The Powers that Be
By Kyra Kondis
At fourteen, my sister develops the ability to move objects with her mind. We’re eating dinner when it happens. Our dad asks her to pass the salt and she looks at the shaker until it slides right off the table. She’s mad at him, for not letting her make a Facebook account.
“Whoa,” says our dad. “The attitude is not necessary.”
At fourteen, my sister wants dangerously. She runs her hair over with a flat-iron and then sprays it until it is fine and stiff as reeds. She lets girls who have slumber parties without her copy her homework. She sends boys text messages like lol and it’s fine :) when they pretend to ask her out and then say, just kidding. Once, I catch her in the bathroom holding a blow-dryer an inch from her face, and when she sees me, she says, “I'm trying to burn off my zits.” There are tears in her eyes, maybe or maybe not from the gale of hot air.
After dinner, I ask her how she does it—moves objects with her mind, I mean—and she shrugs, but at least she smiles.
At fourteen, my sister becomes very popular. Word of her telekinetic powers gets out at school, when she dodges a kickball in P.E. and sends it flying back at the boy who launched it as he runs from home to first base. Suddenly, she is invited to everyone’s houses and birthdays and sleepovers. She is retrieving the hard-to-reach bracelets that fell behind their dressers. She is helping them shoplift lipstick from the Walgreens. She is orchestrating distractions from outside the window of their parents’ living rooms so they won’t get caught sneaking out. She is spilling the teacher’s coffee on the pile of completed quizzes. She is clearing massive spaces in their backyards so they can convince their parents to install a swimming pool.
But it is hard work, telekinesis. My sister grows thin and her shoulders roll forward and soon the smallest things make her tired. Just sitting on the couch in our living room, she sucks down bottle after bottle of water, and I imagine her as a wilting plant. I can count every disc in her spine, like the beads on a candy necklace. Her cheeks sink inward. Her hair becomes brittle and loose and I find it stuck around the shower drain, fluffy clumps that look like hay seed heads. Our dad tries to get her to eat more but she’s already having double helpings of every meal. He takes her to the doctor and she is given a prescription multivitamin. He takes her to a counselor who says, “With her mind? Are you sure?”
“You don’t have to use your telekinesis to please kids at school, you know,” I tell her when she comes back from helping someone rig a spin-the-bottle party. But because I am twenty and no longer in high school, my advice is not relevant to her.
“How do you know that’s why I’m doing it?” she says. “Maybe I just like doing it.” It’s seventy degrees in our house, but her lips are chapped and blue.
“I’m sure she’ll grow out of whatever this is,” I tell our dad later. He is wringing his hands and reading a Q&A website for single parents of teens. He has typed telekinesis, bad? into search bar; the page says, 0 results. “We all do eventually, right?”
At fourteen, my sister often stands in front of the high school and stares at it as though she’s trying to see right through. I start driving her in the mornings instead of her taking the bus, partly because I’m worried that the longer I can’t see her, the more she will wither away. Throngs of kids river around her tiny body. Sometimes, I expect her to use her mind to lift the whole building up, place it somewhere that is distant and separate and other. Even when she finally goes inside, I linger before driving to work, and I imagine my sister and her mind, pulling up the traffic lights, the trees, the road itself. I imagine it getting easier. I imagine that she can make life into anything.
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About Kyra Kondis
Kondis is a graduate of the fiction MFA program at George Mason University. Her work can be found in or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, Necessary Fiction, and the Northwest Review, as well as her website at kyrakondis.com. She is currently working on a story collection and a novel.