New Short Fiction!

This story is everything I live for in a few short pages. I hope you enjoy it.

My Brother

He called me to the upstairs room before the supper was even half cooked. I had been aiding the men collect the wine from the jugs in the back, when Mary touched me softly on the shoulder and said, "He is asking for you." She paused for a moment, and then added, "He seems sad again." While everyone else was still downstairs preparing for the feast, I ascended the wooden stairs to the upper level, where the room we had rented sat empty save for one man. If he can be called that. A small part of me wanted to stay with the others. Lately, my brother had been acting out of sorts, even for him. He had taken to wandering off by himself, away from the crowds and the onlookers and even away from his friends and family. He never told us why, really, but that was nothing unusual. We had become accustomed to not being fully aware of the answers to why? questions. There were times that I would catch him sitting in the garden behind Mother's house, looking at the flowers and worrying at a spot on one of his wrists. Usually, he was muttering prayers to himself. Sometimes he would be going deep inside himself, to that other level, and at those times I left him alone. Talking to him about such things could be confusing. And scary.

He was the only person in the room, sitting by the window and staring up at the moon. I didn't enter yet. I just looked at him, let my eyes travel over his features and accept the reality of him. Sometimes it amazed me how much I loved that man. I remembered hating him in some ways as a child. This was when I was young and didn't know who I was hating. He was the favorite, always Mother's favorite. He was loved far above my siblings and I, and I resented him for it. I found things to use against him. Often, I used to taunt him about his large nose, and oh how my mother wailed on me for it. Only now, as an adult, do I understand why.

I remember punching him hard in the mouth when I was about twelve. I was hitting him because he was favored, I think, and because he was never mean-spirited or cruel like I could be. Because he would never hit me back. It wasn't in his nature to retaliate. I would describe him as a lover, not a fighter, but such simple phrases can not do my brother justice. I remember him crumpling to the ground, blood on his lips and under his considerable nose. He caught himself then, and stared up at me with tears in his eyes. Just a boy. Just my big brother, bleeding in the dirt because of me. He didn't hit me back. Of course he didn't. He never hit back no matter how much I would hit him.

I thought for a second or two that he would hit me when he got back to his feet. His fists were clenched, and he stared down at me. I always thought that this was a weakness, because he could never fight and never speak angrily unless he spoke of some vague injustice to society that should have only concerned the adults. But that particular day, with him staring directly into my eyes with a harsh mixture of sadness and anger and a certain powerful love for me, I saw something that terrified me. For a fleeting moment, I saw the truth of him in the dark center of his eyes, and it struck me deep and hard in my gut and in my heart. I was scared of my big brother for a while after that, but he never even once tried to make me afraid.

I never lifted a finger to him in anger again.

From the upper room, I could hear the sounds of drunken celebration in the inns and bars lining the streets outside. Shouting and laughing. Pottery shattering. My brother's face was illuminated in pale white moonlight, and he was kneading that spot on his wrist like it hurt him. I knocked softly on the wooden trim above my head and leaned in the doorway. He glanced up and gave me that half cocked smile of his. I was accustomed to seeing that smile from growing up with it, but every time I saw it was like seeing it for the first time. It was a smile that wanted to laugh or wanted to cry, but you couldn't tell which. It was a smile that said a lot of things, but when he turned it on me, it almost always said that he was glad to see me.

"John," he said through the smile, "How are things going downstairs?"

"Everything is fine. The food is coming along quite nicely."

He sniffed the air, long and slow. He never did anything in a hurry. He savored every moment of life, even now. Even when he was obviously worried about something. "It smells good. Is there anything I can help with?"

"No. No, they have it under control." I hesitated in continuing, because it unnerved any of us to question him about his emotions. Somehow we expected him to be above emotion because he was always so in control. But I'd watched him sob into James's shoulder at a funeral not long ago, and I had been his little brother my entire life. I had seen him display many emotions. Anger. Happiness. Sudden, inconsolable, mysterious sadness. But lately it had become worse. I had never seen him in such a state before. It was a gloom that descended on his face menacingly, and it seemed to border on depression.

"Go ahead, ask," he said. "I didn't call you up here so you could stand there and wonder whether or not to speak frankly with your own brother." He wasn't looking at me, but out the window again. "You're my brother. I want you to talk to me." I still hesitated because I believed he was only half my brother and half something else entirely. In moments like these that idea was heavy and difficult to grasp, and it made breathing, let alone speaking, a task.

"Ask," he said again, with gentle prodding in his voice. I found my breath and sighed.

"Why...why have you been this way lately?" He turned his head to me again and ran a hand through his curly hair. For a moment his gaze held mine. I was very suddenly that stupid little bully again, and he was staring me down. I saw that flash of something other inside of him. It was something I had seen more and more of in the last three years, and it gave me chills at night when I tried to sleep. I was not scared, not really, but I still trembled at the thought of those eyes, those deep brown pools, and the eternity they had knowledge of.

The moment passed quietly into the night. "Sit with me for awhile. Please." I crossed the room and sat next to him. I placed my hand on the back of his neck, a habit I had formed in my teenage years when chumming around and wrestling with my brothers were things I spent a great deal of my time doing. To think that I tried to get him to join such play fights and sporting, and that he sometimes did join in, brought a feeling that was not unlike horror, but was also closer kin to love. Love of the kind that brother's share. The muscles in his neck were taught with tension, popping like thick cords.

We shared much as youngsters, as boys, and brothers especially, often do. Hours were spent talking about all manner of creeping creatures. We spent afternoons throwing rocks into the sea, climbing trees and running races with the children in our neighborhood. As we grew older, our interests diverged. I spoke often about girls, which interested him more than he let on, and he spoke to me about stately religious things. Temple kinds of things. Still, it was a kind of sharing, and it never truly ceased. Even there, in that upper room. Even in our thirties.

He smiled that smile at me and slapped my thigh playfully, but his mirth was halfhearted and waned quickly back into the frown that had plagued him for days now. He stared out the window again. In the alley below, a drunk spit out a curse, and a dog barked and growled in response.

"I was in the market yesterday, and there was an accident."

"What happened?" He was not using the same voice he used for his sermons or when he chastised someone who was out of line. At those moments, his voice was forceful and commanding. It could sway crowds. This voice he used far less often. It was a vulnerable voice, full of humanity and doubt.

"There was a boy. A young boy, maybe six years old. He was with his mother. They were shopping for fruit. For no reason that I could see, something spooked a horse that he had been trying to pat. It was an army horse, a big black war thing. The soldier on it tried to stop it, but it reared up right there by the boy. It kicked out." Here, my brother had to stop. I saw a tear slide down his cheek and into his beard.

"He took a kick to the head and he went down. He laid there, and the soldier even tried to help after he had calmed the horse down. There was a crowd gathering, and I went to them. In the commotion, nobody even recognized me. I looked down at the boy, and blood was coming out of his ears. He was shaking, and part of his head looked flat and dented. He died there in the market street with the rotting fruit and the stink of the animals."

"Why didn't..." I was almost too unnerved to finish.

"I couldn't. I wanted to. Oh, how I wanted to. But Father said no. Father said that this had to happen. That something would come out of this. That there was some meaning to this tragedy. I didn't understand it. The mother was screaming, she was holding the boy's body and kissing his face. She was wiping the blood off of his ears. I wanted to wake him up. To smile at her and tell he that it would be okay. But it wasn't what was meant to be. So I just drifted out of the crowd while she went on screaming for her son to come back." He said this with a tone that I at first took to be bitterness, but then realized was simply utter sadness compounded by an otherworldly weariness.

There was a long pause, and my brother wiped his eyes with his sleeve and sniffed. Outside, someone laughed. Downstairs, I could hear the clatter of dishes and the excited pre-feast chatter.

"Do you remember when Joseph died?" he asked me. "Do you remember what Mother was like? How for days we couldn't get her out of bed? She would just lay there and cry so hard. Sometimes I would lay next to her and cry too. Seeing her like that broke my heart. It hurt me. That's what grief does to a person." He turned to me. "I don't want to put her through that again. I don't want any more grief in our family."

"And you think there will be." I said it more as a statement than a question. For a long time now, he had hinted that he expected some horrible thing to happen. He talked so much in metaphor and story that none of us had ever put too much stock into the reality of his worries until the last couple weeks, when this odd depression had taken over him.

"I don't think I can do it." He began to cry openly now, the tears coming hot and fast. I wrapped an arm around him and let him weep, pushing away the larger implications of what was happening. "Ohhhh Father, I don't know if I can do it." He was no longer talking to me. He had gone deeper, like he sometimes did, down into himself. Into some other level that none of us could comprehend. When he did this, he went there fast and without warning. It never ceased to throw us off guard and even scare us a little.

"Fattttthhhheerrrrr..." he groaned into my shoulder. "Father don't make it like this. I can't put her through it. I can't. I can't I can't I can't..." A long minute passed, and my brother just sobbed into me. Then he whispered, "Show them. Show them all to me. I have to see them. I need to see them so that I can be strong enough. Show all of them to me, Father. Make me strong. Please." At that moment, he let out a yelp and began to shake. His jaw tightened and he stood up suddenly, unlocking from my embrace. He hung his head out the window and I heard him retch. Faintly, I heard the splatter of something hitting the ground outside, and then I was at his side with my hand on his back, rubbing the tension out as best I could.

"A little too much wine, eh!?" The shout came from outside and was followed by a cheer. My brother collapsed back onto the floor and I sat so he could lay his head in my lap. Minutes passed while he breathed heavily and stared at the ceiling. Finally, he closed his eyes.

"In a day or two, I'm going to be dead. I'm telling the others tonight. I have to make them understand, somehow." I knew better than to argue or try to reassure him. The others would have denied it would be so. Peter would have thrown one of his fits. But this was my brother, and I could tell when he knew something. Something that was going to happen soon. I was scared for him, and for his followers. I was scared for my mother. I was scared for me.

"Why? Why do you have to die?" If he couldn't be bitter with his Father, then I would be bitter for him. Why did he seem to think his life was being forced to come to a head when he could still do so much good for so much longer? Why was he caused so much anguish, this gentle man who had never known what it was like to live a normal life and had hurt no one? If anyone should have been bitter, it was him. He had become the boy again, bleeding from his lips in the dirt and unwilling to strike back. I wanted more than anything to strike back for him, but it was a helpless feeling and I knew it.

"You know why, John." He said, a hint of his other, commanding tone taking shape. It dissolved as quickly as it appeared. "But even I ask why almost every day. I want there to be another way. I don't want it to have to be like this."

"How do you do it? How do you go on with your message knowing your own fate?" I asked. I really wanted to know, because I wasn't sure that I could go on with such knowledge. He managed to smile that half cocked smile of his, and propped himself onto his elbow.

"Father shows me everyone." His expression was a strange division of a smile and of great and sudden sadness. "Every man, woman, and child that ever was and is and every one that ever will be. They come in a flash, and are gone just as quickly, but I see them all. I see the firstborn bite into the fruit, and I see a young man at the End watch as fire tears the sky apart. I see every single one of Father's children. I see what they will do to me in a day, in a year, in every year to come. And oh, what they will do to themselves. I see wars, and deaths piled upon deaths. John, I see them murder children in my name. They use my banner to slaughter millions. I see them rape and murder each other for a millennia. They are a sick and wayward people, and I hate the things that they do. But when they come to me in that flash, sent from my Father, I see beneath what they do. Around it. I see who they really are and I love them. Every murderer and rapist. Every liar and thief and corrupt king. Every decent person that will deny me, and every child that won't. They are all my Father's children, his lost children. I love them all. That's why it has to happen this way." Here he paused, and in his eyes I saw a love that was so strong that it disturbed me. No human being could possibly have such love inside of them. His eyes were deep brown pools of pure, unadulterated, unconditional love. I could not wrap my mind around it. I had to look away, because I saw that the love was directed as much to me as it was the others he saw in the vision. It was too much to bear the weight of such an overwhelming love. Especially one that I did not deserve.

"They have to die for what they have turned this world into. They must be punished for their crimes."

"Will they be?"

He shook his head. "No. No, not while I still have the ability to choose a different path for them." He smiled. "I'm going to give them a way out. I'm going to rid them of death." The powerful emotions bubbling up from inside of him seemed to have halted. He rose and walked back to the window. I followed and stood beside him.

"Thank you," he said, not moving his eyes from the horizon made of city rooftops.

"For what?"

"For coming to me."

"You called for me," I said.

"And you came to me. I needed my brother to be with me for awhile. So thank you."

"Do you want me to stay with you a while longer?" I asked.

"No," my brother answered, smiling. "No, go see about the supper. I'll be fine. I think I will pray for a little bit." I turned to leave, but his voice stopped me at the door.

"I love you," He said, and when I turned to respond, he was still looking out the window, speaking to the moonlit night.

"I love you," He said again, and I left my brother to his prayers.