My sister Sara and I were laying in the grass behind our apartment complex, staring up at the morning sky. It was cold and my nose was red. I wasn't wearing a jacket. We could see our breath slip from each other's lips. We were mouthing a smoke language back and forth. Sara exhaled a single syllable, but I didn't notice. I was looking past her, at something else. My two brothers knee deep in the swamp, splashing at one another. I could barely tell them apart from where I was. Two faint figures dancing together in the dirty watered distance. I raised myself to my feet and walked closer, their splashes turned to pushes, and before long I saw Marcus fall to his knees and the mud drag him under the water.
Jack ran towards the complex, his red converse now some odd shade of brown, his pants waterlogged, his wet skin glistening in the sun, his face distorted and scared.
I looked back at the water. Marcus’s little arms were causing agitations on the surface as they frantically reached toward the sky. I just stood there, the wind scratching at my bare legs, watching as his arms slowed, disappeared and little bubbles emerged in their place. And then those slowed too… until there was just one. One final bubble resting on the surface, not popping, tragic, beautiful.


T and I are lying in bed. It’s snowing outside but we are barely dressed anyway. Tucked safely under the covers. I have my legs wrapped around him and my head resting on his chest. His olive skin is glowing in the light coming in through the window. It makes my pale arms look funny. Pallid and weak – almost ghost-like. I look up into his eyes, hoping he won’t notice my distance and say, “tell me something... something I’ll only forget.” I lay my head back down and look out the window. The snow is starting to leave traces of its existence on the tops of decaying bushes, the windshields of cars, the window ledge. He runs his fingers through my tangled hair and says, cows don’t have upper front teeth yet they graze for about eight hours a day.
He says that “Mr. Mojo Risin” is an anagram for Jim Morrison.
He tells me that cattle were mutilated in Colorado. How apparently their hide was peeled back and their organs were cleaned from their ribcage. He says that the people of the area think it might have been the handiwork of aliens and are now trying to create an extraterrestrial commission, which will have it’s own UFO welcoming committee.

I listen but don’t say anything. Instead I just keep watching the snow.

He tells me that Adolf Hitler was Time Magazine's man of the year in 1938.

The air in the room is stuffy and stale from old cigarette smoke. My nose is clogged and our sheets smell. Thin brown sheets I bought for us from a discount store last October. He’s just as obsessed with violence as I am.

I was the youngest of three, unless you count him, which makes me number four – barely. We were only seconds apart. Identical,inseparable, and soon just one and the same. My family didn’t know how to cope, so they didn’t. They just pretended he was never there in the first place. My mom gave me all of his clothes and the new shoes she had bought for him. A pair of brown boots, both meant for a boy and two sizes too big. Once, late one night, my mom crawled into bed
with me. I let her cry into my ear and call me by his name.

I was left to live in a non-existent shadow.

When T asks about my past, I tell him about my older sister and her new job or I show him old sepia prints of my parents at their wedding. I make my past like the best movie I’ve never seen. I tell him about birthday parties that never happened and how good it smelt at Christmas time. I tell him too much in hopes that he won’t ever dig deeper.

He kisses the crown of my head and says, your turn. Tell me something.
You always tell the best stories. What was the one about your uncle?
Or was it your cousin? What happened again? He’d swim laps in the
swamp in the back of your house, in the winter?

I close my eyes, hoping to not allow the thoughts to linger long enough to register in my mind. But it’s too late.

I see that small girl in a yellow dress, me. Barely six, standing at the edge of the swamp, Watching. Staring. A young boy’s pale cheek reaching just above the surface of the water, an insect crawling over the sun-dried area – now only a scaled down island.

That boy being my other half.

I see my father running through the grass and into the water. I watch the brown waves splash at his bare thighs. He is only dressed in white underwear. It’s winter but he can’t feel it. I watch him swim to the floating boy, my dead twin brother, and drag him back to the shore. He pounds at Marcus’ chest, my father’s fists now turned white, his lips blue. Nothing happens. He pushes his face onto my brother’s. And still nothing happens.

My father looks up at me, his eyes rimmed with red, and tells me to leave, to beat it. I run behind a tree and listen to my father. He sounds like a wounded animal. I can hear muffled cries and screams and the sound of his fist on my brother's chest.

I stop myself and open my eyes. The snow is still there. Still falling. This boy I've been sleeping with for the past three months is still pressed against me. I can feel his heat. I don’t answer him.
Instead I say, "tell me something else. Please.”
He runs his finger down my back and says that pretzels were originally invented for Christian Lent. The twists of the pretzels are to resemble arms crossed in prayer. He says that alcohol beverages have all 13 minerals necessary for human life.
He pauses and tells me that he loves me.
I pull myself tighter against him. I can hear his heart beating.I listen to the thumps until I finally say, it was my father. Did I mention he did it in nothing but his underwear?