Moriah's Mutiny

While her sisters chatted and rearranged their belongings, Moriah observed them with a casual eye. A lot of people claimed that they had trouble distinguishing one Mallory from the other, except for the youngest one, of course, but Moriah didn’t see how that was possible. Each one of her sisters looked exactly like who and what she was.

Morgana Mallory was the oldest and, for now, the most famous of the four, having recently seen her newest novel go skyrocketing up every bestseller list in the county. She wrote her first book, Up on Rapture Mountain, over ten years ago, but it wasn’t until her third, They Call Me Hussy, that she’d made it onto the New York Times bestseller list. The one following that, Passion Rides a Spotted Horse, was turned into a miniseries, and since then, the name Morgana Mallory had meant gold to booksellers everywhere. Some time ago she’d started wearing tailored suits and conservative separates, and she’d had her long tresses shorn into a chin-length blunt cut. All this was done at her publicist’s suggestion, in the hopes that it would make her appear less frivolous and more like a “serious writer.” Moriah had recommended that her eldest sister give her books serious titles if she wanted to be taken more seriously. Morgana had responded by demanding what Moriah knew about the publishing industry anyway, quickly cutting her off before she could mention that little piece of anthropological fluff she called a textbook.

Mathilda Mallory was a fast-rising star on the Broadway stage, quickly catching up with Morgana in the fame department, something which Moriah was certain annoyed her eldest sister to no end. She had never seen her sister act, but her parents had, of course, and were forever gushing about the rampantly flowing ocean of talent in their family. If Moriah gave it much thought, which she seldom did, she would probably admit that Mathilda had more common sense than her other sisters and was probably capable of freethinking if left to her own devices. There were times when Moriah felt that Mathilda was as much a victim of the Mallory mystique as she, and believed that Mathilda might possibly have turned out to be rather interesting if she hadn’t so closely resembled the others in looks and been forced to comply with family expectations. Mathilda still broke out of the mold every now and then, Moriah noted, wearing berry shades of lipstick and rouge instead of the traditional peach, styling her shoulder-length hair into complicated creations instead of letting the silvery sheaths flow like a celestial river as the others did.

Marissa Mallory posed the biggest irritation to Moriah. Next to her in age, Marissa had always been closer to what was going on in Moriah’s life, had always known exactly how to draw the most blood. Like a perfect stereotype of the glamorous supermodel, Marissa was shallow, vague and superficial, her vocabulary consciously restricted to less than a hundred words. With hair that streamed to her waist and a body that most men would kill to possess, she’d also delighted throughout childhood and adolescence in pointing out what she considered an abundance of physical imperfections all over her little sister’s curvy form. And now that Marissa was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to be so beautiful, she could smile in just such a way as to tell Moriah she was thinking, “I told you so.”