The cow jumped over the moon, but when she landed it crushed her legs.

That was the version my sister told me, when I was only six. I had nightmares for weeks, but the idea of twisting storylines stuck with me. Years later, when I was an adult, it became my livelihood:

TwistedSister.com

No relation to the band. Every relation to my sister, Wendy, who died at seventeen, leaving me as the only daughter. In the aftermath, I could rewrite her history to anything I wanted to, and really I wanted to. Because I missed her. I missed her so much I needed to negate her by writing her out of my own life entirely.

We grew up in a standard family, but in my new history Wendy was born to parents in a traveling circus. She was the psychic who knew everyone’s deepest secrets. For her act she took the hand of an audience volunteer, then disclosed the information to the crowd:

You love auto-erotic asphyxiation. You do it on Tuesdays with the woman who’s not your wife.

The woman who is your wife looks up from digging in her purse. At first she thinks it’s a joke but then remembers something you said once, long ago—

People volunteer because Wendy’s act is billed as disclosing a long-lost object. Little do they know that object is frequently their moral compass.

But it was in this way that my sister was not only erased but also redeemed, to me, for losing her own moral compass. For loving a boy who was a criminal and a junkie.

For getting shot while shooting heroin, snorting the big white horse.

Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry,

Go to sleep, my little baby

When you wake, you shall have

All the pretty little horses—

Fuck you, Sis. You left me so now I fuck with other people. I do it at TwistedSister. They pay me to do it. Can you believe it? Can you?

 Fuck you.

                                                                                            ***

If you’re a person who wants my services, you have to use the form on the dark web website. There is no personal contact because it’s just too weird otherwise. And really, I don’t want to know you because you must be a freak if you’re coming to me. Nothing personal, but it’s true.

I’ll take your dead relative’s life and rewrite it to whatever you want, write the rap sheet they never had. Same name but I’ll give them a new history, a bad one: child molester, patricider—is that a word? It should be a word.

Matricide. Infanticide. Er.

Arsonist who targets nuns on a Sunday: the nunicider.

Just tell me what and I’ll do it. Really, I will. And if you can find some naked photos I’ll add those, too.

My parents, Wendy’s and my parents, they don’t know I do this. I studied finance in college. Now I have a ten million dollar condominium on Park Avenue. They think I pay the mortgage with a job at Goldman Sachs.

Mom, that’s what I want to say, Goldman Sachs is a bunch of assholes. Didn’t you see that movie? “The Big Short”?

We sit in my living room on the authentic Chippendale furniture and eat Cheetos from the bag.

“Don’t you mind all the honking?” my mother asks.

She’s a psychotherapist, the old fashioned sit-on-my-couch kind. Her fingers are bright orange from all the Orange #5. She looks right at me yet sees nothing.

“Mom, the windows are soundproof.”

I imagine her speaking with a patient: Tell me about your mother.

Mother tell me about your mother.

“Your sister wouldn’t have liked it,” she says.

 “Now honey,” says my father, “Wendy would have loved Manhattan.”

“God,” I say. I stand and take a bottle of vodka from the bar. “Don’t start with that Wendy-liking crap.”

“It’s not crap,” says my mother.

“You want a drink?” I look from one parent to the next.

“It’s only eleven.”

“Come off it, Dad. Have a drink or fuck off.”

They don’t visit so often anymore. What can I say? I send them ten thousand dollars every Christmas. They tell their friends I’m an executive.

When they’re dead I’ll give them new histories. Or not. I’m not sure yet.

                                                                                        ***

Dapples and greys, pintos and bays,

All the pretty little horses—

Wendy loved that song. In my mind’s eye, I see her sprawled on a filthy mattress on a filthy floor, staring at her lover, her shooter. Red blossoms on her filthy gossamer shirt as she starts to sing.

Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry

Go to sleep, my little baby.

He just snorted coke in the bathroom and wants to kill, kill, kill but then he stops.

Butterflies, at his eyes—

Another man comes in and shoots her through the head.

And that’s how she came back to us. Funeral with a closed coffin.

                                                                                     ***

Fuck all you dead relatives, for skipping out and leaving us here. If you were alive now you would still look good in an Internet search. Your alma mater wouldn’t retire your endowments, scratch your name from their list of esteemed donors.

People’s psychotherapist mothers wouldn’t use their annual ten thousand dollar Christmas gifts to fund trips to snake oil seminars on loss resolution.

The founder of TwistedSister.com, who is strong and independent and doesn’t take shit from anyone, wouldn’t stand shivering and alone on a wind-whipped winter night staring up at the big white paper moon that haunts her dreams.

At the moo-n.

Where a cow might leap and suffer subsequent hemiplegia.

The mooicider.

That’s what you were, Sis. That’s how it all started.

I hate you I love you, I’m tired, God I’m tired.

Sis, I have to work now but I’ll see you later.

 

                         

                                                       THE END