Careless Fantasy

Giggling carelessness. The playful attitude of children. It bounced off the bright tiled walls, the echoes of our too-loud, too-extreme ideas. But gravity always wins, they say, and with one tug of a shower curtain, all our fantastical fun slipped to the ground. I could do nothing but watch as the shower rod, curtain, and all fell down upon my precious little sister, destroying our fun, our fantasies. Her foot slipped from the lack of support we thought flimsy inanimate objects would offer, and her chin collided with the hard acrylic lip of the bathtub, splitting it in a way skin should not split.

And it was my fault.

We were just kids, playing as kids do, climbing with our bare toes on the raised surfaces a bathroom offered us, basking in the bright lights above, making fun of our own reflections in the large mirror. Nothing was dangerous; nothing was off-limits. If you spilled something, the tile floor was sure to reject the liquid from its nonporous surface, and could be easily cleaned up by the limitless supply of towels all around us, hanging from every sort of hook the blue bathroom had to offer. And, best of all, nothing was breakable. No risks. We were free to do as we wished, the only limits our imagination unbounded by rules and adults.
We were full of ideas, of things we wanted to try, experiments we wanted to enact. What would happen if we were to do this? I don't know where exactly the idea came from; perhaps from the deep pool of irrational urges that seems to actively exist within me. A simple prank. For laughs, kicks, and giggles.

Hey, I said, a conspiratorial smile on my face, you should stand on the edge of the bathtub. Test your balance.

Oblivious obedient sister that I had, she did as she was told, standing up on the rectangular edge of the bathtub, her little toes curling over the edge of the ledge.

Then I pushed her.

She slipped, but not in a way that she could catch herself from. Her body twisted, fingers grasping onto anything to stop her from falling, scrunching the plastic material of the shower curtain inbetween her desperate fingers. The shower curtain rod that was suspended between the walls of the shower with nothing but springs gave way beneath the force of my sister's weight and falling momentum. It all came down on her as her chin connected with the edge of the bathtub.

This was not the way it was supposed to go. There was supposed to be much less falling, more laughing, and no pain at all. I rushed over to my sister, pulling the shower curtain off her, dumping it into the empty dry bathtub, asking if she was okay, guilt and dread pooling in my stomach.

There was a cut in her chin, but not a normal kind of cut that you just cover up with a bandaid and hope the neosporin does its job and heals it up by the time the bandaid falls off. It looked like something had split her chin like an axe splits wood. Not an easy fix. Something that requires the help and expertise of an adult. Which, of course, always involves explaining how exactly you were irresponsible, which rules you broke and how and why and make sure it doesn't happen again.

We went to our mother, showed her my sister's chin, told her that she fell. It was serious, she told us, and found a mystical butterfly bandaid to hold my sister's chin together while she bustled off to take care of adult details. It was the first time I'd ever heard of or seen a butterfly bandaid...it had a pretty pink patterned design and looked kind of like a stretched out butterfly. But I was paying less attention to the bandaid covering the wound and more of the wound, and what caused it. Or, who.

Our entire family ended up driving to the emergency room, where my sister disappeared with doctors behind curtains in a place I cannot go, leaving me to linger in the waiting room with the rest of my family. There was a playset, there for the purpose of entertaining children's idle fingers and bored mind with its puzzles and patterns. I traced over it with my mind and my fingers, thinking only of my sister and the injury I'd caused her, one that no one seemed to blame on me. No one knew the truth. It was my fault that my sister was going to have to get stitches, that her chin had been burst in two.

My baby brother slept, my mother waited, my father chatted with the doctors. I sat and stared, tired and silent. It was getting later and later, and I began wondering when we could leave this place, go home where things weren't made all wrong by my careless motion. Go to my safe bed. Sleep. Forget. Regret.

Fortunately, my sister ended up not getting stitches. They had this special type of glue that was able to glue her chin back together without ever having to press a needle and thread through the tissue of her skin. She was lucky, they said, and we all marveled at how technology advanced so nicely, and how my sister wasn't going to have any noticeable mark of this accident.

We all went home and went to bed, my heart still sorry for pushing my sister off that ledge. For pushing our fantasies too far, straight into reality.