. Deeper than skin, dee felt the sickness pervade her frame. She watched Maggie’s face morph from terror to hopelessness as the illness took root. Dee knew the signs and she knew that the only cure

(From the perspective of Dee) As I stepped out from the unwelcoming bowels of the old car, the familiar crunch of gravel beneath my stylish leather boots echoed through the landscape. My eyes drank in the old, weary weatherboards of our old homestead. Our meager dwelling, a testament to our past, residing in unpretentious simplicity; two doors and not a single window wide enough to squeeze an adult man through. A frown creased my forehead, our poverty laid bare to the world with such raw honesty. I can see Mama now, her silhouette cast by the setting sun, framed like an unforgiving old portrait, etched permanently into the tired canopies of the two tall oak trees – ancestors of this quaint Southern landscape. Beside her, sticking close in her timid shadow, was my younger sister, Maggie. Her body language betrayed her; a skittish rabbit caught in the headlights of oncoming traffic. She was her usual self: awkward, shy, submissive. It was pitiful, how little she had changed, how tightly she clung onto this suffocating world, our old world - a world that barely offered her any prospects. I watched as they bring the homemade bench, worn but sturdy, into the yard. Their clumsy fascination with my modern clothing stirring an unjustifiable irritation within me. These quilts, these artifacts laying uselessly, were a testament to the 'old ways' - ones that continued to bind them to the drudgery of rural life; ones that I had fought so hard to escape from myself. But they fail to see what I see: the legacy we descend from, a hard-earned heritage that should not rot away in the background, but should take up a proud place on my apartment wall in the city. A city where people would know what to make of such a treasure.