of my childhood to be blessed and sent to Hell with the rest of my miserable soul. I feel more tears come to my eyes, but still I refuse to touch them, as if they are some vile acid sent from Satan to defile and mock my ceremony.

I go to the edge of the cemetery, which overlooks a sloping valley. The wind has picked up by now. It whips through my hair and tears at my clothing, like a goddess who is starving for my body as well as my soul. For once, she’ll have to wait. This is my final test – overcoming her temptation.

As I stand on the threshold of madness, I throw the pretzel dust into the air. It flies around in a cloud. For a moment, I think I see my sister’s face in the swirling particles. She smiles at me and disappears into the misty shadows down in the valley. The wind twirls around me, but the hungry goddess had gone away. Suddenly, I feel something against my face, I reach up to find the rose petal there. My mouth forms itself into a crooked half-smile. I wipe my tears away and walk back towards my car.

Good-bye, sis.