INCOMPLETE SENTENCE

Ryan Goderez

a week after my mother died we buried my brother in the backyard. He stood watching in his ragged jeans and one of his shirts from high school while we dug up a patch of yellowing grass and turned it until it was dark rich dirt speckled with rocks, then he laid himself down with a tired sigh and let us cover him, every part except his face.

Afterwards the rest of us, my father and sister and her husband and I, gathered in the living room and ate watermelon with the AC on and watched the news, letting the ads play even though it was pre-recorded. I’d washed my hands, but I kept finding grains of dirt caught under my fingernails and spent the evening picking them clean. I became so focused on scraping under my nails that I went too far and pressed into skin that wasn’t used to being touched and a shooting feeling of something that wasn’t quite painful went through my belly button. After that I sat on my hands so I wouldn’t keep doing that to myself.

We went to bed early, all of us, my sister and her husband taking the guest room and me on the couch because even though I’d lost my job I hadn’t moved in, not really. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep so I put on my mother’s sandals which were too big for my feet and went into the backyard to visit my brother. He was awake, too, eyes open to the sliver of moon that hovered low over the roof of the house, and what I took for shadow on his face turned out to be a light layer of dirt that had blown loose and covered his skin. I wanted to reach out and brush it from his cheeks but we weren’t used to touching like that, so intimately, so I asked him if he was sure he wouldn’t come back inside. He shook his head, a slow rocking back and forth, and then his body sunk a bit lower into the ground, the earth undulating in a swallowing motion, and then coming to a stop. I stood watch for a while, then went inside and threw out the shoes.

Over the weekend a family friend, which meant a friend of my parents that remembered me from when I was a child, stopped by with some tupperwares of food and an intense desire to talk. My father had gone back into the office even though it was Saturday, playing catch up, he said, so I was the only one home other than my brother. We sat in the kitchen and drank tea and she told me I was just like she remembered me being, which I suppose was meant as a compliment but who wants to feel like they’ve never changed since childhood, and whenever she asked if I remembered something I said no, sorry, no, sorry, until it became uncomfortable so I lied and said yes of course, yes of course.

Later, after she left and I grew bored with wandering through the house searching for nothing in particular, I poured myself a bowl of cereal and sat down at the kitchen table, where my father had left his laptop open from the night before. It didn’t feel like snooping to rest my finger on the touchpad and watch the screen light up, thinking I would pull up something to watch. Instead, I found an email draft open on his computer, ending on the words when my wife followed by a blinking cursor. I watched the black line jump in and out of existence for a while, then finished my cereal and turned the laptop off.

At some point the weather cooled, though I can’t say I noticed the change in seasons until there were already leaves coming off the trees, which unlike in poems looked mostly brown and wilted and sad, and during the times I sat outside with my brother, who hadn’t bothered to talk much in the last few weeks, I would pile the loose yellow caterpillar-eaten leaves around his face so that his breathing rippled through the dry plant matter, made them tumble and swirl for a moment before settling back down around his chest. Occasionally I crumbled one into a fine powder in my palm and blew on it the way my mother taught me to blow eyelashes from my fingers, though I didn’t make a wish. When I grew bored of that game I ate an apple, spitting the seeds over the mound of dirt he was buried in and seeing how far they would go.

Let me try, he said, his eyes cracking open against the low autumn sunlight, so I turned the apple around and held it to his mouth so he could bite down. He took a seed between his teeth and the shiny black of it sitting there made me think about poison coming in such small doses that you could eat a bucketful before you noticed, and then he spat it as far as he could, which was past his feet. Afterwards I noticed a trail of apple juice, or maybe spit, was dripping down to his beard, but I didn’t tell him.

For Halloween I joined my sister and her husband and their kids for trickor-treating. The kids decided I had to wear something even though I had thought myself too old for costumes, so they dressed me in a white sheet which they’d cut holes out of to make a ghost before anyone had realized that they were destroying a perfectly good bedsheet, and after the family argument and ensuing tears and finally the build up again to having fun and candy I called my father and asked him if he was coming, but he said he was too tired and didn’t have the energy.

My nephew was a pirate and pulled his plastic sword on all the neighbors, hands up! holding it like a gun. My niece was a wolf and after each gift of candy she would lift it up into the air above her head and howl at the moon in victory. Whenever the others got far enough ahead I pulled the sheet down from my head to give myself a chance to breathe.

When the snow came it buried my brother deeper, and I stopped bothering to visit him in the backyard. The cold would take care of him, one way or the other, I reasoned, and somewhere in the frozen dirt he was probably having the time of his life. Anyways, we shoveled paths in the yard and covered his mound of dirt with as much snow as we could to make a sledding hill, which my niece and nephew and their friends went down while screaming and laughing and then trudged back up, snow-pant fattened legs sinking knee deep into the snow. Sometimes they made snow angels down at the bottom of the hill where it flattened out, and sometimes I would join them and say look, right here, you’re probably next to your uncle if you lie down here. But then my nephew wanted to know if my brother might be putting treasure in the hill and could they dig it up, and I told them to go back inside before they froze.

I was pretty sure my brother wasn’t doing anything at all, let alone leaving presents around, buried in ice.

For Hanukkah we lit three-plus-one mismatched candles because it had taken a few days to get everyone together, then put the snaggle-toothed Channukiot in the back window instead of the front so my brother could see the tiny, flickering flames. Over dinner my father began to cry, the silent kind of tears that eat up boxes of tissues and go nowhere, and my sister asked her children if they knew why he was crying, and why this year was different, why tonight was different. Wrong holiday, they said. Asking questions is for passover.

Later I found chocolate coins scattered across the place where my brother was buried, glints of gold foil beginning to freeze to the ground. There were two coins over his eyes, and I wondered if whoever had put them there knew about the old traditions and the river styx. I considered it morbid so I took the coins off of his face and ate the chocolate from inside.

My father couldn’t be bothered to build fires, to haul in logs, to cook dinner. Sometimes I put on his boots and a pair of cobwebbed work gloves and dragged wood in by myself, but most of the time we relied on the duller and more efficient gas heating system. I stayed up past midnight most nights, slept in until the house was empty, shared take out over the kitchen table, and occasionally borrowed the car to visit friends. My father was either losing weight or gaining it, I wasn’t sure, and the bags of salad I kept insisting he buy went rotten in the fridge.

In spring the snow melted and sank into the dirt and made mud, and eventually I could see the place my brother was buried by the way the grass was growing, and then it rained and I could see his face again, too. I had to wear rain boots because of the mud, but I came and crouched down next to him and asked him how he was doing. He blinked, and I noticed there was dirt caught in his eyelashes, and smudges of it on his face that made me think of smokey eye make up. The outline of his limbs was almost visible in the way the dirt was gathered around him, but mostly it was just the same as a grave except for his face.

I’m leaving, I told him. He looked at me and I wasn’t sure he understood. I mean, I’m moving out. He nodded at me, and let out a sigh that made eddies in the dirt on his chin, and then he closed his eyes. He didn’t say anything for a long time, so I got up and left.

The Orb

A Cup Brimming With Summer

Makenzie Hodges-French

The sun shines for everyone. In its resplendent glow, bathing our voices, our movements in honey-summer I hear the song in people’s conversations. They swirl around our buzzing hostel. Like butterflies startled out of the bushes of sea glass-hued dorms, in the morning, int’l travelers gather around the flowers of our hostel’s communal room airy and spacious, worn couches. Scents of ylang-ylang, jasmine and neroli.

The hush in the pauses. Somebody made butternut squash brunch. They’re bringing it outside now. And one voice stands out, part of a musical chord, yours. I see the orange slice of your smile, intimating warmer movements.

The sun glances off the crystal in your eyes and on your summer’s jacket –tossing light spots around us, playfully dancing malakino. Your cream canvas bomber jacket and my Crystal bow choker Could set off our adventure, will we travel together everywhere?

Your home, my home base, but for now, they set the summer sun to sparkling. Your crystal fangs glimmer when you smile.

I’m not afraid of them, nor of the height you reach when you unfold, because these light spots follow us.

An aura of malakino wings, but – fluffy like your summer’s jacket. I see you, my man. When you met me, you stepped off, dancing, off the crescent moon. It was simply an int’l chocolate café, but time slowed, we got swept up in play. You showed me your art book, sticking up out of your satchel. You painted your postcards, sent one to me. You’ve got a magyk soul, sun-surfer. Let’s ride that summer sun into the next journey, but it’s happening now. Comes in this adventure’s timeline. When our tea lattés finally come, we pivot our conversations, unfold, and the voices around us spiral, dancing and echoing prisms of communal movements. With cups brimming with Malak Roses, we ride the summer sun to a Malak tea garden party in our hostel patio. The voices here are sweeter, honey-drenched I want to play with you, dance in the glow of our eternal summer They give us rosé gummy bears and candied orange wedges for our tea lattés. I want to cut the fruit of my life on your crystal fangs.