My Brother

Life had never felt the same since the murder of my father. He had been a cruel and wretched man—harsh, loveless, and incapable of seeing me as anything more than his second-born and, therefore, unworthy of much regard. I had no illusions about his feelings, and yet, in the wake of his death, something restless had rooted itself inside me, waking me earlier and earlier each day. That morning, the clock read half-past four.

Sleep never came back to me after those disturbances. It was as if my body would make its own decision to rise, and I could do nothing but follow. As I had at the start of each day since his death, I made my way to check on my mother. Out of us all, she bore the heaviest weight of his absence. Most of her days were spent sleeping or otherwise lying awake exhausted. Every time I saw her, she seemed to sink a little further into her half of the empty bed. It broke me each time in small and silent ways. Still, I never let a morning pass without offering her a greeting and some food. As I reached the hallway, I found her bedroom door standing slightly ajar despite its typically closed state. I hesitated, then pushed it the rest of the way open with a slow, reluctant hand. The hinges gave a soft groan that she didn’t stir to. She didn’t lift her head to offer the glance of acknowledgment she always managed, no matter how heavy her sorrow had grown. I stepped inside, my eyes drawn to the nightstand where her prescription bottle laid tipped onto its side, a few stray Klonopin pills scattered across the floor. Beside it, a nearly empty bottle of vodka caught the weak morning light. The sheets were twisted around her legs, her body still, face slack. There was serenity in her expression, calmness I had never seen in her waking life. My pulse thudded in my ears as I stared down at her. I couldn’t bear the sight of her vacant, lifeless gaze, fixed so terribly upon me. Turning away, I fled downstairs.

In the kitchen, a single light dimly glowed, illuminating the only other person I knew would be awake. My brother sat at the table, absently flipping through one of our father’s old jurisprudence textbooks, a steaming mug of plain, black coffee beside him. He didn’t look up as I stepped into the doorway, but I knew he was aware of my presence.

“You knew,” I said. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

He turned a page with deliberate slowness.

“She killed herself,” he said. “What more did you want me to tell you?”

My hands curled into quivering fists. I blinked hard, willing the sting in my eyes to vanish before the tears could spill.

“That’s it?” My voice rose. “You just left her lying there? You weren’t going to tell anyone?”

At last, he looked up, releasing an irritable sigh. His dark eyes met mine, empty and lifeless—just like hers.

“She’s been lying there for a year,” he said. “Now she just isn’t breathing.”

A chill ran the length of my spine. In his eyes then, I saw a sick mind with no consideration for anyone but himself. I saw our father. His coffee remained untouched, its rising steam curling into the feeble light.

“That’s all you have to say?” I asked.

“What else is there to say?” he countered. My pain registered to him only as a minor disruption, a nuisance barely worth his attention. “She killed herself, Francis. And whether you want to admit it or not, we all saw it coming.”

I crossed the threshold of the archway into the kitchen, each step heavier than the last, lowering myself into the chair across from him. My gaze dropped to my hands that laced tightly in my lap, willing the tremble in my fingers to still.

“You should have woken us up.”

He slammed his book shut with a harsh clap that echoed through the kitchen.

“For what?” he asked. “So, we could all stand around her body and pretend to be shocked? So, we could cry over a woman who stopped being our mother a long time ago?”

I hated him for saying it. His indifference conveyed it as a fact that I simply needed to accept, but she was my mother. In that moment, I hated him, and I hated him more because what he said was true. A lone tear betrayed me, slipping down my cheek, trailing behind it hot anger and helplessness.

“What should I do?” The words escaped before I could stop them.

It was as though no matter the extent of my resentment, I subconsciously sought his guidance. I started to wonder if I always would.

“You should call someone,” he said. “The police. An ambulance, maybe. Not that it matters.”

His stare was unfaltering. Whether he waited for me to argue or simply to disappear, I couldn’t tell.

“You know, Anton, Liane, and the twins… They’re going to wake up soon,” I said. “And they’re going to wonder where their mother is.”

He leaned back in his chair, watching me with something akin to amusement.

“So… you came down here for what exactly? To ask if I’d be the one to tell them?”

I didn’t answer. There was no point in going back and forth with him. There never had been. In his eyes, he would always win. He stood, stretching his arms over his head, shaking off the pesky conversation.

“I’ll call someone,” he said finally. “They’ll come and take the body, if it makes you feel better. And you can break the news.”

He strolled past me out of the kitchen, moving towards the front door. Then, he was gone. The sound of his car engine cut into the quiet. I watched through the window as he drove away toward the city where he would arrive at the towering building that bore our family name: Galloway Law, to sit behind his embellished desk, holding his inflated title as Strategic Liaison, a position invented for him and him alone, while still being addressed as “Mr. Galloway” with polite smiles.

I sat in the kitchen long after he left, staring at the steam of his coffee as it eventually dissipated. I knew what had to come next—that in a few minutes, the sun would creep over the horizon, spilling the light of dawn through the windows. Upstairs, the others would soon stir, blinking sleep from their eyes and wandering downstairs with tired murmurs of “Morning.” They would look at me expectantly, asking what happened to Mom, and I would have to say it out loud. The thought made my stomach churn, the weight of the truth spiraling into sickness. The truth that Mom was dead. The house was still quiet, but it wouldn’t be for long. Then I asked myself, how could I let them see her like that? And so, I didn’t wake them, not yet. I couldn’t. Panicked, I grabbed the phone off the wall and called Galloway Law, asking for my brother. I must have called three, four, six times. No one put me through. No sirens were heard, no knocks at the door.

If he refused to deal with it, I knew the burden would fall onto me. For a long time, I hovered by the phone, staring at it while the receiver hung limply from its cradle. I thought about calling someone else, someone who could help, but my insides twisted with fear. In my head, the police would arrive demanding answers I wouldn’t know how to give, ripping what was left of my family apart, scattering us into cold foster homes miles from one another. It had been just past eight in the morning when I carried my mother’s body out to the woods behind our house. I’ll never forget how it felt, digging with my bare hands until my fingers ached, my chest burning with every breath. The earth swallowed her whole. I returned to the house filthy, sweating, my stomach hollow with grief. When my brother finally returned that evening, alone, with his hands in his pockets like nothing had happened, I knew he never called anyone. I confronted him, but he only shrugged. It didn’t matter to him. Nothing ever had.

I waited for anyone to ask where she was. No one did. Not Anton, not Alice or May, not even Liane. They lived day by day as if nothing had changed, and that was when the realization settled over me. To them, nothing had changed. It had been our brother who made their meals, who helped with schoolwork, who made sure they went to bed on time. It was a harsh reality to discover that he was right—our mother had been a ghost for longer than I had acknowledged.

It wasn’t until late that night, when the house had fallen silent again, that he came to me. I heard the faint scruff of his footsteps before I felt his presence in my bedroom doorway. Sitting upright in my bed, I absently scraped at the dirt still lodged beneath my nails, keeping my back to him.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“Buried,” I said. “In the woods.”

Nothing but silence answered me. When I finally dared to glance over my shoulder, he was no longer there.

By the time our mother was spoken of again, a full week had passed. Routine continued, unchanged. The house still stood, the sun rose and fell, and it was as if she had been gone our entire lives. We ate dinner together each night as a family, just like we always had. It was during one of those dinners that my brother finally said it. He didn’t ease into his declaration, nor did he offer any sort of warning.

“Mom is dead.” His words were flat and untouched by sorrow.

For a moment, the air seemed to vanish.

“What?” Anton’s voice wavered, uncertain, but we had all heard it.

My brother leaned forward, propping his elbows on the table.

“Our mother. She’s dead,” he said. Then his eyes found mine. “Francis knew about it.”

All at once, their gazes turned on me, and suddenly the room felt smaller.

“She’s really dead?” Alice whispered.

I opened my mouth to speak, but the words tangled and died before they could escape.

“If you want to see her, she’s buried in the yard,” my brother said.

Alice covered her mouth with both hands. Liane’s lip trembled, her wide, innocent eyes darting between us, and May remained eerily quiet. Across the table, my brother’s glare anchored itself on me, steady and cold. At last, May spoke. “How did she die?”

My brother tapped his fingers against the wood of the table in a slow, methodical rhythm. “Overtaken by grief,” he said, “she overdosed on her pills.”

Liane’s voice cracked open, crying out at me. “And you buried her?!”

I wanted to explain myself, but before I could find the words to, he laughed.

“Oh, why mourn her?” he said, sneering. “She didn’t care about any of you!”

I managed to croak out in shock, “What are you doing?” but he barreled past it.

“Are none of you angry?!” he demanded, his eyes flashing across the table. It wasn’t a question; he was telling us to be angry. “She abandoned us. She chose to drown in her own misery, and even before that, she wasn’t there! Once Dad was gone, I raised all of you! Me!”

He intended to hurt us, sparing none of our emotions, not even mine. His resentment filled the room thickly, his eyes pinning me once again, daring me to answer, but I didn’t. He exhaled sharply, the tension bleeding from his body all at once. His chair scraped loudly against the floor as he departed without another word, though the weight of his presence always lingered, even in his absence.

Upstairs, I found him sitting at the edge of his bed, staring at nothing.

“Hey,” I said, stepping inside. “You okay?”

For a long moment, he didn’t say anything. Then, slowly, he turned just enough for me to see the side of his face. His eyes were glassy and distant, looking straight through me rather than at me. I closed the door behind myself.

“You hardly sleep. You barely eat. Why do you do this to yourself?” I asked. “You don’t have to live like this.”

Since Dad’s death, he had stopped taking his medication, and I wasn’t the only one who had noticed the way his mind unraveled and frayed at the edges. Even the gentlest mention of it made him bristle, and somehow, he already knew what I was going to say.

“I don’t need to be medicated, Francis!” he said, ragged with fury as he snapped. “I don’t need medication, and I don’t need your goddamn help!”

He had been unstable for most of his life—maybe all of it, I was never certain. Whether he took his pills, that was up to him. Whether he sought help, from me or even from a professional, that too was up to him, but that following night, he had disappeared somewhere between eleven o’clock and midnight. I hadn’t bothered to look for him, not until I heard sounds beneath the floorboards. The basement was little more than a graveyard of forgotten furniture and broken appliances; no one ever went down there. At first, I told myself it was nothing, but then I heard more—a deep rhythmic murmur, a voice rising and falling in a cadence.

I was sitting in the living room, absorbed in schoolwork, while the others slept upstairs. The house was still, shrouded in shadows save for the warm light that spilled from the lamps at my back. It wasn’t unusual for my brother to roam the house at odd hours. More than once, I’d found him adrift in one of his episodes, pacing and muttering nonsense to himself. Just another restless night, I told myself. Still, I rose from the couch, padding softly out of the living room, past the darkened kitchen, down the narrow hall. The door to the basement was left open. A faint, shivering light flickered along the stairwell—the unsteady glimmer of the downstairs ceiling bulb. I swallowed the lump gathering in my throat and started down the steps, avoiding the ones that grated underfoot. Twenty steps, maybe fewer, yet they stretched forever downward. Halfway, the air had shifted. A thick, metallic scent permeated my lungs. At the bottom, under the faltering light, I saw her. Liane, my baby sister.

She lay sprawled on the cold stone floor. The nightgown she wore, once a pale pink, had been soaked through and clung to her small frame, glistening a deep scarlet. Her curls that were usually buoyant with life fanned lifelessly around her head in a halo. He had folded her delicate hands over her chest, taking on the illusion of peaceful slumber. My brother knelt before her, his body rigid. His clothes were stained red, a blade of obsidian at his side. It was familiar even in the dim light. The same blade our father had once owned, shimmering in its newfound bloody glory. My stomach stirred violently, and the room swayed. The edges of the world bent around me. I couldn’t move; I couldn’t even find my breath. For only a second, I convinced myself that none of it was real, but then he looked up. His eyes found mine, vast and shining with an unearthly brightness. Slowly, a grin split his face. His entire body quivered, trembling as though electrified by some undivulged force.

“Francis!” he said. “Perfect, you’re here! You need to see this, really see this. He spoke to me, Francis. He came to me!”

My mouth was dry, my voice barely scraping out when I was forced to ask, “Who?” though I knew I wouldn’t be able to understand—couldn’t hope to.

He shuddered with the force of his own exhale.

“At first,” he began. “I thought it was God. His voice was mighty and commanding… He told me what had to be done, just as He did with Abraham, leading him to the altar! But then, He revealed Himself to me…”

My heart hammered against my ribs, the blood roaring so loud it nearly drowned out his words.

“What are you even saying?”

“It wasn’t God, Francis… It was one who knows suffering more intimately than anyone. The one cast out, the one forsaken. A fallen angel. The Morning Star!”

His voice was wild with devotion and utterly unhinged from sanity. My head pounded under the weight of it.

“Fucking listen to yourself!”

“She was the offering!” he said, beaming. “A pure soul, untainted. The sacrifice demanded to balance the scales and avenge our father. And now, Francis, I have been chosen!”

He stepped forward, drenched, unsteady hands outstretched to me. I stumbled backward, my foot catching on the edge of a step, falling hard onto the unforgiving stone slab. He looked down at me, lighted from above by the swaying bulb.

“Abraham never killed Isaac.” I feebly spoke. “But you murdered Liane in cold blood.”

His face twisted as though the words physically wounded him.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “She’s not gone. She’s transcended beyond this broken world, basking in the glory of her sacrifice… You should be grateful.”

My terror ignited into blind fury. Grateful? Grateful, of all things? Without thought, I lunged, grabbing him by his collar and slamming him against the wall. He hit the stone with a loud thud and crumbled beneath me, but it wasn’t enough, not after what he had done.

“You’ll thank me someday, brother!” he said before I shoved him again, harder.

The crack of his head against the floor resonated like a gunshot. His chest heaved, then slowed, his wide eyes dimming into an unfocused stare. I staggered back. Above us, the basement light swayed on its chain. It flickered, flickered, then it went out.

I didn’t sleep, but rather stared into darkness, and when the sun rose, I stared at the wall. Despite everything, I dragged downstairs, my mind empty, but my limbs moved on their own. My brother had prepared breakfast, just like every morning, and it sat cold on the counter by the time I arrived in the kitchen. He was already there when I stepped through the archway, his voice meeting me like a breeze from another world. Light, even cheery.

“Morning, Francis,” he said.

I stood frozen, my gaze landing not on him, but on his prescriptions, I had deliberately left out on the counter. He noticed, wordlessly shifting to place himself between me and the little orange bottles. “I made breakfast. Sit down.”

I didn’t move. He took a step forward, just one.

“I’m going to eat in my room, if that’s okay.”

He nodded casually.

“Could you ask Liane to come down?” he asked, just as I was about to leave.

Slowly, I turned back around. He stood there, disarmingly ordinary—so untouched by the memory it was sickening. The bruise above his right ear bloomed purple black, blossoming like a flower in rot.

“Are you deaf?” he said with a laugh.

I stared, like one might stare at a ghost that had forgotten it was dead.

“Take your medication.”

Quickly, I ascended the stairs before he could respond.

Liane was no longer in the basement. I had heard him all through the night, his slow footsteps drifting beneath the floor, the scrape of objects being dragged or rearranged. He wasn’t loud, but I could hear him. By morning, she was upstairs. I realized it before I even saw her. The air outside her bedroom door was saturated with the sour stench from the basement. That night, I had heard the water running in the bathroom down the hall. He had washed her, dried her hair with a towel like she’d just stepped out of the tub, gentle as a father bathing his child. Then he had dressed her in her favorite outfit—the soft cotton dress with lace collar and pearl buttons. He even braided her hair the way she used to ask him to. He didn’t see what I saw. To him, her skin wasn’t waxen or cold, her joints not stiff with the rigidity of death. He tucked her into bed, carefully and tenderly, whispering something like a lullaby before I heard her door click shut. He spoke to her the whole night like she was still there, responding to him with sleepy murmurs and giggles as I listened to it all from my bedroom.

Alice was the first to notice the scent. She emerged from her room, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. I sat at the top of the stairs, watching her as she wrinkled her nose and turned towards Liane’s door.

“Do you smell that?” she asked me.

Some part of me felt buried deep in guilt. When our eyes met, it was as if I was the culprit instead of the witness. I nodded. Drawn by something she didn’t yet understand, Alice approached Liane’s room, calling out her name, receiving no answer. She peered inside at Liane who lay perfectly still, the white of her dress marred by dark, spreading stains where the blood had since seeped through. Alice’s scream split the silence. She reeled back and turned to flee down the hall into me, crashing against my chest, racked with violent sobs.

“Francis?” she asked. “What… What happened?”

The question hung in the air between us as she buried her face against me, clinging so tightly I could hardly breathe. My own tears blurred the hallway into smudges of light and shadow.

“What’s going on up there?” my brother called from the base of the stairs.

Alice stirred, lifting her tear-streaked face from the hollow of my shoulder. Rage warped her features, and she broke away from me, stormed down the stairs, shoving hard against him with a shocking force as she passed. He didn’t react, just blinked slow and reptilian-like, cold-blooded and impassive. May and Anton appeared next, awakened by the noise, their faces bleary and confused. They passed by Liane’s room in their pursuit down the hallway, the sight inside stopping them both dead. It wasn’t like when Mom had died. When Liane died, our worlds shifted. Even in the thick stupor of denial, everyone noticed. Everyone except for him. The house was usually a lively, colorful sanctuary come the weekends, but that day it stood brittle and silent, interrupted only by the sharp, shrill cry of May when she caught sight of Liane’s blood-matted dress. Anton’s cry was silent, reminiscent of a breathless gasp, though his wide stricken eyes conveyed everything that screams couldn’t. They would have turned to our brother for direction, but now their eyes found me, searching for solace that I couldn’t provide. I said nothing—not to him, or to them. Part of me couldn’t, but part of me needed my brother to see what he had done on his own. He hummed a tune under his breath as he wiped down the kitchen counter for the third time. May mustered the nerve to approach him, her voice shaking as she asked, “Who dressed her?” The cloth fell still in his hand. He tilted his head, smiled a soft, dreamy smile down at her.

“She wanted to look nice today.”

My eyes lingered on the angry bruise at his temple, the faint red that crusted over the beds of his nails. I wondered if the others saw it too.

I stayed at the top of the stairs while my brother sat alone in the living room, facing the loveseat as if Liane still sat there, cross-legged and bright-eyed on her usual spot. He spoke to the empty seat with gentle enthusiasm, laughing as if prompted by her imagined replies. Then he would pause, listening intently to nothing. At one point, I had crept down the stairs for a glass of water, careful not to disturb him as I walked by. When I returned from the kitchen, his position had changed to kneeling before the fireplace, his head bowed, lips moving in a stream of whispered muttering. His words weaved in and out of English to something guttural and obscure, a half-formed tongue of a language that only existed to him.

I waited, foolishly, for the scattered pieces of my brother’s mind to fall back into place, but it became evident that those fragments would never find anchorage again, only drifting further apart. By sundown, I couldn't bear it any longer. He had wandered out into the yard by then, settling beneath the old oak tree at the back of the garden—the one that had long since died, its limbs bare and its bark frail. The splintered swing hung askew from its strongest branch and my brother gave it a light push in the windless air, watching it sway before pushing it again. Through the backdoor, I stepped out into the night, crossing the expanse of the garden. I sat down beside him. For some long minutes, we shared the silence. The last sliver of sun dipped below the horizon and darkness took its place.

“She’s dead,” I said at last.

He turned to me, confused. “Who’s dead?”

“Liane. You killed her.”

First, his brow twitched, then his lips parted as though to protest, turned away, then turned back. “You’re not funny, Francis.”

“She was a child,” I continued. “And you tore her open like she was nothing.”

His breath caught. Both hands flew to his head as he doubled over, fingers pulling at his own hair. A hoarse sound clawed its way from his throat, something between a groan and a scream, his face contorting in agony.

“No,” he said, mumbling over and over again. “No, no, no. I couldn’t have. She needed me.”

“She did. And that’s what makes it worse.”

We didn’t look at each other. His eyes were squeezed shut, his face wet with tears. Mine were fixed onto the pale moon that had begun to rise in the absence of the sun. His entire body shook with anguish, the type of cries that leave you hiccupping and gasping for air. It was the first time I had seen my brother cry.

“I didn’t do it…” he sobbed. “I didn’t do it… It wasn’t me…”

The following morning, the overcast sky shed a sickly gray hue through the windows, barely illuminating the main floor. In the kitchen, my brother sat hunched over the table, scribbling furiously into another one of Dad’s old books—a leather notebook with curling, water-warped pages, its spine nearly split from years of handling. He didn’t look up when I entered, though he never did anymore. To my surprise, May and Anton were already awake, seated across from him like obedient pupils. May’s long, dark braid, damp from her morning shower, lay draped over one shoulder. Anton’s nose still bore a pink tint from crying the night before, yet his lips pressed together in a solemn expression that didn’t belong on a child’s face.

“There’s breakfast on the counter if you want it, Francis,” my brother said, still without sparing me a glance.

I looked over at the kitchen counter—toast with butter and slightly burnt edges, eggs, and a sliced apple.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You should eat,” he said, the pen tearing across the notebook page in jagged strokes. “He’s coming back tonight,” he muttered, no longer directed at me, but to whom, I wasn’t sure. “The veil’s thinnest just before dawn.”

The scratch of the pen’s nib against the tough, abused paper was an ugly and invasive sound. He turned the page, only to attack it with even more fervor than the last.

“If the sacrifice is pure, the binding will hold this time.”

“What binding?” I asked, “What are you telling them?”

He finally lifted his head, eyes meeting mine. “Not a genuine binding, Francis. Not to worry,” he said, as if explaining something obvious to a fool. “A spiritual one.”

May turned to me then. She clutched a stuffed animal of Liane’s against her chest—a worn rabbit with one ear dangling by a thread

“He told us everything,” she said. “We know what you did to her.”

I stared at her, at Anton, then at him as awareness dawned on me. He smiled from across the table, the pen stilling in his hand.

“He’s lying!” I said. “You know he’s not well!”

“It’s okay,” Anton then spoke. “She isn’t really gone. Last night, we talked to her, and… she moved her arm. She can hear us.”

“She’s trapped,” my brother said. “And it’s up to us to free her, to help her pass over. I’ve been chosen by Him to help her.”

A rage boiled inside me, blistering and wild, the same rage that had flooded me the night she died. He knew better. He had once been intelligent, so much that I was envious. He wasn’t deluded, he was manipulating the young and naive—our own flesh and blood, turning them against me. Or maybe, he had truly forgotten. Either way, I exploded.

“You liar!” I practically screamed. “You know none of this is true! You’re poisoning them! You’re filth! You’re scum!”

His smile faded, replaced by a steady, measuring stare. May and Anton’s eyes fell on me too, then beside me, Alice emerged, still in her night clothes, hair unbrushed.

“Are you finished?” my brother asked in that same condescending tone.

My face burned and my muscles twitched with the urge to hit him. One of Alice’s hands gripped my shirt, fingers digging into the fabric. My brother’s attention slid to her and the smile reemerged.

“Alice,” he said, reaching a hand toward her. “Come, sit. We were just about to say morning prayers.”

She shrank back, her gaze flickering from Anton, to May, then to the floor. She shook her head, making his expression dissolve once more, his hand falling.

“Fine,” he said, returning to the notebook with a violent slash of the pen. “I saw her last night, Francis. In the mirror. She was crying.”

A strangled sob escaped May as she gripped the stuffed animal tighter against her.

“She didn’t speak,” he continued. “She just wept… And with it, I heard the little song she used to hum to herself when she couldn’t sleep. You remember it, don’t you?”

He laid a hand reverently across the notebook, the sharp ends of his nails pricking into the fragile paper without tearing it.

“I wrote it down,” he said. “Every note. She gave it to me.”

I stepped closer, squinting over the children’s heads at the page spread before him. It wasn’t music. It wasn’t anything. What I saw was a deranged mess of sigils, spirals, and loops that appeared endless, crowding the pages like an infestation.

“You’ll see,” he said, rich with certainty. “Tonight, He’ll speak to me again. He’ll set it right. You’ll see.”

Liane had since joined our mother in the ground, but that night, the smell returned as if her body had never left. It thickened the air, creeping under doors. I noticed it when I woke from a nightmare too tangled to retell, one that left my skin damp and my heart rattling like a dying engine. Light from my brother’s room illuminated the hall and the metrical scraping of his pen met my ears once more. I looked in. The room had transformed into something demented and profane, the once-blank walls defaced in illegible scripture and unnerving depictions. They were words without meaning, faces without eyes. One face drawn in obsessive strokes mirrored Liane’s, down to the slant of her nose and the freckles on her cheeks, etched so deeply it had cracked the plaster. My brother sat at the center of it all, his knees pressing into the floor, a broken piece of charcoal clutched in bloodied, blackened fingers. The insanity had reached the hardwood and as far up every wall as he could reach, nearly to the ceiling. He muttered gibberish to no one, not seeing me. His world had folded entirely inward, and I was no longer a part of it. The shirt he wore clung to his back, soaked in sweat and speckled with crimson.

There was a light pressure on my wrist, a trembling hand that grabbed onto mine followed by the sound of a soft, breaking cry. I turned. Alice’s face was colorless as she looked up at me, features corrupted into a silent scream. Her eyes were pleading. She tugged at me with all her strength, urging me away from the evil my brother was weaving into the flesh of our home. Down the stairs we went, her breath catching in shallow, panicked swallows. The air began to worsen with every step, as though the walls had been soaked in copper. I gagged, bile rising behind my teeth. We reached the living room, and then she stopped. A sound raw and horrifying in its sincerity ripped from her throat and there they were, Anton and May. They lay together on the floor in front of our mother’s old standing mirror, the one she used to primp in, fussing over her earrings or smoothing out her skirts. It was shattered at its center but remained intact. Anton wore his navy slacks and suspenders, May in her yellow dress with embroidered violets. Their clothes were pressed, their hair neatly combed, their hands bound together by ribbon that cut into their skin. Above them, symbols in red scrawled across the glass, dripping and staining the floor where their bodies hadn’t already reached. Their chests had been cut into with precision. The heart seemed to be his favorite. They hadn’t been hacked or torn but simply opened. Alice collapsed beside them. Her scream gave way to a weak sob, hands hovering helplessly over May’s face—the face reminiscent of her own. May, her twin sister. She turned back to me; her cheeks streaked with tears. I wanted to cry with her, like I had for Liane and for our mother, for the deterioration of what family we had left, and for the fear of not knowing what time we’d be given. I couldn’t. There was no room for the sound—only that aching pressure behind my eyes and the dry knot in my throat that never came undone.

“He did this!” Her voice fractured at the edges, unable to hold the weight of her rage as she opened her mouth again, trying to speak, but all that followed was the dreaded weeping that clogged her throat tight.

I dropped to the floor and pulled her close, folded her shuddering body into my arms as she shattered from the inside. There was nothing else to be done, no comfort to offer. He hadn’t cleaned it up or dressed it in false hope, because he wanted us to see it. Upstairs, the scraping on the walls resumed as he rocked on his knees, lost in his own mind. He didn’t sleep. I didn’t either. Alice, cradled in my arms, stared endlessly into the mirror as her breathing eventually steadied, though she never truly stopped crying.

She cried through the night, her vocals shredded dry, and by morning, she was still crying. We both knew what was coming. We were next, that much was certain, but not when. Tangled together in a huddle of desperation, we remained on the living room floor, too terrified to move or to speak, but God, I wish I had spoken. I wish I had turned to her and told her that I loved her, that I was sorry. The floorboards above creaked a low wooden moan that made Alice flinch against me. I tightened my grip around her shoulders, but it wasn’t him—only the house, old and groaning under the weight of all it had witnessed.

At some point, I must have drifted off under a spell of sheer exhaustion, because I never heard when he truly did approach. The first thing I felt was his hand, rough and cold as it wrapped around the back of my neck and yanked. My body jolted, teeth clashing hard together with a snap when I hit the floor. Alice screamed—a terrible, broken sound that tore from her like a final breath. Dazed, I tried to get up, but he was already there, looming over me. His eyes locked onto mine, but there was no fury in them—only a deep, harrowing sadness.

“Stop! Don’t touch him!” Alice’s voice broke like glass, but he spared her no mind.

His gaze stayed fixed on me.

“You challenge me, Francis,” he said, low and steady. “All I’ve ever done is care for you. And all you’ve done in return… is challenge my authority.”

My palms raised instinctively, open and shivering as if they might catch the blow. “Please,” I gasped, the words tumbling out in a single breath. “Please, you’re my brother. My closest brother. I– I love you.”

For only a moment, his features softened, and he even seemed hesitant, so I pressed on, pleading with him.

“You protected us. All of us, until now,” I said, though his lips peeled back in a grimace. “You’re our brother. You don’t have to do this.”

The words had hardly left my mouth before I saw the wall behind his eyes slam back into place, and that’s when I knew I had lost him.

“You think you’re better than me,” he said, each word laced with venom. “You think you can take my place.”

The collar of my shirt was seized in a violent jerk and my skull collided against the floor with a brutal slam. My vision shattered into a white-hot blur, the world narrowing to a high, ghostly hum. Somewhere then far away, Alice’s screams pierced the ringing. I fought to move, only to find that I was buried alive inside my own body. Through my narrowing tunnel of consciousness, I saw her. She stumbled, caught on the hem of her nightgown, arms raised though she knew they’d do no good.

“Traitors!” my brother yelled. “How dare you betray me! You’re both traitors!”

His voice should have been deafening, but it only blended with the penetrating whine that reverberated in my ears, and just before the dark engulfed me, the glint of his blade met my eyes. The cry that followed echoed off the bones of the house like it wanted to claw its way out. Then there was nothing.

When I awoke again, I was no longer in the living room. The world pitched and reeled around me in nauseating lurches. I willed myself to sit up. The air was thick with dust, motes drifting lazily through a narrow stream of light. I was in the downstairs guest room, resting atop the forgotten bed’s stiff mattress. Beside me on the nightstand, like a token of victory, was the blade. Its obsidian glistened faintly, streaked with the lives it had taken. My knees buckled as I stood, pain blooming from my head and seeping into every limb, throbbing. The door was shut. I gripped the knob, but it only rattled uselessly in my palm. My breath quickened, dread unfurling. Staggering back, I scanned the room, eyes settling on the small window flush to the ground, simply placed for ventilation. A cool breeze passed through it, sweeping over me a mad spark of hope. I stumbled forward frantically, collapsed, the fresh air whispering freedom against my skin. I pressed my face to the opening—undoubtedly tight, but it had to be possible. I drew back, mind racing. My skin was slick with a gross sheen of sweat, but it had truly been my only ally.

Removing my shirt, I cast it aside and plunged my head through first, my shoulders following until they filled the frame. My jaw clenched and my arms pulled tight against my body as I attempted to shrink myself, pushing painfully against my chest. The frame scraped against me with every inch, tearing skin, blood smearing onto the sill. I paused, drew in a breath, then another—deeper, until my ribs strained against the skin of my torso and I shoved again. Agony lanced through my being. The old, wood frame flayed me, piece by piece, but still, I shoved. For a moment, I thought I’d be stuck there, waiting for the hour my brother would find my head sticking out onto the lawn and cut it clean off—until, finally, the resistance broke. I spilled out into the dirt and tangled weeds behind the house, breathless and shaking. A while passed where I just laid there, face in the mud, blood dripping from a shallow gash along my abdomen. My heart pounded like it would flee my chest, but I was alive, and somewhere inside, my brother was preparing. He still believed he had time.

I don’t remember how long I ran, only that it felt like forever. The world passed in blurred strokes and time no longer held meaning. My bare feet slashed open on gravel and broken asphalt, each step tearing skin from bone. My lungs burned raw, throat stripped with every gasp, but I didn’t stop. At the edge of some nameless roadside, I found a market just opening for the morning. A few early risers milled about, unloading crates and setting up stalls. I must’ve looked feral—bare-chested, caked with grime and dried blood. From my pocket, I pulled a few damp, torn bills, warm from the press of my body. It was just enough for a shirt, cheap and ill-fitting, rough with an odd scent, but it was clean. At the train station, I didn’t care where I was going. I didn’t read the board with any intention, didn’t check the maps or timetables. The first outbound route was all I pointed to at the counter, surrendering the last of my money. It could’ve been anywhere, it didn’t matter, but when I looked down, the ticket was for Chicago, Illinois.

For a while, I lived in the shelter on West Harrison, packed in tight with other bodies running from different pasts. I worked wherever I could—washing dishes, stocking shelves, shoveling snow. Whatever I could find, and whoever was willing to hire a bedraggled seventeen-year-old with nothing to his name. It wasn’t much, but eventually, it was enough to scrape by. Recently, I rented out a small apartment downtown—a shoebox with leaky faucets, mold here and there, but it was mine. Gradually, I clawed my way back into something resembling a life. Sometimes at night, when the city hums beneath my window and sirens wail in the distance, I wonder how different things could have been. I never went back to that house, but I did keep something from it. It was a letter that I received months after sending my own from the shelter. It didn’t contain hatred or rage, just the truth—that I forgave him, even if he didn’t deserve it, that I loved him, even though it was hard. The reply was short, written in a familiar shaky hand. I keep it tucked away in the bottom drawer of my dresser, still folded along the creases from when I first opened it.

“Francis,

I’m sorry I couldn’t be the brother you needed.

I’m sorry I couldn’t be the man Dad wanted.

I hope that someday, you’ll see the light with me,

And we’ll meet again.

Your brother,

Declan.”