Sleeping in Your Brother's Bed

A stranger enters a boy's life.

There is a stranger in my brother’s bed.

He had appeared with the grumbling of an engine and a flickering headlight, the vehicle having emerged from the night like a tired beast. Few words had been exchanged between the stranger and my parents, my tired ears listening from the shingles. They’d been muted and harsh words, but he came in anyway. I stayed on the roof, losing myself in the heavens.

Now two nights later, I peer at him, a shapeless lump beneath the covers. Consistent muttering leaks from the bed, unintelligible sentences lost like the whisper of the wind. He shifts and turns periodically, groping at invisible monsters. I don’t go to save him.

The stranger doesn’t belong in there. He intrudes on my brother’s space, spoiling the memories held in there with his presence alone. There is a feeble ghost of my sibling that has always lingered, and every movement the stranger gives just stirs its peace. Like a parasite, trying to destroy what resides within the sacred room, tarnishing everything. I hate him for it.

That is my brother’s ground.

My brother, with his confident smile and magnetic aura, always making sure things were the best for me. Raising me when our parents couldn’t. Being my friend when no one else would. Teaching me when I thought I wasn’t capable. And he always had a smile. Nothing ever got to him. He was my shield, and I was under the belief it would never end, that sense of protection and friendship.

But then, with a roar of an engine and a cloud of dust, he was gone, leaving a confused little boy on the porch, his parents refusing to come to his side. A gaping hole was slashed, gutted, and excavated from my life then. That silhouette that should have held him was now empty air, never to be refilled. I had been too dependent, and now my soul had been torn away with him.

That was only on the fringes of my memory now, so what did it matter?

The next morning, I fled from the house, escaping the dulled yells between the stranger and my father. Discontent brewed in my home, threatening to burst from the seams, so I distanced myself from the inevitable eruption that the stranger was about to trigger. Why was he still in my home? Why did he insist on loitering?

I decided to walk, aimless with my direction but knowing I would only wind up at the usual end. Gravel was kicked away by my feet as I trekked down the road, my head hanging low. The dome of blue above me churned with wind, the horizons in every direction never faltering. Out here, the miles only ended when your eyes could see no further.

I veer off into a field, leaving a space of parted grass behind me, my body paving through the waist-high sea of golden brown. Soon, I cross paths with a worn trail, one made by my own wandering feet. On instinct, I follow it, leading it to a clearing of brush and dirt. A single tree, its branches grey and dead, stands at the far end, like a silent guardian.

Here my childhood resides.  Games played, adventures made, and memories once shared all linger here. Once there had been more vegetation, but the tramping feet of my brother and I soon brought an end to that, erosion having ruined any chance of it returning.

I wander over to the tree, my eyes still fixated on the ground, not minding where I was going. This had been our holy ground, and I knew it better than any other land. It was a home away from home, and perhaps more comforting.

My hands dig into a certain crevice in the trunk, the dead, stripped tree smooth from years of stationary death. I climb up a branch or two, reaching up to a notch between branches. My hand returns with a baseball glove, the leather faded from age. I clamber back down, sitting down on a wide, protruding root.

I stare at the glove. All the games it’d witnessed, its brother always in the hands of my own sibling. Playing catch, our simplest escape from life.

Each of us held a secret to where we hid our respective glove, never telling or showing the other its location. Eyes would have to be turned away in the time of stowing away our most cherished possessions, but it was the only secrets we kept away from each other. I always suspected my brother knew where I concealed mine, but I knew he’d never dare ruin the magic of the idea. I never found his. I don’t even know if he bothered retrieving it when he left, and I’ve never gone looking for it. Let it remain gone, just like him.

I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at a physical part of the past, but when I eventually looked up, the stranger was standing there.

The air became thick as I gazed up to him, as if the wind itself had suddenly stopped. Here he was, in our spot. OUR spot. I wanted to leap up, to strike him wherever I could and frighten him away from the clearing until the end of his days. He was a bug. A parasite. Something I should just squish under my shoe.

But with all that distaste I gave him from a look alone, the stranger just returned it with a sad little smile. His eyes showed pain, though, like wells deep with sorrow, threatening to consume not only me, but him as well. Lines etched tracks beneath his eyes, the nightly mutterings and dreams taking their toll. I only hugged my glove to my chest, letting my eyes fall and burrow into the dirt at my feet.

He sat down beside me on the root. I inched away.

The stranger was silent, but that tension to speak was churning in the air. I know he wanted to say something. To explain why he was intruding my home, why he was disrupting memories that should have been kept at peace. But he just sat there, a hollow man with no real purpose here.

He began to cry. It started as a shiver, running up his body before leading to a sudden heave of his chest. One tear, then two, then streaming down his face in a torrent. His mouth moved, tongue curling to try to form words, but he was muted by the bitterness in the air, the stranger mouthing nothing. Just gasps of deep pain, shaking in my presence.

I watched from the corner of my eye, silent.

The stranger shakily let a hand fall, reaching beneath the root we sat on. It dug through grass and dirt with desperation, emerging clenching a glove, the leather worn, dirtied and ancient. A glove of the exact same make as mine. One that was all too familiar.

He brought it to his lap, tears like raindrops as they pattered against the glove.

“I’m sorry,” muttered the stranger through a sob.

Sometimes, that’s all it took. Two simple words to crush a wall of bitterness built over years of quiet brooding. No matter how well defended that wall was, there would always be a fault; a crack, a miscalculated angle, a weak stone. Something that would make it fragile. It just took the right tool to make it crumble. 

I looked at him, my own tears starting to join his before he embraced me, a stranger no more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author's Note

Something I wrote up for a contest.