September
The day the deputy found my brother, I was still asleep. I wish I could tell people that I had a horrible dream that night and that I woke up sweating and shaking with the knowledge that something wasn’t right. But I did not. I woke up and had some cereal. The doorbell rang an hour later.
In this town, news travels fast. “Did something happen?” the neighbors asked the following afternoon, “I’m sorry” already forming in the backs of their mouths.
~
Bob is a tiny man with a thin face and compost-colored hair. He always wears a collared shirt and khaki slacks. Delicate is how I would describe him. Delicate and dry, like straw. Every piece of paper and furniture in Bob’s office is parallel or perpendicular to the wall, and the carpet smells like Febreze. There are no pictures in his office because “This is not about me. This is about you.”
I tell him that I’m fine. That I can cope with everything. He tells me he would not be doing his job if he believed me.
October
“Just forget about it,” Joan tells me. Joan is my neighbor. We go to high school together. She’s older than she looks and proud of it. Joan says, “You’d be surprised at how much your brain can hide from your consciousness.” Either way, Joan isn’t the best person to take this kind of advice from – the day they found her lost in the woods wasn’t the same day she found herself; that happened a few months later.
“I’m fine now,” she tells me. I open my mouth to reply when she interrupts. She furrows her brow, bites her lip, and says, “Suddenly I’m afraid of gas station bathrooms, but I can’t remember why.”
November
“Interesting,” Bob says as he scribbles on his clipboard. “Can you explain?” I know what Bob is trying to do. But it’s like I’ve said all along – I’m fine. I don’t need to be here. But I know that’s not the way things work, so I decide to play along. This is what I tell him:
In the yard there is a pile of firewood that my brother and I chopped the afternoon before he died. The firewood is covered by a bright blue tarp, and sometimes it catches my eye when I am looking outside of my bedroom window. After a storm, wet leaves stick to the tarp and cover it like a paper-mâché pyramid. When the wind dries the leaves and blows them away the next day, the blue tarp re-emerges.
My brother and I would take turns chopping firewood for the winter – ten minutes him, ten minutes me. That pile of firewood is the last tangible thing he contributed to this world.
Soon it will be cold enough to burn.
Sida Li studies business and creative writing at New York University and is painfully aware that he can’t use being a kid as an excuse for much longer. Sida’s poems and short stories have appeared in the Boston Literary Magazine, Antithesis Common, the Minetta Review, and (Apo)phonic.