Sisterchild.

I round the corner and she is in the hollow of the blackberries. She looks up at me and waves excitedly. This is flagging number four. And as my sister, she surely knows the steel look in my face, the one that she has grown up watching, staring out the car window, in the middle of the night in the kitchen. Those guilty minutes while I am intent and listening. I radiate inhospitable isolation.
This, she must certainly observe, as I round the bend. But the impatient waving continues. And I react, as perhaps she knows I will.
"Not now," I growl through a sore throat, "I can't right now"
I will apologize later, in the kitchen, like a sobered drunk. But for now her crestfallen face haunts my ascension to the top of the hill. She retreats to the hollow in the blackberries. I am comforted knowing that she will wave again when I circle back. I will get a second chance.
When she stumbles through the dark of the early morning, she is rosy and warm. She forgets her timer and the time, and reads. She calls out into the porch for her cat, and coos when he arrives. Scolds him if he is accompanied by a dead mouse. Sometimes, when he gets at the birds, she still cries.
When I arrive home from school, she will have exchanged her black attire for grey. The color is good on her. I have always been a little jealous of this easy beauty, growing up against a thistle like me. It is not a jealousy potent enough to be acted on, (she is my junior of six years) but enough to make me shake my head, as I do now, arriving at home. She is industriously setting up her meal. She will probably take it out to her blackberry hollow, where her cat will try to eat it. She will probably spill her food as she lifts it out of the animal's reach. I want to warn her, standing in the doorway with my tea, but I know that she would not likely listen. In fact, it would only motivate her more.
She heads down the hill and I watch her from the window. She will come back soon, breathless and flushed and lead me down. And I will not growl.