The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters by Timothy Schaffert Page B

and ate both pancakes before Lily woke.
    Lily sat up in bed. “What flew up out of the ditch?” she said, in a choked, waking voice.
    “It was a crane,” Mabel told Lily.
    “It was something worse than a crane,” Lily said, pulling at a sheet and covering her naked body up to her chin. Mabel thought Lily might be right; all the cranes had passed through weeks before, before it had even turned spring. Hundreds had died with ice in their feathers. Mabel had seen it on the news—a man lifting a frozen crane from a frozen tree, then tossing the carcass atop other carcasses in the back of a pickup truck. It broke Mabel’s heart even more to think of her crane in the ditch, having survived the ice only to get hit on her family’s Sunday morning drive.
    “I’m hungry,” Lily said, standing from the bed with her sheet still wrapped around her. She hid behind the closet door to change into a sundress with a daisy print. Lily had newly found this modesty, and Mabel was convinced she was only pretending. She just wanted to hurt Mabel, to hide her round, plump body away and leave Mabel alone with her terrible bones and sickly olive skin. The old farmers’ wives and widows frequently descended upon the house to weigh and measure Mabel. Though they never marked down any measurement, they were certain, with each visit, some fraction of a fraction of an inch had dissolved from her body. They examined her in her underwear. One old woman, who wore long skirts and always held a white stone pipe, constantly unlit, in her long fingers, would tap that pipe at the knobs of Mabel’s shoulders and elbows, sending a ringing down through all herbones. But Lily they pinched and adored, admiring of the way she moved indifferently about them all like a rowdy cherub.
    In the few months since their father had died, Lily had wanted to be close to Mabel. They had spoken that winter in a mock sign language, wiggling their fingers in the air and pretending to understand each other. They’d faked silent conversation at breakfast and at dinner, even outside in the cold, their fingers hidden by mittens. But now, with the spring thaw, Lily had changed.
I’ll only love you more
, she seemed to be saying,
if you don’t look at me, if you don’t speak to me, if you don’t touch me, if you don’t know me
.
    Mabel followed Lily into the hall, and down to their mother’s room. The door was closed and locked. Lily pressed her lips to the keyhole. “We’re hungry,” she said. Their mother spent much of her time sleeping in her bed. The only reason they’d gone out that Easter morning was because Pastor Lenny had been by a few days before. He’d told their mother that Mabel and Lily desperately needed the guidance of church. He’d spoken so loudly, his voice coming up from so deep in his throat and his chest, it had seemed he’d blow the whole house down with his prayer. If she and Lily were minister’s daughters, Mabel thought, they could steal a wafer and lick it. They could explore all the mysteries of the altar—take a sip from the baptismal font, blow out the everlasting flame and inhale its curl of smoke.
    “Come downstairs,” Mabel said. She felt guilty for eating Lily’s pancake. “I’ll find you something.”
    Downstairs, Lily sat at a table in a corner of the shop, andMabel went to the kitchen. The kitchen was nothing but a narrow closet lit by one faint bulb. Mabel looked into the refrigerator and found only uncooked ham wrapped in newspaper and a jar of apple rings. “She has to eat something,” Mabel said aloud, plucking the mold from a slice of bread, then opening a can of sardines found in a drawer.
    The table was still set for tea from the day before. In the teapot, tea bags steeped in black water and a horsefly did a dead-man’s float in someone’s half-empty cup. The day before, as usual, Lily had ignored the old women who gathered with their grandmother for bridge and stood on a chair with a key to wind all the clocks