The day the hole showed up was just a plain Thursday. Nothing special happened, no big storm or natural disaster. Just midday in the middle of the parking lot, there wasn’t a hole and then there was. It wasn’t a terribly big hole, and didn’t cause many issues. The problem was that the hole took my sister with it. 

Becca hadn’t been feeling well that day and wanted me to pick up her meds from the pharmacy, but I had just gotten my permit and she was the only one home to be in the car with me. She managed to get in the passenger seat, but was out cold by the time we made it to CVS. That was how I left her: asleep and snoring against the grey cloth seats of mom’s old Impala. I was only gone for 6 minutes, and came out to a yawning hole where the car, and my sister, had been. 

The cops didn’t know what to do. One of them dropped a penny down and we couldn’t even hear it hit the bottom. We didn’t know what to do, or what happened to Becca. My mom cried for days after the detectives told her that Becca was most likely gone. We all did. How do you have a funeral without a body? How were we supposed to put her to rest? Even after the scientists came, and the parking lot got shut down and roped off, no one could tell us what happened. An unusual phenomenon, they called it. One of them bragged about how he was going to write his thesis on this–on the hole that ate my sister. 

It was all horrible, and sad, but the weirdest part was two weeks later, when the hole closed up overnight and the Impala was right back where I’d left it, Becca still asleep inside. When the knock came at the door, it was 2:03 am. My mom made all of us get out of bed and took us straight to the hospital where they’d brought Becca. She’s not waking up, they said. She was back, breathing fine and apparently not hurt, but she wouldn’t get up. We watched her chest rise and fall through the glass, the heart monitor beeping steadily. A few days passed where we all took shifts by her bedside. 

One night, I fell asleep there next to her. I had been holding her hand, twisting the beads of the bracelet I had made her for her birthday that year. It couldn’t have been long, but I woke to the feeling of something watching me. I jumped back-Becca was gone. The bed sheets were rumpled, monitor beeping. Something cold wrapped around me and I screamed. I heard Becca start to laugh, and then I laughed, and then I cried. I turned around in the hug to find my older sister standing as though nothing had happened. She had a big smile on her face, and shooed away the doctors as they were checking her over until they finally let us into the lobby to await our parents and go home. 

It was only when I was laying back in my bed, hearing the quiet patter of footsteps around the house, that I realized something was wrong. I felt a cold hand on my shoulder and opened my eyes. There was Becca, smiling over me. But her smile wasn’t quite right. In the glow of the closet light, I saw that there were no teeth in Becca’s mouth. There wasn’t anything but a cold, dark hole. She bent down, pressed that empty jaw to my forehead. The next time I blinked, my bedroom was gone, and the dark began to speak.