This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2022 Spring Print.
Illustration by Watson Frank
In the summers before we grew up,
my brother and I were two halves
of the same face. Every July happened
in the library, the Walmart, or a lake.
To see the rest of the universe,
you needed to be in the car.
We loved hallways.
We especially loved red ice pops and unicorns,
and we went to so many summer camps we hated.
There was mandatory soccer
and the pools we shivered in bluely.
There was the girl with the broken doll that made him cry
and the counselor with a whistle
who made me draw a picture
of every rule I broke without knowing it
and I still see her in bad dreams.
We traded a dirty quarter back and forth
on the living room floor, scraping designs
into scratch tickets and we won a dollar
and eight cents once. We were gods.
We woke each other up in the morning
because the stairs were too tall and dark
to go down by yourself.
We played this game called Inside Sledding
until mom took the extra mattress away.
My brother and I hated the baby.
We liked spaghetti-os
and the sugar cookies from the bakery on the corner,
but only the first bite.
We took turns being mermaids in the lake
until dad said my brother was a merman only.
We trampled the flowers he planted in the garden,
all of them except the morning glories,
because those were our favorite.
Sylvi Stein (she/her) is a freshman in Columbia College. Her writing has been published by Beaver Magazine, Eunoia Review, Orotone Journal, and AYASKALA Magazine, among others. In her spare time, Sylvi can be found wandering the aisles of used book stores, even though she has more than enough to read at home.