When you die, I become obsessed with recreating you. I walk endlessly through our town, to notable places in your life. I go to our old school where you were bullied relentlessly by girls who were skinnier and smaller than you because unlike me, you refused to be quiet and accept their ridicule. I go to the stationery store where you would buy those glitter pens that leaked on everything and gave you purple patches on the pocket of your school uniform shirt, to the mailbox where you used to mail the letters you used to write to your pen-pal in the prison program, to the gas station bathroom where you told me you once shit without touching your butt to the seat but then your shit bounced so hard into the bowl it splattered dirty gas station toilet water all over your ass. I stroll to the playground where you blew a boy in front of me as he sat on the swing and you knelt on the sand under him; to your old house where you said you touched a penis for the first time when your father made you touch his.

You are my sister, you said once when I was six and you were five-and-a-half and I rolled my eyes, ever the skeptic, always trying to assert myself as the smarter one. No silly, we’re not related by blood, I said. Your face fell and I watched your cheeks crumple in that familiar way that I knew portended a loud storm of tears, so I quickly retreated. Fine, fine, we can be sisters, I said, and you were happy, and the sun crept back into your eyes.

Every day I walk to a new spot and try to remember you, but it’s been getting harder. As the number of sunsets between your funeral and the present day become double, then triple digits, I feel as though I cannot see the corners of your face anymore. I try to remember the roundness of your cheeks, the roundness of all of you. You and I were always the fat ones, united by the soft, white rolls of our bodies, our ancestry of largeness. Our family called us luxuriant food nicknames that tasted bitter when shouted at us – fatty pork, chicken skin, pork belly, roast piglet. We got the fat from our fathers – short, wobbly, roll-ridden men without much purpose whom our mothers grew to detest, though their hatred manifested in different ways – mine left and remarried my stepfather, a thin, angry man who also left her within a few years, while yours stayed and complained bitterly about it every day until the bitterness engulfed her body and killed her with its cancer. 

You moved into our house when your father locked you and your mother out of the shophouse you used to live in. It stormed that day. I remember because you and your mother were drenched when you arrived, she, hitting you relentlessly with a flipped over pink umbrella. It’s your fault, it’s your fault, you slut, walking around with no clothes around your father she screamed. I marveled at how you did not cry, just let her smack you as you walked into our house, her shouts so loud she could be heard over the thundering rain. My mother was uncharacteristically kind to you that day. She made you a bowl of herbal soup that she spooned into your mouth with a tenderness I had never seen her possess.

We enrolled in primary school and cried when we were separated into different classrooms. Our teachers, weary of our sweat and tears, relented and let us enter Miss Kumar’s class together. Other girls would make fun of us, call us fatty bom bom and smelly puki. I would lower my head and try to keep walking, tugging at your sleeve. But you would march up to the gaggle of thin, long-haired girls, push at them, stare them down. Sometimes they all pushed back, slamming you against the wall as they shouted those rude names, their young voices almost a harmonized chorus. I tried to step forward once to get you, but you caught my eye and shook your head. I’ll handle it, your eyes said. I got you.

Your father came by our house a few times over the years. Your mother would wear her finest cheongsam, a green and yellow silken confection that was so beautiful it made me hungry. She would spritz awful smelling scents on herself that made me sneeze. Then our mothers would force us into identical blue dresses that had a layer of tulle under the skirt. It was so itchy they left red welts on our thighs that we would rub ice on after. We would walk out of the house to the backyard sweating and trying not to scratch, where your father would sit on a long bench with your mother in a chair in front of him, and the two of us flanked on his either side. My mother would watch through the window, eyes both hopeful and frightened. I wonder if she saw how your father wedged his hands under our skirts, pressed his fingers against the soft inner parts of our thighs, his callouses leaving bruises that we would later trace and map to the shapes of countries in our atlas. Yours looks like Australia, you said once, admiring the blue and red swirls on my thighs. And you have Mexico, I trilled, mesmerized by the thin purple curl on the end of your bruise. Your father’s visits trailed off as your mother became thinner and thinner, the cheongsam that once hugged her tightly, now dangling off her pronounced shoulders. The visits finally stopped when your mother became bald and bedridden, shouting and waving her hands at imaginary ghosts, her hallucinations her only comfort in the weeks before she finally succumbed to the cancer.

I try in my dreams to touch you, to recall how you feel, but then I remember that it has been years since I have touched you. We touched constantly as children; hands held in sweaty communion as we ran around together. Even as we grew into ourselves, we would strip naked and inspect each other’s changing bodies – your nipples darkening before mine, my vulva drooping lower than yours. But I also spent a lot of time watching you. I studied the side of your eye as it crinkled when I told you a joke as we walked to school, the side of your cheek as you sucked it in when you were angry or about to laugh really hard, the side of your arm that would tense whenever someone who wasn’t me put their arm around you. I became an expert on the whole of your left side – the side I would always stand on when we were together, the side of the bed that I lay on when we were kids, on our pilled Little Miss bedsheets.

The day everything changed was the day you told me you were in love. We were fifteen, and to me it felt way too early. It’s true that we were beginning to sneak out of school sporadically to meet with boys – in the playground, behind the sundry store, in the windy alley between the municipal building and the neighborhood library. I would keep watch for you at these engagements which were always the same – a moaning boy, his khaki school uniform pants tangled around his ankles, his eyes rolling and his arms reaching for imaginary objects in the air as he tried to keep his balance, your mouth around his penis. It never lasted very long. He would buck nearly losing his balance, then pull himself out from your lips, a string of saliva and cum linking you both until it broke off when the boy pulled up his pants and ran away. You always positioned me within your sight so we would lock eyes as you bounced your head back-and-forth, back-and-forth, lips puckered against the length of him. It was as though if we blocked out the boy’s groans and shudders, it was just the two of us watching each other, our bodies aching, wet and ripe as fruit.

But then, the declaration of love. You told me it had been hard keeping the secret, especially from me, but he had told you that you had to. You told me that for the last few weeks, every night as I drifted off to sleep after one of our many long chats, you would creep out of the bed we still shared, and go see your father. You knew it was wrong, you said, but you felt drawn to him in a way that shocked your body and no matter how you tried to exorcise him with other boys, he filled your thoughts, made you tingle, made you feel like you would explode if you could not be with him. I was devastated, not by the clear and absolute wrongness of everything, but by the fact that all the while I had watched you with the boys in the alleys, my body’s desire leaking down the side of my leg, you had been thinking of him – your father – who had the same jiggling body as we did, who bruised us, who I thought had finally gone away after your mother died. 

When did he come back, I asked. 

He came back one day when you and your mother were at the market. When he walked in, it felt like magnets attached to his and my chest and pulled us together. When he hugged me, I thought I would burst into fire, you sighed. 

Flames, I thought spitefully, the expression is – burst into flames. I was wracked with jealousy, my own body hot and red and itchy. How dare he encroach on the lives we had built together, how dare he make you keep a secret from me, how dare he take you when you were mine.

For days after you told me I avoided you, slept at the furthest corner of our bed although that wasn’t actually far away since it was a single bed. I refused to speak to you, refused to meet your eye at mealtimes, crossed the road and walked on the opposite side staring straight ahead when we walked to school. Your sadness became fear. Are you going to tell your mother, you asked me over and over again. I’ll do anything for you, please, please don’t, you begged, holding my limp fingers in yours. I said nothing back to you, but I also said nothing to anyone else because despite everything, when I imagined you and him together – your mouth wrapped around your father’s penis – it soaked me, made me want you even more, and that disgust made me so nauseous I barely ate anymore.

Eventually I asked my mother if I could clear out the storeroom in the house and move in there. We’re growing up, I said, I think we need separate rooms. You watched soundlessly, as I packed up my meager belongings and kicked them over to the storeroom on the other side of the hall. I also began to spend more time at the houses of other girls from our class, staying there all day after school so I could avoid you. At dinner, my mother tried to engage us in conversation. How was your day, what did you do, girls, she would ask, but we would just mutter unintelligibly and refuse to meet each other’s eyes. 

We even stopped looking alike. You stayed the same round shape, but I became lithe and thin. In a way my self-loathing helped. Every time I needed to throw up my meal, I thought about you and a boy in the alley, or if that didn’t work, you and your father, but mostly just you-you-you. As aching desire filled the area above my pelvis, my disgust would overwhelm me, and my stomach would empty itself of its contents. My body and I quickly became the envy of the neighborhood – boys would whistle as I passed and I would see you standing some distance away, your eyes unreadable, your white school shirt stretched against your stomach and shining with sweat.

Sometime mid-way during Form 5, about seven months before our general examination, I came home to find you wailing on the floor, your cheeks pressed into the gray kitchen tile, the grout leaving an indentation on your cheek. 

What the fuck, I said, the first time I had directly addressed you in nearly two years. 

He’s getting married, you scream, between hysterical sobs. He’s going to leave me. 

I dragged you to your bed, pausing outside your room as the scent of you from your room wafted over me. I hadn’t so much as glanced in there since I moved into the storeroom, and it looked exactly the same. I sat on the Little Miss sheets that pilled and crinkled on the edges; you were never good at making the bed. As you cried, I learned that your father was going to be marrying one of his office girls, the prettiest one who brought him tea every day, even when you were around. 

She was attractive, you said, but older than you, at least twenty-something, so you were never worried. You had planned for you and your father to move out of town after our general examination. People wouldn’t understand here you said, but elsewhere, maybe they would, and you-and-he wouldn’t have to be a secret. 

I marveled at how childlike you were, wondered how we were only six months apart in age. No one would understand anywhere, I said. It’s just wrong. He forced you. 

He! Did! Not! You were indignant, actually stopping your weeping to glare at me. I find myself caught in my reflection in the dark, wet pools of your eyes. Then you scream at me. 

You’ve always been jealous. You’ve never understood. You don’t know what love is like. 

My heart ached. But I do, I thought, though I did not say. 

You rose from the bed, leaving a divot on Little Miss Sunshine’s face. As you walked away, I watched as the sweat stain on the back of your school uniform skirt get smaller and smaller, leaving me sitting on the Little Miss sheets, my hands wet with your tears.  

Perhaps it was inevitable, your death. My mother said it was an accident, that you had simply not looked where you were going and crossed the tracks into the moving KTM train, but I knew better. You killed yourself the day before your father’s wedding, a week after I turned seventeen. His distress gave him a stroke, and his young wife-to-be, horrified by the sight of your father’s drooping, stroke-addled face, left him.

 Two months after your funeral, desperate to keep your memories alive, I begin swallowing you. Well, not you exactly, but the things that remind me of you. I tip the ink from those glittery pens down my throat, choke as the thick bitterness clots its way down my esophagus. I imagine the glitter coloring my small intestine purple. I chew up your favorite stamps – the plain, ugly ones of paddy fields that everyone had. I bought you specialty stamps once, with faces of Malaysia’s former prime ministers on them, but you rolled your eyes and said that you would never lick the back of a corrupt leader, even in stamp form. I press the sand from the playground we met boys at, onto my tongue; bite down on the gritty bits and swallow a large gulp of water to wash it down. I even take a trip to the Petronas gas station where you had your explosive shit. I crouch at the bowl and drop a little bit of toilet water on my tongue. It doesn’t taste like much, but the smell of the toilet makes me gag, so I take the opportunity to throw up my lunch. 

Sometimes these swallowing escapades upset my stomach. When I swallow the glitter pen ink, I shit purple for days, and when I wipe my ass, streaks of shimmer dot the brown. The gas station water gives me sharp stomach pains, but because I barely eat, I am unable to get relief. Still, these episodes please me because it feels like I can sense you again. Even if I am losing your face, ingesting bits of your life make me feel like you are, just for a moment, with me. 

Finally, I think I am ready. In November, I sit for the general examination. Every day for two weeks, me and five hundred other girls in my class crouch over our desks, shading in answers in multiple-choice test sheets, filling blue book after blue book with essays. I am focused, more focused than I have ever been, with mental clarity I have not had in years, not since I walked out of our shared bedroom and built a life separate from yours. The day of my final paper, I walk out of the school and inhale deeply, pushing the warm afternoon air down my throat. It is time. 

We’re going to Pizza Hut, some of the girls from school yell. Come with! I shake my head no, I have something else I need to take care of. I cross the tracks and hop on the KTM train. I wonder if it was the same one that had hit you; if they had simply wiped you off the front and reintegrated the train into the schedule. I hug my school bag close to me and run over my plan in my head. I am pleased; there are no gaps, it is neat and precise. The next town over, I hop off. Although the nursing home is only ten minutes away, its midday and the sweltering Malaysian heat sticks my school bag to my back. Sweat drips off me but it also smells like your sweat, and the familiarity takes my breath away. I shake my head to clear it; stop it stop it, I have a job to do. At the nursing home the security guard barely looks up as I sign in. I had prepared a whole speech. I’m visiting my father; I had planned to say. I love him very much. I am almost disappointed at not having to use my script.

I pause outside your father’s room and press my ear against the door. I hear the rattling sound of an old man breathing and push the door open. Your father is lying on the bed, propped up by pillows. He is watching Sesame Street on television, his mouth agape, one side of his face sunken from Bell’s palsy, a leftover effect from the stroke I assume. He claps as the children on screen laugh, licks his lips as they begin to sing. When he sees me his eyes light up. Then he says your name. 

“Dorinda,” he cries, his voice high and shaky.

This is an unexpected turn of events, but I decide to go with it. Whether he recognizes me or not, will not make a difference. 

“Yes papa, I’m here,” I murmur, taking on your identity. I unpack the contents of my school bag – raffia string to tie his hands, a ball of socks to muffle his mouth, a bandanna to blindfold him. But now, seeing how frail he is, I put them all away. I won’t need any of my planned implements. 

I crawl into bed on top of him, wrinkling my nose at the stale smell of sweat and urine that coats the air around his body. I turn off the TV. I pull the thin sheet off him and his eyes dance. “Dorinda,” he groans. “I’ve missed you.” 

I take him in my mouth, limp and covered in excess skin, and get to work. Back-and-forth, back-and-forth as I had seen you do in the alleys. “Thank you my girl,” he murmurs. “My girl, my best girl.” My jaw aches, I worry he will never get hard. But eventually I feel him swell, poking against my gums. A little bit of liquid drips off the tip into my mouth, pre-cum or pee, I cannot tell. I swallow deeply and will myself not to choke. “You know how I like it Dorinda, yes my girl,” he cries and I want so badly to bite down and taste his blood, but I do not. Instead I pull my mouth off him and swap in my hand. I lie the full length of me on top of his body as I move my hand up-up-down, up-up-down. His eyes flutter close, “Uh, uh, Dorinda, uh,” he moans. When I wrap my hands around his neck, he opens his eyes, first in surprise, then excitement, “Oh Dorinda, you’ve learned a few things,” he says. But when I tighten my hands into fists around both his neck and his penis, his eyes get large, then roll to the back of his head, the sunken side of his face quivering.

I wonder if you are watching, and the thought turns me on a little. I tighten my grip. Your father chokes and kicks his legs feebly under me. I feel a warm wet gush over my hand, and the hiss of his last breath snakes through his mouth. I squeeze my fingers around his neck once more for good measure. 

When I take my hands off him and wipe them on the bed, I see the beginnings of a bruise forming around his neck. It looks like the map of Japan, an island long, thin, and curved at the end. I make a note to check our atlas.