My Brother is Something

I killed my brother today. His body is buried in the backyard behind the rose-bushes. I left the shovel there, I hope someone finds him. I hope they dust for prints or whatever they do.

I hope they find out I did it.

I did it for no reason. Some people would say it was an accident but you can't murder someone annd have it be an accident, not when you literally have their blood on your hands.

This wasn't the first time though, I thought I had killed him once before.

I was trying to cook. I destroy things when I cook. Started a fire once, blew up the microwave, almost poisoned my family. We had to call poison control. I wasn’t embarrassed, just sad.

But I was obsessed with this dish, Gnocchi. It is these little potato dumplings rolled up and they look so simple, just little mushy white lumps with sauce on them.

But they're impossible.

I cooked them fifteen times, and cried, weep after each one, because they tasted like salt and potato.

I bought potatoes everyday for a week from the little Greek market place down the street. They'd wave, I'd wave. I managed to smile every time, I'd managed to hope that the dish would turn out all right even though last nights attempt lay rotting away in the garbage still formless.

The recipe was really simple, flour, eggs, roll the gnocchi put it in a pot wait for it to raise to the top. I could do the rolling fine, though at first potatoes were everywhere. They stalactite off of the ceiling and were smooched by bare-summer feet on the floor. Most importantly though, they gloved my hands so everyplace I touched there was a little bit of the mush until the whole kitchen was dotted with it.

The first time after my parents saw the kitchen after I made Gnocchi they screamed for an hour, I cried for two.

It was just pasta, just pasta.

My brother refused to help, when I needed him he refused to help.

I was desperate, covered in it, asking politely, then screaming until you could hear echoes of the desperateness in my voice months later, but he wouldn't help me.

He was busy, playing doing something. His expression blank.

I swore, unplugged the computer.

And I broke him.

People have boundaries have levels. When I was younger I had a theory that if I tickled my brother enough he would get used to it, it didn't work then, but I think I saturated him in other things. Pain, hatred. When it was easy he would always love me. And I beat him for it.

I'd hate that he think he could just turn it on and off. I wanted him to toughen up. If he wasn't going to be sensitive he shouldn't be it at all. All or nothing, all or nothing! So I beat him. I was always stronger than him, though our last fight was almost even. But he had a point where he lost everything.

He was blind. Not completely but partially, and he can't see things, but I'm even more blind, I could never feel it when he was about to fall apart into something horrible and primal.

He would throw his head back until I could hear his neck almost snapping. and I would just change positions, grab him from the middle until I could feel the outlines of his large intestines swallowed in my fingertips pressing, pressing so hard.

Potato was all over both of us, every place I hit him, I touched him, was covered with it. Usually that was it, I would hit him on the back, but he always had a shirt on so it took some of the brunt, like I was just giving him the Heimlich maneuver.

I’d growl and pretzel his arm behind his back and then lower my lips right by his ears, like they do in the movies. The only time in my life when I’m not self-conscious when I’m not analyzing, and I’d say “you’re going to lose, you’re always going to lose, now help me with the goddamn dumplings.

I thought he was having a seizure. Because I had said those words before and the only difference is that we were covered in potato. His eyes, what was left of them, mostly they were half clouded figures, dialated and he hissed. He had hissed before but he didn’t stop hissing now, his legs humming-bird blur.

I swore, let go. “Wait!”

“JUST LEAVE ME ALONE.” Whip like his voice cracked upward into treble. He was always trying to put his voice lower than it really was, he was just a kid. He wanted to be older. Now he is ancient. God.

“Come on.” I sounded desperate, but he didn’t care. He saw me for what I really was, covered in potato, pathetic beating someone who just wanted to be left alone. His only crime was pretending to love me. He just didn’t want to be tangled with me.

“LEAVE ME ALONE.” Halfway up the stairs, footsteps the only thing not covered in potato in this house.

I swore, and went back to the potatoes.

Too salty.

Threw em out.

And then the world faded back away from my hands on his back, from the imaginary blood and bruises that were already developing.

I ran up to his room. He was leaning against his door, shaking though I couldn’t hear the tears or taste them in the air, but my mouth was so full of potato I couldn’t taste anything.

“Avery, let me in.” throwing out the pasta had calmed me.

“why should I?” he sniffled, the door pulsing a little as he rocked, slowly back and forth. Ship on seas it thinks are storm but there is really a giant fucking hurricane.

He shouldn’t of let me in, he should have just kept on crying and hugged himself and toughened up. I remember it that he asked if I was really sorry and then let me in. I remembered it like that for a while. But he wants to punish me now, he wants me to know what I really did.

But he didn’t let me in, I backed up against the door and pushed it open until he had been thrown, rocking and sobbing to the other side of the room. “LEAVE ME ALONE!” Scuttled like a cockroach to the bed and just sat there, just whimpering. He was pathetic. Everyone knows he was pathetic.

“Are you alright?” I didn’t move just observed him from across a set of trains laid out on the floor. He was in seventh grade and there was Thomas the Tank engine. He was so small, so thin that he was enveloped by the worn gray pikachu pillow.

“Leave me alone.” His voice was just as rough, just as passionate, and his eyes were wide not looking at anything. But I had been carefull not hit his eyes. At least then I played with the notion that he would get out of all of this eventually.

“Avery, come on.” Hand outstretched to touch his back, he should’ve flinched. He always flinched, but he didn’t. He spun around and started seizing up again legs pumping imaginary pedals and arms wiggling like an almost drown man. I had never asphyxiated him, I didn’t do that. What was that?

His breathing became shallower, hurried, it was late going somewhere. “Avery! Avery!” My hands washed over his body trying to check for sings I didn’t understand. Pulse, breath, blink, what were things things, he was just different then. I couldn’t, I didn’t. But somehow he revived. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.” I whispered, and I knew I would miss him but I didn’t care.

I just couldn’t be found with a body. That was how I thought. That is how I think. People breath but I don’t know, they can’t bear to be anything more to me. It’s not fear, though I feel it.

And I care I do. I love him I can feel it, I know I wouldn’t want him to just end if I didn’t love him. He is so weak, so ridiculously unfit and he doesn’t even realize how much people laugh at him and he wants to live this horrible existence he is living. God. He should want to die

But somehow I held him as he wept in my arms whispering how much he loved me. I couldn’t punish him then. I should have, he wouldn’t trust me anymore. He can’t be that stupid, he’s pathetic sure but Dad always said he was smart. He has to be something.

There is something underneath that rosebush.

It is my brother.

I killed him for no reason.

But he lived against all reason.

So it has to even out doesn’t it?

So when did I actually do it? I did it on a Saturday night. I was frustrated, my dad wouldn’t let me go to a party. And he, Avery, was just sitting there defending me. I didn’t want him to defend me.

I told him he was a pathetic nothing and my dad just stood there, saying nothing waiting for my arguments. Just focusing on me. And then he has the nerve to say my brother is important.

When my brother would be beaten until he was almost broken (I never beat him that bad until today again) my parents would say he deserved it. You’d warn him you say and he just kept coming back, kept wanting to be with you.

They’d tell me to stop but they wouldn’t really mean it.

They were just to afraid of doing it themselves to bogged down by morals, and issues and guilt.

I should have been, it’s a damn heavy weight to carry.

But I couldn’t go to the party. Avery was a beat off. He always was, but then especially, as I stepped two seconds later he’d take a step too. I didn’t understand it. I’d hurt him so much that’d I’d hurt myself and here he was, kinko style promenading up the stairs in an angry huff. It wasn’t supposed to be mocking, but it was.

I did not walk like that dam nit, my anger was elagent, or brutal, or important. I could hurt him until he bled.

“Stop it.”

Silence except for pounding base of forced heavy steps and then he turned to look at me his face all twisted up his eyes bulging like some alien crap, all cloudy and wrong. He looked gai and placid and it infuriated me. And then he began to tap slowly and quietly.

“I’m going to count to five and then I’ll hit you.”

Fingers up like flags. They went down like soldiers, quick and without meaning. One hit like a bong on his back. He used to scream to call for mom, but he didn’t then, not after the gnocchi. His body was just as it had been before, tapping, untangled.

Three steps and he didn’t stop, I grabbed him from behind. Are fights were always the same, until that one. Until he actually learned. He threw his head back and I didn’t even hear the tiny cracks in his neck, just the banging of it against my chin. My foot fell and I tumbled down the stairs.

My parents were going out the door, all dressed up my mom in her old purple vynil coat and my dad obvious in blue. They saw us, and my mom frowned. “That is not acceptable.”

“Avery annoyed me I warned—“

“But mom!” He slipped away from my tangle mess of limbs up to his room.

“Just try to leave each other alone.” Deep base, dad, slipping through the door and into the dying summer beyond.

As the door shut I grabbed him, Avery, at the heel, he kicked like a caught fish. I dug my dull nails into his heel, but he shivered and kicked harder. I pulled myself up the stairs that way, drawing little bloody halfmoons onto his heels as he tried to escape.

He got away at the fifth step. Usually I could keep him the whole way. He turned around, and smiled, he smiled. “It’s okay Sophia,” he said. His eye was bulging and throbbing and his limbs were jutted out like a model run way pose even though there were faded heelprints of blood on the wooden floor.

And I couldn’t move. Didn’the see how ugly he was, how un-okay this whole situation was. That he could sneer and hatefully say things like that. I know he couldn’t read body language, so I imprinted it upon him with my fists and hands. I didn’t sob, I should have, but I didn’t feel it. I just felt anger, political anger that he didn’t understand.

He was my crusade. I shook a little though, that was all that it showed, all my anger had fruit. Just a little shake, and a burning cross in my mind, an infection spreading from his eyes to my heart. I would storm his castle, I would make him see. I would burn my thoughts onto his until he could see. Until he was no longer blind.

And I did.

I pulled apart his Thomas the tank engine and ripped the pikachu pillow from his harlequin fingertips. “WHY DO YOU LOVE ME?” I screamed until it was whisper in the air, until my voice was crackly like a dead fall leave. Until my face was stretched and worn.

“Because you’re my sister.”

That’s when I broke.

I thought I had been broken for a long time. I thought that I had been primal like he got occasionally, but I was wrong.

Python arms snaked around his middle, just like usual, but he knew now. And he was stronger too. He was in seventh grade, and even invisible muscles are still muscles. I swore and changed my position, holding his head with one hand and trying to clench his stomach with the other.

But he broke as I broke and we broke together, tangled together, until we were thrown onto his bunk bed struggling between cherry wood and thousands of stuffed animals. They were stirred up as we fought like dead leaves.

He was winning. I couldn’t just leave him with bruises anymore, he asked me of this. He needed to try, to not just accept that I was better that he should just not try to pretend. He threw me down.

It was the first time he had ever thrown me, hurled me anywhere, to the ground without latching onto me, like a leech. He had done something to me without me letting him. He was something.

My hands, his neck, piano fingers searched his nerves. Where is the right key and I found it. “Don’t tell mom about this and just leave me alone and we’ve got a deal.”

He would always run, whisper between doorways. He’d come back later, but he’d run. He didn’t’ he just stood there twisting like a carosel and swearing in little kid swears.

“Jeeze, what the hell?”

“Just do it, okay!” I whispered in his ears. I couldn’t feel his pulse, I couldn’t see his face.

“No!” His first word was no, it was his last one, even though all his life he had been craving a yes, from someone, for me.

Just a little tap and a hold, and slowly he became limp but he still twitched. I pressed just for a couple more seconds just to make sure he was gone.

He was gone.

An hour later, my eyes as wide as his I buried him in our backyard.

And ran.

Hoping someone would find us.

Hoping someone would find us.

I buried SOMETHING in the rosebush yesterday.

It was something, oh god it was something.