The park across the street was the stage for all our battles. Trumpet vine cascaded down the rock wall. Each flower was the decapitated head of an enemy soldier, spiked there to warn others to call off their invasion. But still they came, those stubborn, crazed soldiers, so Sabrina and I would pluck off snails suctioned to the wall and smash them underfoot. "So much for their high-tech armor!"

We were willing to absorb injury to defend our castle. Once Sabrina squashed a bumblebee in her fist. My mother, her step-mother, had to extract the stinger with a tweezer. "How'd you get stung on your hand, Bri?" Mom said, perplexed.

We spent hours fighting those outdoor battles to avoid the indoor ones, the shouting, the just-as-terrifying reconciliations, with the bedroom door closed. At eight and nine, we were already seasoned veterans. We knew what a dissolving marriage looked like, we'd lived those wars. We knew, moreover, that our own sibling status was contingent on the whims of adults, and revocable. No wonder we played Besieged King, no wonder we smashed those beautiful, whorled shells. We were mad; we sensed what was coming.

When her father finally packed up their car and drove away, Sabrina waved at me sadly from the back seat, her knapsack full of trumpet flowers.
Years later, when I tracked her down on Facebook—Sabrina Louise (she'd dropped her last name, dropped out of college, it took some hunting to find her)—I messaged her, "Do you remember those battles?"

"Which ones?" she messaged back, maybe seeing, as I did, her father's face crimson. "I still feel shitty about those snails." 

.

Kim Magowan's debut book of stories, UNDOING, won the Moon City Short Fiction Award. Her novel, THE LIGHT SOURCE, will be out this summer.

Detail of art on main page courtesy of Etienne.

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