Free Fragile by Chris Katsaropoulos Page A

letting them go out on their own. As Zoe goes by, Holly notices something in her hand, the thing she was fiddling with on the floor.
    â€œWhat’s that?” she says, raising her arm weakly from under the blanket to gesture at it.
    Zoe keeps going to the kitchen but answers after a moment, her voice difficult to hear from behind the door of the cabinet where the snacks are kept. “Nothing,” she says, which means nothing important. “Something I found. At the old lady’s house.”
    Zoe comes back to the living room with a box of crackers, the kind that are shaped like fish.
    â€œLet me see,” Holly says, and she reaches her hand out to show her she wants it. Zoe stops and looks at Jenny, as if she’s asking for her sister’s permission. At times it seems as if Zoe has two mothers, as if Jenny has assumed the role of a second parent, filling the void, looking out for Zoe and doling out discipline in Holly’s absence, relishing the role of being the oldest. Jenny keeps staring at the screen, ignoring them both.
    Reluctantly, Zoe’s hand extends the object to her mother, drops it in Holly’s open palm.
    It hits her ring—the ring on her right hand—with a dull plink. It looks like a piece of broken of pottery, a white curved shard of ceramic slightly larger than Holly’s palm. She brings it close to her face and examines it, rotating it to view the jagged edges. It is roughly the shape of a triangle, curved, concave, the sunlight glancing off the shiny face of it. She brushes the ball of her thumb along one of the edges to feel the grainy texture, chalky almost, as opposed to the smooth milk-white face of it. One vertex of the triangle is particularly acute, a point so sharp it could cut.
    â€œWhere did you get this?”
    Zoe hovers close, eager to retrieve her treasure. “I found it,” she says again. “At the old lady’s house.”
    Yes, Holly thinks. I know that. She remembers now that Zoe already told her.
    â€œLooks like something broke.”
    Zoe glances over at Jenny again, and Jenny is staring at the fragment of porcelain now, watching intently.
    â€œGo on,” Holly says. “Tell me. Did you break something there?” Holly can see that something happened, something the girls don’t want her to know about. Then, an image flashes in her head and she knows exactly where this came from. She presses the issue.
    â€œI know what this is—I saw it when I was there. The vase from the dining room. The pitcher.”
    Jenny stands up now, rising to her sister’s defense, or ready to plead her case. But Zoe speaks first.
    â€œI did it,” she says, her voice tightening in anticipation of a punishment. “I was throwing a ball and it hit the pitcher and broke it.” Jenny is watching her closely, as if they have discussed this already, what they would say if their mother found out. “I was throwing the ball to Jenny and she missed and it hit the wall and broke it.”
    Jenny leans back a little and says, “The old lady was mad. We were surprised she didn’t tell you.”
    â€œNo, she didn’t. It was very late.”
    â€œShe was very mad at Grandpa Steve,” Zoe says. She looks at Jenny and realizes she has said too much.
    Holly sits up on the couch, raising her head too fast. She closes her eyes and lets the surge of pain crawl up the back of her skull from her neck. And riding along with the pain, flooding her head with the pain, is the smell of him, smell of fish and wet hay, followed by a rapid succession of images—scenes she must blot out—tactile sensations, tastes, a fullness inside her, all things she must twist and turn away. And other things. Her stepfather riding up to her on horseback on the three-acre farmwhere she spent her late childhood; beaming with pride as he rode towards the house on the colt he had just bought. It must have been only a few days after they