brass knuckles
march 24.

---

Cameron took last month’s catalogue out to the outhouse in the back and shut the door quietly. Sissie was sitting on the floor reading this month’s, hungry little eyes on page one-hundred-something. She loved it when Cameron brought the mail back from the post office in town. He did it when he could get out of school without starting a fight, which was why Sissie loved the mail so much. It was because it barely ever came.

I chopped up some cabbage for dinner, two heads, and Cameron came out of the outhouse fastening his belt. He washed his hands in the spigot outside, brown well water translucent, shining in his white palms. Cameron was a shock when you first saw him. He was tall and thin and he would be handsome if not for misshapen face – nose broken thrice, eyes always black, lips always swollen and split. His cheekbones were raw, pointed, bruised yellow, blood rotting beneath tan skin. He came in and stood next to me and started breaking up the head of silvery garlic on the counter. His fingernails were short, blood blisters surfacing in most.

“Two cloves,” I said, not looking at him. He pressed down on both at once with the flat of his palm, and he peeled off the white skin. Cameron was quiet and gentle but his knuckles, when his hand stretched to press down on the little cloves of shining, wet garlic, his knuckles were red and raw and bloody. Cameron fought and he was full of fight. He was the death of our mother, weak-hearted already since our father left.

Sissie was saying how she wanted some doll. I said she had plenty. Cameron was looking at the side of my face and I pushed my hair behind my ear so maybe he’d get bored and stop looking. He was chopping up that garlic like a stupid chef, one hand pushing down near the tip of the knife and the other moving the handle diligently, intelligently. Then he scooped it all up and put it in the fry pan with the cabbage.

Like I said there was a lot of fight in Cameron but I scarcely ever saw it. I don’t think Sissie did, not ever. He hid it from her, his bleeding nose and the shoulders I popped back into their sockets outside away from the windows. I saw him fight only once. I was in town and I was walking to the grocery store a different way hoping I’d see him leaving school. I did; I saw him bury his white fist in the left eye socket of this tall, built boy. He was shoeless and his knuckles were red and there was a bloody handprint on the collar of his shirt, bruises in a ring around his slender, freckled neck. He turned toward me and his eyes, bruised, widened and he spat blood on the sidewalk and he said, “I’m sorry.”

---

oldie / goodie.
listening to beat the devil today, and "love to be the loser marked up with the bruise of a damn good fight" made me think of this story, so here it is for you.