Little Brother, or Bran-don, or Bug

“You’re under arrest for the murder of a bird.”

“A bird? That’s just ridiculous.”

“Yes, ma’am. A bird. Now, hands behind your back.”

“Hold on for a sec—”

“Hands behind your back. Now.”

“Officer—”

She rubbed the left tip of her forehead, over and over and over again. There was a nail stuck in it, how bad it hurt. She was Frankenstein’s creature, squatting on the floor and pinned by copper, amalgamated with embryonic fluid. She tipped a Tylenol down her throat, then a mint. Laid her elbows on the table. She looked forward.

On the wall, there was a small clock lighted by the singular buzzing bulb that aligned with her heartbeat, sticky and thin. It said six o’clock. Six. Six. Click. Click. A brief flash of darkness hit when a fly crashed in. Another corpse to sweep out.

Storage door opened. She looked back. Some guy. His face was familiar but his nametag said Mike, but she knew no Mike.

So, uh, can you take the shift? I’m clocking out now. You know, they don’t pay overtime, he chuckled, nervous.

She let her stare linger over her shoulder, a little knife stabbing until he shrugged and waved, simultaneously, so he looked like he was vaguely falling apart to disco music. 

I’m clocking out, though, he repeated. You know, Will is super mad cause you missed that night shift yesterday.

He melted out the door.

Like a gargantuan, she stood up. Rubbed her head. Adjusted herself to her current height. She hadn’t really realized how tall humans were until they fell. That had many meanings.

The first was when she saw Mom cry. The third time was now.

The second.

“Can I just know, what kind of bird? Species?”

“You hit the bird. You should know!”

“It was just so fast, officer. I was getting home from work, my back was aching from being on my feet so long, and it just came exploding out. Like a firework or something. Or, a dynamite.”

“You should know.”

“Okay. Fine. It was a pigeon. Happy?”

The second time she had heard Little Brother speak, past the singular time, the required initiation of “Ma,” it was “Millie.”

She fell right into those two syllabic holes. 

She had told this story over and over again, to him. How magical. How laughing. When he was five, then seven, then nine. He grew up hearing this story.

Four hours later, she clocked out, after spending those dragging minutes parrying customer demands and the snapping mouths of ponytailed people who did not know what kind of paper towel they wanted even though, every time, they insisted they did.

Little Brother, Little Brother. The things she would do for him. He was a pearl clutched in the pressure of her mind. On the way back, she stuck another mint into her mouth. Relished and exhaled to its sensation of cleanliness, as if it could make her hands shiny and smooth again. She didn’t really know what brand it was, she didn’t need to memorize it, because she always had a second box in her pocket. In case her first ran out. Or it was a forlorn try to hang on. 

Hang on, to what? 

 She paused on the intersection of Amster and Sage, where they never fixed that dead streetlight.

If she walked a bit further, two streets into the moon, she would find a small lump in the ground of packed dirt.

The moon, which was behind her, tapped her heart. A teasing touch. 

“No, no, I swear it was pigeon. You know those, like the rats. Flying rats. With the cradled purple chins.”

“No, it was a mockingbird. Its legs were all broken. And the right wing. Because you ran right into it.”

“It must have been very pretty then. At least, more than a pigeon. Ugly little bullets.”

“No.” A pause. “It was just a dead bird.”

Little Brother spilled his milk at the table that evening. 

She breathed, a tremendous wind spilling out. She swore she rippled the milk a little, an expanse of bone-silk, her sigh so huge. A small bit went over the edge, so now dripped abjectly to the tile below. Little Brother glanced at her. Just a bit afraid.

Smell it, it’s rotten, he said, mouth twitching up in the gesture of a smile. He leaned up close, a microbiologist studying his morbid find. 

Gross, Little Brother. Stop that, she snapped, reaching out to yank his head back up before his nose could dip in.

Ow! He touched his head. There was still a breath of purple there. Bruised flesh. 

She cracked her hand back, scraped back her chair. Clean that up. It stinks. I better see you using Clorox.

He flashed a side-glance at her. Stop being worried. 

Then: I shouldn’t have told you. I’m sorry. He wasn’t really— I don’t get hurt usually, and he gets what he wants, and if I just give him some money he usually leaves me alone—

Little Brother held the carton upside-down beside him. Now a second drip joins the first. Like tears. Boo-hoo. How sad was he, how sad they were, twin stars in a death-spiral orbit, compressing deeper before they inevitably splintered outward with all the force of two supernovas.  

She crossed her arms.

They said rotten meat smelled like spoiled milk. Rotten: unfit for human consumption. Breaking down, or curdling, with enzymatic activity and oxidation. Outwardly revolting. Or, rot-in: could go both ways. Slopes of decay curving into spongy ground. It made her think of digging a hole for a body. 

The smell of the milk was making her sick.

The body had fallen very quickly, and looked very wrinkled on the ground.

Another thing. She hadn’t meant to. Or she did.

 It didn’t matter what she meant or didn’t mean, because the deed was done and buried and what else, could she dig it up again? Reanimate it? Steal an identity? Could she play up a con act, create a double identity? Murdered by day, murderer by night?

Something resembling giggles gurgled up inside her and she pressed it back down. She whipped around to leave before she could truly shudder into laughter.

Millie, Little Brother called. 

She looked back. Her heart chambers thudded like little people were banging and tearing at its walls. 

It’s Brandon, he enunciated.  Bran-don. Each syllable popped out like a dislocated joint.

“Mockingbird, huh, where did you think of that?”

“Hey! That’s not the right voice to talk to an officer. What were you doing on the night when you hit the mockingbird?”

“Well, I was driving home from work—”

“You already said that.”

“Stop interrupting me! You’re supposed to be taking notes. That’s what officers do. Anyways, I was driving home from work, it was all dark. This city, you know, should fix its street lights. There’s always one broken over on Amster and Sage. Also its traffic lights. Everything was absolutely darker than ol’ Mama’s forehead when she’s mad. Bam. It just came right out. Never saw it coming. Eyes could have been wider than a quarry lake and I would have still crashed into it.”

“…”

“What, you scared?”

Little bug. Insect. A louse flipped on its backside like an inverse turtle. Open cream stomach inflating with greasy red. Blood-sucking cicada. Cicadas sing songs prettier than guitar or cello because they are a lyre of nature. She was a natural liar. 

Just as Little Brother was a natural bug. 

She did it for him. So why couldn’t he just- 

And that, in itself, was a scampering thought. It bounced off the tip of her brain and she refused to grasp it back. She should, would, never think that. She loved him. She loved him. That wasn’t a crime, at least, and even if all the crimes in the world were needed to hold up her coronary veins, she would rather tear into smithereens than deny them.

What should she have done? When Little Brother had shown up with those bruises and the tears. Given her a name. What she could have done. Give her another choice.

 Her stomach was a sinking dam, her heart stuck right at its parabolic opening, clicking as it watched the silt scrape past into some bottomless… where? There, in the devoted dark, Brandon stood with a gaped mouth, watching as she spilled into a pile of sand, as if he never knew she would always end up a pile of sand.

How winsome. She would like to be a pile of sand. Eventually, she would be picked and polished and blazed, and become a glass statue of Aletheia or whatever. In her next life she would be truthful, she promised, she would be merciful. 

Or was there a need? If she looked back now, she could become a pillar of salt.

Or was she already a pillar of salt? Did she already look back?

Or Little Brother, he might look back. Oh God no—

No, no, remember it was Bran-don. 

It had been far away enough, yes?

Clean enough?

He would never know.

She kept coming up with little phrases in her mind, and not finishing them, and not knowing where to put them in her mind. So they end up with all the sand and salt.

And, also, at the bottom of her feet, where they kept trailing out in footprints as she walked.

“I don’t want to play this game anymore, Millie.”

“Come on, it’s just make-believe. It’s just pretend. You’re breaking character. Here. Sit back down.”

“Can we play something else?”

“It’s not like I’ll ever kill a bird. Wait— don’t cry. Brandie. Brandon. If you cry, I’m gonna call Mom. And you know what she does with naughty little boys like you.”

“…”

“Brandon.” Sigh. “Do you want a mint? It’s your favorite. This- whatever this brand is. You know I begged Mom to get it. If you don’t—”

“…”

“There. Better?”

Morning after, Brandon flips his backpack into the backseat, its strata of calculus textbooks and English notebooks and looseleaf crunching against the damp nylon. Methodically, she taps her fingers on the steering wheel. Click. Cl-click. She thought her brother should treat his things with more care. Those textbooks cost hundreds and if they had to pay those fines, Mom would get explodingly mad. 

God, Little Brother, this is my car, she said instead. Can you please?

Brandon froze for a second, like a glitch. 

What, he asked then, slipping in next to his backpack. Super pissed today? Also, like, yesterday. You’re super pissed these days.

She squeezed her lips together and twisted the key. Snarling, the engine rose up around them and consumed any further need for conversation. Foot down. Driving away from her words, letting the exhaust smoke extinguish them.

But rumbling to school, she couldn’t stop looking. Peering into the rearview mirror, eyes a hidden shore, she lapped at her little brother’s gaze. Her focus skipped between the asphalt and Brandon. Asphalt. A scrappy green truck pulled in front of her. She swerved, startled. Brandon. She looked back. 

Then she found her little brother’s pits of amber. They hooked her lashes, and she couldn’t tear away. She was a struggling mosquito, caught in the plea squirming from his irises like twin eels that said, tell me anything at all, please. When did this happen? Neither of them could pinpoint the exact moment bitterness soured whatever mitochondria they shared.

She was the real bug, huh?

So that’s an eight out of ten. On the Millie anger scale, he said, staring forward at the road again. Usually you would have killed someone by now.

Oh, she could have laughed. 

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha-ppy?

But she didn’t. All this is not the truth. I think it’s what my sister thought. I’m sorry. I loved her.