INDELICATE INCIDENTS: 3-5

Beginnings, endings, and the chaos in between.

3.

It’s been three days. I go about life as if there isn’t a blade hanging over me.

I water my plants. Commit credit card fraud. Cook elaborate meals for Grady.

It’s the best I’ve ever been, best meals I’ve ever cooked, but I can only pick. Don’t have much of an appetite.

I clean the apartment until it reeks of lemon scented chemicals and we have to spend the next few days sleeping with all the windows open to air out the fumes.

I spend a lot of time with Grady. Spend a lot of time in bed with Grady.

He doesn’t ask about the letter.

I jump at imaginary noises. Check the mailbox ten times a day.

I don’t bring it up.

Or maybe there won’t be an answer. This is the rest of our lives.

Grady gets louder. Chatters constantly. Doesn’t listen to himself half the time. Can’t stand a second of silence between us. Babbles about his research and theories. Discusses the chemical compounds in the food I make. Mutters to himself while he works on his computer.

For four days we exist in a delicate bubble of selective silence. A tentative truce. Calm before the storm. Last days of Rome.

Grady starts talking in his sleep again. First time in over a decade.

I don’t think about that, either.

There’s still no answer.

I start to believe we’ll be here forever. Poised on the precipice. Waiting for the hammer to come down, the shoe to drop, judgment to be passed.

There are worse places to be.

On the fifth day, there’s a plain white envelope in our mailbox. No name. Unsealed.

Inside is a single sheet of paper with a date, time, and location scrawled across it.

I read it two, three times. Commit the note to memory. Crumple it up. Stuff it in my back pocket to burn later.

I walk to our apartment. Each step is a sacrifice. My stomach is through the floor, rotting in the basement.

I step inside. Grady is stretched out on the couch with his battered laptop. He types a mile a minute. The light shines off his glasses and his face is tense with concentration.

Worn jeans and black frames, a faded shirt I’ve stolen from him countless times. The sharp nose and downturned mouth, hidden behind a short, thick beard. Bad tattoos scrawled across his arms and chest.

I commit him to memory. Perfect and untouched and unaware of the bomb going off around us.

Grady looks up at me and smiles.

‘Hey,,’ he says. Sees my face. His smile dies a brutal death.

‘Shit,’ Grady says, and closes his laptop.

4.

I had six younger brothers.

Dennis Georgie Tobias Tim Aaron Jakob.

I’d say their names strung together like they made up a single living creature.

DennisGeorgieTobiasTimAaronJakob.

Always from oldest to youngest. A single being of legs and eyes and punching arms and complaining, hungry mouths. Ripping clothes for me to mend and giving each other bruises for me to bandage.

Dennis Georgie Tobias Tim Aaron Jakob.

It was how I woke them up in the morning to get ready for school. How I called them to dinner in the evening. It was what I bellowed when there was a fight. What I shouted when I heard something break.

DennisGeorgieTobiasTimAaronJakob

I used to wonder if Jakob was the last one, or if they’d kept dropping kids out like it was a sport.

I was supposed to protect them.

I used to have six brothers. Dennis Georgie Tobias Tim Aaron Jakob.

DennisGeorgieTobiasTimAaronJakob

Now I have one brother.

5.

Or maybe I never got an answer to my letter.

Grady and I wait and wait until the seasons change. Years grind by and we don’t ever talk about it. It becomes the albatross in our lives.

Grady and I wait until I can’t remember a time we’ve done anything else. Automatons going through the motions.

Maybe Grady gets tired of me, finally. Maybe he leaves one day, defeated by my nightmares and my secrets and the silence growing between us like a cancer.

I fade away, everything else I think feel hear see remember the misfirings of a dying brain.

Pickled in alcohol and strung out on denial.

Or maybe I never had a brother at all.

Maybe it’s been me alone all along.

No.

I used to have six brothers.

DennisGeorgieTobiasTimAaronJakob

I still have one brother.