This brother, that brother. This brother answered the door to a flat-topped blond sheriff who left his prowler running in the driveway with the red and blue still swiveling. It was dusk. Trees in the yard showed their branches and this brother had swept orange and yellow leaves into small piles here and there in the front yard. Locusts made noise and street-playing neighbors were called in for dinner. The sheriff told this brother to get that brother, so this brother went and got his mother. She came to the door and stood with her hands on her hips like she did when she was concentrating on one thing or another. The father came in from wherever he’d been and stood silent with arms crossed over his chest, nodding. This brother went to get that brother. This brother raced up the stairs. That brother was in his room. Rap music thumped and everything was everywhere. This brother told that brother that there was a man to see him, and when he did that he did not smile or shudder but said it quickly and went to the window until that brother told him to leave. This brother left. That brother followed. That brother came to the front door and had a look of complete unsurprise on his face. This brother was told to scram. That brother stood behind his parents when the officer stepped inside the door and said something about moving into a room with chairs for everyone to sit down and discuss the situation. This brother stayed around the corner of the living room with the nice couches they used on holidays and for company, lingering in the hallway, not moving but trying very hard to see inside the room around the bend. This brother heard his mother speak and heard his father speak and heard the officer speak, but that brother, he sat mute. The officer coughed. His keys jangled. The officer—call him Sergeant Taylor—Sergeant Taylor said that that brother threw a kid named Brad, whom everyone called Mags, in a Dumpster on the way home from school earlier in the day. This brother crept closer in the hallway. The television was on, so the mother yelled, in the direction of everywhere, for this brother to check the stove. That brother must have been chewing the insides of his cheeks. This brother removed a pot from heat and turned something to low and came back to where he’d been before. Mags lived two blocks away and his parents called the sheriff’s office when Mags came home from high school with trash in his hair and slime on his face. Mags told of being picked up after a great scuffle and tossed into a blue Dumpster as seven or eight other kids laughed and hooted. That brother’s mother probably shook her head or pinched the bridge of her ski-slope nose. That brother’s father probably looked at his son. That brother must have relaxed and stretched his legs. This brother, that brother. This brother, still wallpapered and soundless, knew Mags to be the kind to ring the doorbell and run away. Mags had purple hair and half his head was shaved. Mags was scrawny with a mouth he’d have to grow into. That brother said it wasn’t a great scuffle, and the father chuckled and caught himself because the mother surely glared. That brother was a freshman and was an offensive lineman on the high school junior varsity team. That brother was a hulk with tan arms like telephone poles and tits bigger than the fifteen-year-old girls who did not call the house for him. That brother had stretch marks on his sides and swam every summer with a shirt on. In two years, that brother would be built like a brick shithouse, and this brother would not in any physical way mess with him. That brother slept with a stuffed animal named Dobby, a ragged brown dog he’d had since the age of two, when he could not say the word doggy. That brother fell asleep each night with Dobby cradled beside him. Sergeant Taylor stopped talking. Everyone must have looked at everyone else. Dust was on the sill. Someone shifted in a chair. The mother looked to the father, who looked to the younger son, who looked down at the beige carpet he vacuumed weekly for occasions such as this. This brother sat down on the tile. This brother remembered pinning that brother down on the floor, knees on shoulders, fumbling with squirm , this brother letting spit drip from his lips to be this close from that brother’s face before slurping it back up. This brother remembered farting as he passed by that brother while they watched television. This brother remembered taunts of fat boy and jumbo around the neighborhood, and this brother remembered that brother doing nothing but weeping and hiding and later telling the mother, who spoke glowingly of brotherly love and family duty that would one day kick in, no doubt long after she had passed from being. This brother remembered seeing that brother in the hallways at school, one on the way to study hall and the other racing toward a science class he could not find, and flipping him the bird. This brother, that brother. That brother said, suddenly, startling the room from the inhaled silence, that Mags had called him and his buddies beasts that dragged their knuckles when they walked. That brother said it had gone on for weeks. Fat-ass this and Neanderthal that. That brother, whom the family called Motor, had discovered a natural talent for football the year prior and had quit slapping at fifty-mile-per-hour fastballs and motoring his pudginess around the bases, to find a thing he did better than anyone else. That brother now had sports pictures along his walls to match the soccer pictures on this brother’s. Mags, that brother mumbled, had started it. That brother told of stewing bus rides and long walks home with a tormentor only a few feet behind him. This brother, aware they knew where he was, pictured his mother hem and his father haw while Sergeant Taylor must have sat with his hands on his knees, nodding. Mags’s parents wanted to press charges, he said. This brother tuned out. This brother pictured that brother grabbing Mags by his Marilyn Manson shirt to violently snap the buckle that has been torn from an allowance-bought dog collar. This brother wanted that brother to be angry when he did this but that brother was probably not. This brother saw that brother seize Mags by an oversize pant leg, immediately after stepping foot off bus number 67, and force him up over his head with Mags kicking and screaming. This brother pictured their Saturday mornings of pro wrestling. This brother pictured maybe that brother walking slowly toward Mags, a crowd having not gathered but friends of friends awkwardly watching, with Mags not moving but standing with his arms out wide, open-palmed, the look on his face saying something like so then what now? This brother thought this day was different than every other day for that brother because, well because, and this brother pictured that brother with Mags in his arms like newlyweds over a threshold. An open Dumpster half-full of garbage to be what the moment had carried each of them to. This brother had to slink silent and tardy in the hall because this brother wasn’t on the bus that day. He was a junior and juniors did not ride the bus. This brother got high on cheap pocket-lifted grass in the backseat of a speeding blue Firebird, his hands on the pale thighs of a tittering brunette named Candace, while that brother bench-pressed a boy in what could have been deemed an act of hatred. This brother, that brother. The dinner was late. A car was running. Porch lights came on. A boy was done explaining to his parents why another boy had tossed him like trash into the trash. The dog stirred by the sliding glass door but no one who was going to do anything about it noticed. Sergeant Taylor’s voice came out of nowhere, interrupted by a dispatcher’s crackle, and said a few more words about bullies and picking battles and knowing when to walk away, and the mother said a few more words about that being good advice for both that brother and Mags, and the father said not a word, and that brother said not a word but sat still, not rising when the officer stood to go. Sergeant Taylor said something funny, or something clever in a sharp way, and someone other than him laughed, but this brother could not hear what it was or who it was because he was busy hurrying to another room, because even though he knew they knew where he was, he did not want them to know where he was. The officer said a thank you, thank you and a it won’t be necessary ma’am and a boys will be boys after all, and the mother and the father made small talk and all three chuckled and all four followed Sergeant Taylor to the front door to wave goodbye and to shake their heads and roll their eyes together . This brother, that brother, the mother and the father. Huddled and embraced by twilight and framed by a doorway. That brother stood with them, allowingly indignant, and in the background of the goodbye, this brother hurried toward the sounds of booted footsteps and the closing sound of a front door’s latch. He got there a second too late.

This brother, that brother. My family gathered to witness the neighborhood driveways and sidewalks buzz with inquiry as a patrol cruiser, commanded by a short, bearded man speaking into a shoulder-harnessed walkie-talkie, killed the flashing lights and backed, straightened, out of our basketball-hooped driveway and then rolled toward the street’s end. As it did, my father wrapped his arms around my mother. She leaned into and allowed herself to be held by him. I came out from pseudo-hiding to stand right beside my younger brother. The car went and went and the taillights got dim and then went away, and a front door was closed to the world so as to keep secret the holy-shit, this brother, that brother, loud-smacking high-five and stoic giggling that came from me, aimed at him, as soon as I thought the tension was ripe for removal . Kept secret was the steam that curled from the corners of my mother’s shut mouth and my father’s heavily sighed acceptance of how boys go where they are led. Secret was the reheated dinner of silence, sideways glances, and clinking forks. Secret was me knocking on the ajar bedroom door of my brother later in the night and the clutter that was us standing face-to-face with each other, one young and the other younger, one wanting to figure out the world all at once, the other content to sit on a bed and wait, this brother, that brother, that brother telling this brother, Brother, that guy was a shitmouth, with his hazel eyes lit, punished yet proud, both searching the other for a flicker of recognition, both knowing no such flicker existed just yet, but would, one day, and it would hold us up the way sunflowers do in a strong wind—when he would get caught shoplifting dietary supplements from an all-night superstore in what my parents felt surely to be a fraternity prank, used by them as a lesson of tough love as he slept three nights in a holding cell while I worked to convince our mother and father to pony up and bail him out, or when my mother would bald and shrivel of cancer and my father would weep and stammer and bury his head in his tan hands and I would whisper to my mother as she slept and wipe her mouth as she died and my brother would refuse to enter the hospital room, pacing in and out of doorways, not saying it was too tough to be there but implying that he had decided to remember her in his own stranded way, and he would instead linger in hallways full of young squeaky-shoed nurses and dinging elevators, to peek in now and then when the room grew soundless, and see two men, his father and his brother, hovered over the sunken-cheeked waxen figure of what was yesterday, a mass of blankets in the shape of his mother’s body. A sea change in the absence of breath, two men in a room, his older brother, his father, waiting for him, knowing that what they waited for would not come now but maybe later, when the three of them could stand as men who had once felt the same sense of self and who could recollect it. Who had once been proud of the same shameful things, an admiration of silence, a sense of strength, a boy tossed in a Dumpster, this brother staying put and that brother staying away, our father being somewhere between. Who had once shared silence when the rest of the world offered flowers and handshakes that told them what they cared for was fleeting and sieve-like. We waited for him, in a tense room of unused furniture, in a picture-framed hallway, in a dim-lit hospital room, in a crowded funeral home, in three separate states in three separate time zones, as my father would stay in western Kentucky and I would move to northern Idaho and my brother would move to central Florida, we waited for him to stand beside us the way we had stood beside him once, when boys were boys and brothers waited, heart-scraped and hushed, this brother, that brother, when I hugged him after two years apart and thought He even feels like Mom, when our father remarried and hung up the phone and a family became a facial expression of motherlessness, and a thing to move toward, and loneliness became a sort of prayer, and loss meant what would come would not change what had come before. We waited. This brother, that brother, waiting to see what the other needed to find.

M. Lewis is an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho in the nonfiction program. There he serves as co-editor of the literary journal, Fugue. He hails from western Kentucky. This is his first publication. He thanks Jo Ann Beard.