I have invented characters in my mind before, fairies and pirates and things like that. That night in the cramped guest bedroom, fearful and unable to sleep, I create the Little Sister. Rhonda will crochet a cozy to encase me from head to toe, so that you can barely make out the lumpy shape of my body I’ll breathe through a woolly woven web, and will only be able to see the world in pieces, through the constellation of small apertures between the yarn. I see myself sitting here on the lumpy loveseat, becoming another permanent fixture of the house. When eight o’clock-my bedtime-arrives, I know with certainty that they have taken the new baby home to replace me and that I will remain with Jim and Rhonda forever. When my parents have not shown up or called by late afternoon, I begin to suspect that they are not coming back at all. Also no one has explained to me that it’s way too early, that the baby is not supposed to come for two more months. No one has explained to me how long babies take to come I have the vague idea that they just spring out, like a Pop-Tart from the toaster. I expect this to happen quickly-within, say, an hour. I sit all day on the sofa, the crochet pattern imprinting itself onto my sweaty legs, watching an I Dream of Jeannie marathon and waiting for my parents to show up and take me home. This cozying does not make the objects look cozier it makes them look ashamed. Rhonda crochets cozies not only for the extra toilet paper rolls, as I’ve seen in some of my friends’ bathrooms, but also for the phone and the phone book and the dog and my uncle’s guns and both of their toothbrushes.

No, not “hobby,” exactly: her crocheting is a compulsion, perhaps some kind of illness.

Uncle Jim is married to a woman named Rhonda, whose hobby is crochet. This story starts when my parents drop me off at my uncle Jim’s house, on the way to the hospital where my little sister is about to be born. She lives in Athens, GA, where she is working on a PhD.

Amy Bonnaffons' work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Kenyon Review, among others, and has been read on This American Life. The characters in The Wrong Heaven seek to solve their conflicts and dilemmas, both spiritual and sexual, in all the wrong places. The following is from Amy Bonnaffons' collection, The Wrong Heaven.

House party footjob mod