Little Brother - Matthew Jakubowski
Deep in the woods in my final cycle of lifetimes the fire is bright. Between naps, I age in and out of the world. Among our kind a year or more can pass in an hour. Sometimes we live a human lifetime and a half in twenty-four hours. As a teenager my voice gets croaky in the morning, then croakier still as an old man by mid-afternoon, and by dawn I have a new voice again pure and wailing as snow floats down through the trees onto my pudgy infant face, which will be covered in gray whiskers again by noon.
In one lifetime I remember the darkness of an early morning. I’m about an hour old in my Mom’s arms. I’m nursing under the huge T-shirt she’s wearing. We’re both tired and wet, at home, not at a hospital, looking like we’ve just washed ashore on the raft of my parents’ bed.
Two small people in pajamas who I’ll soon call my sisters are standing in the bedroom doorway looking at me. My parents tell them it’s okay, come in and say hello to your new baby brother. The oldest one, all of seven, yawns and goes back down the hall to her bed. The other one, three, now no longer the youngest, suddenly a middle child, comes over to us. Her upside- down face turns one way then another as she tries to get a good look at me. My parents ask her what she thinks. She waits a second and whispers, “He’s too little.” Her ponytail smells like grass, bugspray, and sweat. Then, because she thinks I haven’t learned how to hear yet, she says very loudly, “Get bigger and we can go play outside, house baby!” I start bawling but pass out because I’m full of milk and tired from being born. So much work just to be loved and yelled at.
Life was sweetness for a year or so. Then our family had to be packed up. They rolled me in brown packaging paper inside a cardboard box, sealed it up, and stuck it on the moving truck. This was long before we settled down in the town near the forest and cornfields. I am traveled inside a box inside a crate inside a larger crate. Deep inside these packagings I make trips with my family one place after another. I grow and explode my box. I eat foam popcorn. My parents love me but keep me packaged away so I’ll be safe. I die, come back, die again, come back and am about to die and stop trying when the truck doors are unlatched with a kerchink and a klang and sunlight brazes me.
“It’s time to play now!” my sisters say.
I am agog and scream to let them know I am so ready. They stand me on their shoulders and we swoop across hills and guzzle up ponds and clouds.
Growing up, for schooling I do my daily lessons: imagining the worst, to inoculate ourselves with superstition. This will help us avoid the world’s troubles, the kind I am told forced us to spend some of our early kid years wrapped in packaging inside an awful truck. Me and my sisters put up fences in our minds around all the worsts we’ve memorized. Kids thrown down the stairs by jail men. Police who shoot down people’s Dads. Moms with babies bitten by government dogs. Bodies nailed to things, put in ovens, crushed by space-age tanks. Ghost moments that slither inside and hollow you out with silent fangs.
To make me even tougher my sisters sit on me, give me yucky foods to eat and laugh when I cry. They teach me how to wrestle and cheer the day I don’t drown learning to swim at the canal. I braid their hair and sharpen their knives. They get two mirrors and show me the scar map on my back. “These are all the places you’ve lived since you were born.” They show me their maps, too. I get jealous of their breasts and the places they got to live that I never saw. They teach me how to dirt bike. I crash and get a small rock lodged under my chin, but they pluck it out and stop the blood with a hanky.
“Yes! Look,” they say, showing me their same chin scars. “We’re scar triplets!”
We scream at the sky and live in forts made of scrap wood in the summer. In the winter we burn the wood, live in snow forts and nap together in a pile.
“Stay with us and bleed and live,” they tell me.
I do, sleeping with a bloody smile on my face, and let myself die and come back three or four times right then to circle the happiness deep into me, carving its ripples onto my bones so I’ll never forget who I am with them now and forever.
We were luckier than a lot of other families for a while. Then Dad did bad things for money in the woods. He said he had to. But it was too much. He’d become someone else’s worst. My Mom packed things up and left. Us kids were among the things. We didn’t scream. We didn’t have time. Crish crash and gone and traveling again. No Dad.
Dad was so stunned to find us gone he walked into a river and turned into a stone. That’s the story Mom stuck to. That’s the story Mom stuck to. That’s the story Mom stuck to and we stuck to Mom because that was that.
After that Mom died and came back, feebly, a few times until she said this was going to be it for her. She needed one last life or two to herself. Please go, she said. We loved her so and with respect we didn’t argue. We went our separate ways in the woods. My sisters and I had overlapped one another. The elder was much younger and the younger much older and I was sort of half-monstrous with something else half-entirely. We left one another in a confusion of promises. Oh, my sisters.
We each chose a way. We made a vow with a single tear the size of an ocean. Three drops, three oceans. In our last life together, we lived as sailfish then sea urchins then as dragon seabirds that could spend the night as dolphins. We let a typhoon take us apart.
On my own, missing everyone, I imagined the map on my back growing with new scars my sisters might’ve been receiving wherever they were. I could sometime feel theirs growing too when I made new travels. Our mother and father hovered around my skin and my voice with a heat and a chill that shook me dead with joy some days and fury on others. Toward the end of the rest of my lives, I drowned finally in the ocean that lives in the sky and beneath the soil bleeding with you, my sisters, forever, singing without voices to each other in a pile beneath a small dome of snow.
Alone now in the woods by the fire I stare at the dead, wherever they might be, all those I’m afraid to speak to. A lot of nights to myself listening to echoes inside. One night a partridge hen followed by a few chicks ran past the edge of the tall grass around me. The firelight clothed them in feathery gold and I knew everyone I’ve loved would be alright.
I gave in to a ghost moment and was finally hollowed out. I crept in my bone-shape into a sleeping deer’s mind. I became antlers plunged into the water, into the belly of a boy and an old man with the moon in their mouths. I am several branches of bone that remembers, dipped in the blood of my family, dropped from a stag’s itching skull. I fell and pierced the earth. I wait beneath the new grass, a thorn full of legend ready to re-enter the world through the sole of a dancing child’s foot.
Previously published by Lunate 2019
Matthew Jakubowski (he/him) is a short story writer, novelist, poet, and experimental essayist based in West Philadelphia. His stories have appeared in Milk Candy Review, JMWW, gorse, Spelk, and the Best Microfiction 2024 anthology. He is online at mattjakubowski.com.
