(This is a story I wrote for my school's literature magazine. Enjoy!
)
I can see my brother there, kneeling in the dusty floor of my old bedroom. Cobwebs are strung like small, delicate pieces of lace, stretching across the grime-splattered windows. Shadows move gently across the floor of my decaying room, while the sun outside illuminates the photograph my brother is holding his hand, slowly sagging down to the ground from the weight of the icy, angry and horribly sad leaden tears that drip onto it every few moments.
The faded white curtains wave in the slow wind that often blows through our decrepit town. Even from this distance, Jeremy--my brother--can hear the shouts and the laughter of the children at his old high school, the ones who still have brothers to care for, still have brothers to laugh at or laugh with, on occasion. The lucky ones, he thinks. But he doesn’t want to think of that at all. Jeremy stands up, grabbing his worn-out, blue denim hat from the ground and shoves it on his head firmly, as if to further block out any incoming thoughts about me, about his brother.
His brother Andrew. That’s me.
Jeremy takes the wet black-and-white photograph and shoves it in his pocket forcefully, almost tearing it in the process. He doesn’t want to be reminded of the faces in it. Faces that include a slightly younger Jeremy, with less of a defiant gleam in his light green eyes that match mine, grinning as if he is the luckiest person in the world. He has his arm slung around my shoulder, while I’m grinning, too, at the person with the camera. I’m standing slightly bent over, due to the fact I’m leaning on my wooden crutch that Jeremy had made for me.
I have a bad leg.
Everyone said I was a goner, that I was destined for the Cells. That’s where the Patrol puts kids like me, the ones who were sick or injured or just born like that from a very early point in their lives, and unable to do anything that could contribute to society. But Jeremy fought to keep me. He persuaded our parents not to give me up, that I could surely do something to help out, with everything or anything. So with Jeremy I stayed, living with our parents in our shabby, run-down apartment on one of the busiest streets in the city.
I thought it was the best place in the whole world. Of course, Jeremy made it better for me.
Since I couldn’t play soccer or football with the other kids at school, we had to improvise. Make me fit in somehow. Jeremy found the answer one day, when we were walking to the cafeteria for lunch. I was talking nonstop about a girl I’d met that day, how her parents worked for the Patrol but she wasn’t bad at all, compared to the other kids we knew with parents in the Patrol. Jeremy had been listening, but then he cut me off, coming upon a poster that had been nailed into the door of the cafeteria. He stopped, reading the bright, bold text that must have stood out a mile away, compared with the dull, drab greys and reds of our school. This, Jeremy said, was the answer. The school’s old chorus teacher was coming back, and was looking for talented boys and girls to join and hopefully reinstate the chorus of our school. Talent, Jeremy told me. The chorus teacher was looking for talent. So, every afternoon after that, Jeremy made me practice singing. I made him practice, too. I didn’t want to be alone in chorus, and Jeremy was the perfect candidate to have along my side. Maybe the only candidate. Of course, he gave me grief about it for a few days, saying that this was my opportunity to do something, that he didn’t want to interfere with my chance at life.
Well, I didn’t see him doing anything to contribute to society. At last, I convinced him to join me, and he started to practice with me. In no time at all, we were both signed up for the new chorus class at our school.
Maybe Jeremy wants to rid himself of those memories, too. All those hours of learning music and fine-tuning our voices until they were the best in the whole city. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t look at the bronze medals and flimsy paper certificates bearing my name and his in shiny gold lettering lined up on the shelf of my bedroom, the fruits of our hard work that had finally paid off in the various singing concerts and contests that we had won. Together.
Jeremy walks down the stairs leading to the rest of the house, where our mother and father are getting dressed for the walk later this afternoon. He slides his hand down the banister, his already slightly grubby fingers rubbing off the fine layer of the gray dust that coats almost everything we have in our little, inexpensive home. He meets our parents in the hallway, almost knocking his head against the iron-wrought candle holder that hangs from the middle of the ceiling, sending a few more dust particles drifting through the air and down to the floor where they settle gracefully, disappearing into more of their kind. See, they don’t have me to sweep up the house anymore. Not that I could do it that well in the first place. Our mother’s normally cheerful face has disappeared into a reflective mask, hardly betraying her emotions that are bottled up in a cup, with a top that will most likely never come undone from where it has been wedged shut. She always was the strongest of our family. She frowns at Jeremy’s attire, taking in his tousled chocolate hair sticking out from underneath the cap I gave him, the blue vest with a few dark stains that have stubbornly refused to be washed out at the community wash center, and his jeans. He returns her glance with the defiant one he has taken to wearing nowadays, and heads out the door. Our parents reluctantly follow him out into the streets, walking down the long road.
They stop at the gates which creak slowly in the breeze. Litter gently swirls up and off the pavement, twirling away from my brother and my parents, drifting lazily on the dying breeze. The shouts and excited yells and screams from the school have all but died away, and Jeremy can think clearer. But it’s plain he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to go over the events in his mind that happened last month, replaying them over and over again until he was left devoid of all the good feelings that he usually had. It would take a very long time, if not ever again, for those to rise to the top again. But now he is left with bitterness, and an angry defiant internal roar that is aimed at the Patrol and everything our city stands for, or is forced to stand for.
Jeremy stops at the tombstone which is situated almost in the center of the graveyard. To my eyes it looks quite lonely and forlorn, but that is soon fixed with the placement of the deep ocean blue flowers on the small patch of dirt that Jeremy cleared away in front of the grave. He tears his gaze away from the newest and only spot of colour in the graveyard to read the name on the stone, as he has done so many times in the past few weeks. I can see that he is trying to relive the better memories in his mind, dragging his thoughts away from the Patrol officer’s sneer and the gun and the clattering of a crutch as its occupant is thrown to the ground by the impact of the blow. He doesn’t want to remember that day, but he knows he can never forget it.
The name on the tombstone reads Andrew Finch.
That is my name.
The description reads ‘We never gave up on you’.
That is what Jeremy never did.
He stands up again, staring at the inscription unwillingly. Jeremy closes his eyes in pain, having cried too much today. He stuffs his hands into his pocket, and his fist closes around the photograph he found in my room. Gently, as not to rip it, he draws it out and splays it out on his palm. My face and his own stare up at him, our grins frozen in time. Impossibly unaware of future events that leave both of us alone.
Because I am dead.
And now my brother has no one.
)