My stomach wants to launch through the train’s window, plop all belly beneath green cathedral clouds smearing over the river. Join me! Says pitless water. Tish listens to music through wireless headphones. I ask her if she also feels motion sickness, but she doesn’t hear me. Two sisters from opposite ends of the country sitting backward on a train.

I press my forehead against the seat in front of me. I focus on being stationary. Focus by looking at my knees, pink and naked. A mole, the small hairs missed while shaving, the crisscrossing grooves. A scar from sliding into home base. Sunspots. I focus on the skin’s texture, so similar to the earth in the desert where Tish and I grew up, where I still live. In the desert, green is yellow. Sprawling shopping centers in rainbow waves of gasoline. An aluminum mirage. At night, tiny lights indicate homes in gaseous interspace.

The veins scribbled across my skull contract, startling me. Saliva pooling, a telling sign that I’ll soon be sick. Oh god, I think, I’ll never take my body for granted again. Just make it go away. People think like this when they’re ill, but forget when they’re healthy. I try to concentrate: stationary skin, stationary organs. But I can’t keep hold of my knees, my skin, the mole, scars, tiny hairs, texture; can’t feel the train slowing.

Hey.

Tish’s hand is warm on my spine.

This is us, she says.

What?

We’re here. This is where we get off.

Green beads wet routes across my collarbone. Green melts my teeth as I down a bottle of cold water from the platform’s vending machine. The train’s motion pulls at my feet as it departs and we head toward the little town for our day-trip.

Light bulb-sized bumblebees mining pollen tubes. Trees sawing off the tips of voices. Up the steep hill we wander, noting colonial buildings—some monochrome and trendy, others signaling age in abundant sweaty vines. The air is husky.

For lunch we eat dry burgers in a tavern. The sweet potato fries are exceptional. Tish talks about her lover: a man studying architecture in Manhattan. He wants an open relationship. Tish struggles to have an open mind. She wants monogamy, but feels in certain circles, the choice has become old-fashioned, and Tish doesn’t want to be old-fashioned.

Why this guy?

I already told you, Tish says.

Oh, I mean—are you sure he’s worth these feelings.

Tish talks first about compromise and then about dating apps. Though I appear to be focusing, I‘m not. I try to attach to the conversation, nodding, but my mind just drifts. I should care more. I should care that my sister is frustrated in her relationship. That Tish, who has always been the strongest person I know, could be unhappy. Tish, who moved across the country, far from everything and everyone she knew, could be doubting herself. But my brain hears mostly static, the stuff of my body working to maintain some sort of human shape.

My stomach mashing neon-orange fries. My throat coated in chili powder. Organs and squishy sacs keeping me alive with a mind of their own. My insides, auto-pilot. My heartbeat, just a thing. I’m always listening through a sense of distance. I smile and nod, That’s so hard, I say, mechanical and dumb.

Tish stabs a cardboard piece of meat. I decide to change the subject.

Do a lot of people move here from the city?

No. There’s nothing to do, Tish says.

The closeness to nature is nice.

People don’t move here by choice.

I look out the tavern window: perspiring forest, green ready to burst. I guess it would be nice to live here, I say. It’s pretty.

It is very pretty.

Yeah, I say, and then a loud silence grows from my mouth.

It sounds like you’re saying something just to say something.

What do you mean?

You sound so bored, she says.

Ketchup has darkened on my plate.

Tish sighs, says, I just wish—like, if you think this town is nice, say it with some enthusiasm. Say anything with some enthusiasm.

Tish is younger by three years. I think, Oh, so you’re Miss Perfect? You’re not happy with the relationship you’re in? Change it. Tell him what you want. Let me hear the confidence in your voice: WE WANT DIFFERENT THINGS.

But I don’t say any of that. I just feel shame as if I am a child being corrected by an adult.

Never mind. I’m sorry I said anything, Tish says.

Don’t be, I say. And then I try to sound like I mean it, like I believe it, I believe myself: I am having a lot of fun.

After lunch we walk down the main street and discover a bookstore, and it’s here where I feel the earth move backward. Light swallowing dark ripples. My body shivering densely like jello.

Unchanged, Tish looks at the faces of books. The shop-keeper, undisturbed, writes notes in a ledger.

This isn’t California. Earthquakes don’t happen in upstate New York, I’m pretty sure. Geography, varied as color, stretches here to there. Home, three hours in the past. Gossamer vision, untangling myself from the ground. I try to steady, but the motion sickness rears brightly and I panic.

I think I’m going to faint, I say.

What? Tish says.

Faint.

Take a deep breath, Tish says, standing feet apart. She says, It’s probably just from riding the train. Whenever I come up here with friends, someone always gets queasy.

I dig my nails into a wooden display table. My stomach moving hip to hip, then up, exploring my chest. Trying to break open. I concentrate on being still, again, my knees, the hairs, the mole, the scars, my skin—tiny cracks and ridges. This porous organ that follows the shape of other things: bones, muscles, air, static, stuffing.

Tish has me sit on a step stool. I put my head between my legs, breathing deeply. When I resurface, I catch Tish rolling her eyes.

What’s wrong? I ask.

It’s just that it’s always something, Tish says.

Last summer, we had meant to celebrate the 4th with a picnic at the beach. But I had awoken to find my head split in two.

I’m sorry. I don’t want to ruin the fun, I say.

Steadying myself, I walk back and forth a few times. I want to connect.

I think moving helps, I say.

A large warehouse full of mirrors. Embossed gilding, surfaced rust. Choir of light bouncing off panes, turning all things translucent, even our bodies. Mine is more compact than I could have imagined.

Then we find another antique shop, this one painted with the scent of dark minerality. We browse old cameras and piles of records. Colored glass kitchen sets. Clip-on earrings. Victorian medicine jars, when medicine was about expelling. Laxatives for chickenpox. Turpentine for constipation. Cocaine for alcoholism. Arsenic for anemia. I remember reading once that arsenic was also used to dye dresses green. On winter nights, ladies gathered close to the fireplace. Fat wicks, bodies. Bursting into green flame, so sudden the pain, their last thought: oh god, make it stop and I’ll never take this body for granted again.

I would have done the same. Arsenic to rid me of myself. Turpentine to rid me of myself. Fight pain with pain. The more it hurts, the better the cure.

In a corner, a petal of light illumes a painting of a desert. I forget the combustible women, float toward the familiar landscape and check its back. 1902. So distant from conception. Shelved in silence, discovered by strangers on random afternoons. Its purpose, being found. Standing back, I study it.

Deserts are naked. They are shoulders and rib cages and knees. In the desert, each growth takes itself seriously because it must. But in this town, in this forest, plants grow voraciously. Here, the word paradise emerges, but only because people think of paradise as an abundant place.

Outside, wildflowers have doubled in size. Sunflower faces bloated by seed, mutated. Pods of tumorous cells. And bumblebees, now the size of my stomach, droning around like toy helicopters. Tish wants ice cream. We walk toward the river to a famous parlor. I’m still measuring my breath, focusing on feeling still while moving.

As we approach the river, the water’s movement surges in my ears. The sound is all-consuming—every pitch a different bone in the cadence. The river moves with ferocity, so natural that it appears unnatural, rushing gallon into gallon toward its mouth, the continent expelling. I can feel the river’s throat.

I’m going to be sick.

You don’t have to get ice cream, Tish says.

That’s not what I mean.

I sit on a bench. I want to wring myself of sweat and blood, any part vulnerable to movement.

I don’t think I can get back on the train, I say.

Tish watches the river chop at the horizon for a long time, then says, We can spend the night if that’s what you need.

I don’t think I have a choice, I say.

Tish sighs.

I can’t get back on the train.

Tish looks at me, but not at my eyes. She looks at my forehead, or inside of me.

It doesn’t help when you look disappointed, I add.

I can be disappointed and that doesn’t have to mean it’s your fault.

Once, there were two sisters close in age who looked alike, who spoke alike, who lived in the same place, the same house. Two sisters who had the same sense of humor, who shared toys, made-up languages, invented new worlds, who would run into the kitchen at the end of the day, feet stained by the yard, months tangled in their hair.

But even then, when we were connected at the hip, Tish was the powerful one. Tish was outgoing and full of energy. Tish made up the rules, invented the voices in our worlds. And I loved it. I loved watching her mind race, imagination explosive and addicting. And maybe Tish is right—maybe it isn’t her fault that I’m not that sister. Maybe it’s not even my fault that I’m the opposite, if opposites must exist through differences. Maybe I need someone to invent the world. Maybe the ones with an imagination need people like me.

Has the medication been helping? Tish asks, voice soft.

I’m looking at my hands, my skin, freckles, grooves, knuckles, scars, veins. For a moment, I forget my sister’s question and imagine that each striation in my skin is a tributary. I imagine that we grew up here in this different place and the games we once played were rooted in the river’s presence, like Tish had been the Queen of Cattails, had commanded armies of eels. Like we’d built a log fortress and had worn gowns sewn of leaves as wide as our faces. We would have been the same children, but in a different place, which is a way of imagining that I would have grown up to be a different person. Tish blazing her way, moving, always moving, and me, happily, blazing my own.

Ellie?

What?

I asked you if the medication has been helping.

Oh, I think so. Though, apparently antidepressants don’t help with motion sickness.

Tish smiles, and I smile, and I feel a little lighter, emptier in a good way, and soon our heads are tilted up, throats talking to the trees.

The wallpaper matches the bedspread at a Bed and Breakfast. In the morning, we wake to a blue jay peering through our window. We take a walk in the park. The lawn steaming. We wander toward the train station, but my body quivers, stomach twisting away.

I shake my head. Not yet.

And so, we spend another night.

Orange peel scones for breakfast. Morning birds inventing sound. I try again, but the motion sickness wins. We spend another night, and then many more.

Sitting in the grass, waiting for the full moon on Tish’s last night. The sun wearing a lilac shroud retires, and the sky floats away. We watch the moon swell from ghost to fleshy giant, so large the light burns our foreheads and noses. We’re levitating on the grass’s coolness. In the morning, Tish leaves. I watch her part the day without even a ripple. I watch without control of another’s movement, but with a longing to follow her where she goes and to stay where she is and to be more like her, and at the same time, wanting none of that.

Weeks are dominos, and suddenly I’m so familiar with the town, I sometimes forget where I came from. I frequent the apothecary and purchase chia seed oil for my eyelashes and marshmallow root crème for my budding wrinkles. I like to browse the little book store and I grow an affinity for nonfiction, which I had had little interest in before. I read about the importance of eating dark vegetables. I read the biographies of great women and explore different religions of the world.

Sometimes I walk to the train station at the bottom of the hill. But the closer I am to the train, the more severe the sickness becomes. It’s hard to believe that after several weeks, months now, the sensation has still not left my body. After more time passes, I decide to stop walking to the station. And I stop walking to the river, and I stay within the soft wooded space between.

Eventually, I find an apartment, an annex above the tavern that overlooks forest. When my savings dwindle, the apothecary hires me. I learn about skin and plumping agents, exfoliants, emollients, extracting essential oils from plants, and look forward to the moments when I can demonstrate a body scrub on a client’s hands in the large porcelain bowl at the center of the shop. I cradle their hands in mine, glide my fingers between their hard bones, the skeletal form more pronounced when flesh is wet.

Months cycle. Green hibernates, and the trees glisten yellow, then darken orange, and then shed, dying of redness. Snow arrives, smoothing the fettered lines of wilderness. White moths collecting in the hallway between my room and the tavern entrance. White steam dancing on the street. Animal bones emerging from slush.

Spring ripens. Bumblebees shooting about with sparrows. Flowers thrusting from teeming soil. Everything begins again with vigor as if it’s forgotten that the cycle has been lived before.

Do they know? What if they knew? If any of them knew—the white oak, red maple, pale jewelweed opening its arms, wild cucumber acrid and minty, fluorescent carrots, sweet garlic pearls, tangled daisies, dawn-colored chicory, silky dogwood, fat swamp roses, or little mud crabs who feel safe when they are buried, sensitive catfish in lightless odyssey, muscular birds of prey, ghostly Gypsy moths, cicadas, Jurassic dragonflies, iridescent beetles, mushrooms, moss, worms, flesh-flies, parasites, spores—if any of them understood the effort required time and time again just to be, would they continue?

There are moments when I’m walking around town and I find myself heading to the painting of the desert. Or I’m already outside the antique shop. Or I’m already walking through the shop’s aisles of miscellanea.

One day, someone purchased it, took it home to hang in their guest bathroom or foyer or designated reading nook. I never saw the painting again. Someone looked at the sand and sun with their yellows and tans and pinks, and felt warm. They looked at the straight horizon void of distance like a tight-rope stretched across the scene. They walked it. They watched a sunset in another part of the world.

Kayla Eason is the author of Mia (Orson's Publishing, 2020). Her work is forthcoming or has appeared most recently in The Rumpus, The Real Story, giallo lit, and Parentheses Journal, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction, from San Francisco State University. Find her other writing and visual work at kaylaeason.com.

Matt Bristol (Of the Earth III, black and white negative) is a master’s candidate in the Food Systems Program at the University of Vermont. He recently self-published two narrative photographic essays while teaching in Colorado. He likes to hide his work in free libraries and bookstores.

This story was originally published in Salt Hill 45.