Listen to the author reading this story:
“Let’s pretend we’re sisters,” Sophie says. Sisters are closer than cousins, share secrets, swap clothes. She stares at me in my new bunny rabbit pyjamas and, for a second, I think she’s going to make me strip them off, even though her two years older body would stretch the bunnies out of shape. I cross my arms over my chest. She must see my thoughts because she laughs and says “As if I’d wear those babyish things.” Suddenly, I don’t love my new pyjamas anymore.
“Let’s share our darkest secrets,” Sophie says. She has lots. The sweets she steals from the Pick and Mix in Woolworths, filling her pockets with pink and white mice, fizzy cola bottles and cherry lips when nobody’s looking. The time she locked the neighbour’s cat in the garden shed and left it there for days, mewing and scratching at the door. The rude words she wrote on the board at school, letting a boy she hated take the blame.
“Your turn,” she says, and I shrug. My only secrets are the ones she makes me keep, the pinch marks on my arms that keep me cardiganed on hot days, the bruises on my shins, the pocket money that mysteriously disappears whenever she comes to play.
“Let’s pretend I’ve kidnapped you,” Sophie says. She ties my hands behind my back with the stripy scarf Gran knitted her, binds my feet with sparkly tights and sticks the brown tape you use on packages over my mouth. She must have planned this earlier, must have sneaked downstairs and sneaked it from the sideboard drawer.
“Don’t be stupid, it’s just a game,” she says, sneering at my nearly-tears. She sits cutting out the paper dolls on the back page of Bunty for ten minutes before untying me.
All night she spreadeagles on the bed we share, stealing my space.
In the morning, I pretend to be dead. Eyes closed, but not screwed up tight, I let my mouth hang open and my head fall to one side. Sophie lifts up my arm and, when she lets go, it thuds, deadweight. I start to enjoy myself. She pokes me with a pencil. I stay dead. She tickles the soles of my feet. I stay dead. She puts her hands in my armpits and pulls me into a sitting position. I loll my head back. Still dead.
Still dead when she says “Time to stop pretending,” Still dead when she screams “Stop it, you’re scaring me,” So dead that I almost start to believe it myself.
I stay dead as she whimpers like a trapped kitten, as I hear the slip slapping of her slippered feet on the stairs, taking the bad tidings to Auntie Margaret and Uncle Ken.
I am sitting up and smiling when they burst into the room.
“Don’t be stupid, it’s just a game,” I say. We’re cousins, Sophie and me, but close as sisters, sharing everything. Cut, it turns out, from exactly the same cloth.
Alison Wassell is a writer of flash and micro fiction from Merseyside UK. Her work has been published by Fictive Dream, SoFloPoJo, Does It Have Pockets, The Bridport Prize, Trash Cat Lit, Frazzled Lit, The Dissapointed Housewife, NFFD and elsewhere. She has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net.