Kinship Through Pharmacology

ACT 1.

I submerge my hand in a trash bag full of

pill bottles: all leftovers, all unused

All five fingers ripple in the translucence

This now as water:	Or something simple:
It's somewhere dirty. People say "impure." It's a reflection of ill, rather than health.	You're 8 and it's foggy for the first time this year. Your sister is just a shape two streetlights down.

The thing about translucency:

There's not enough clarity for

subjectivity. The form on the

other side becomes an object.

Between somewhere, light shifts

directions a million times over.

Losing features,

*de-finity

ACT 2.

Let me open this bottle and dive in. If I

take the top off I can now see without a

doubt where her hand once was.

Reaching for the same object-a dusty

film-leaving streak on both our

hands. Dashed white lane markers on

clawed fingers.

And the air in here is an unfiltered stale;

you jumped in a month ago and shut it

tight.

An air that's full

trapped for me to find

Can you feel someone this way?

This ritual.

ACT 3.

I feel just like her

Our blood, each an emulation of the

other. We share data and code-this

paired dance of feeling.

Here, at the bottom of the pill,

on the other side of the translucence,

I absorb what you were.

But to absorb is not the same as to

remember. To remember is to imagine.

To absorb is to hold; to materially retain

something that no longer exists.

*It's a form of preservation.

ACT 4.

My sister: a disappointed face when I

tell her I am taking the bag of

leftovers home with me

I'm far past the fear of her judgment on

this topic. Ethics will fade into reason,

diffusing until you can hardly see an

outline of its imposing form.

I hold the orange bottle up to my eye,

my sister shifts in its glow.

Ryan Riffenburgh is a writer and musician from California. His work has been published in The Big One, X-Ray, and Westwind Journal among others. He's studying at UCLA.