We paint the walls red

Jill Jepson

“Do you need a moment?” she says. “Do you need a moment? I’ll give you a moment.” She hangs up. I hear a dial tone.

John and I are painting the living room red. The walls are like a bordello. Spatters on the floor, a murder scene. It was supposed to be cheerful, but it is only lurid. We laugh at the walls, at the fiasco of the red. When is anything the way you imagined?

We wash our hands in the sink, the water red, then pink. The phone rings. I am still wiping red from my hands as I answer.    

Her voice is so familiar, so like mine. My mother couldn’t tell us apart on the phone.

“Jan or Jill?” she would say. Only two years apart in age, but different in every way except the ways we are the same. Different souls in similar bodies.

I hear it in her voice, that voice like mine. A chasm splits the earth. The joints of the universe break.

She says, “I’ll give you a moment.”

I stumble away away from the phone, from the voice, from the words. Then I am sitting on the stair and John is there, begging me to tell him why I can’t breathe.

I don’t answer. I am not there. I am spiraling off into a galaxy lightyears away from the red walls. I am an asteroid spinning in the silence of space. The space before the words. Before the words are true.  She has given me a moment, she who has no moments to spare.

He pulls me back with his arms and his voice, back into the solid world, the world of walls and words.  

“My sister,” I say. “My sister.”

They give her four months. Six if she is lucky. A year, not without a miracle. They give her a moment.

“My sister,” I say.

I remember: we were painting the walls red. Before the phone rang, we were laughing.

The author and her sister.

Jill Jepson is the author of two books, Writing as a Sacred Path (Ten Speed Press 2008) and Women’s Concerns:Twelve Women Entrepreneurs of the 18th and 19th Centuries (Peter Lang 2009) and 65 stories and essays. Her work has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, Arizona Highways, Aloha Magazine, and numerous literary journals. She lives in Ravenna, Italy, with her husband.