Your Brother's Autobiography

Your brother’s body is on the metal table, and you can’t look away. 

Wait, is it your brother? Isn’t that what this is about? Didn’t you want the damned cops to be wrong just this once? For all you know, the bag in front of you could be a manikin, another sick joke your brother is playing on you. He’ll jump out from behind the sullen, gray filing cabinet and laugh at the wide-eyed relief on your face. You’ll call him a ‘fucking bastard’ and it will be done.

Or maybe not.
The mortician comes back into the room with forms snapped onto a clipboard, apologizing for forgetting the documents and leaving you alone.
“Are you ready?”
You could never be ready for this, but you nod anyway.
He unzips the gray-blue body bag just enough for you to see snaking tattoos and bizarre shapes printed on sickly white skin.
“That’s him.” You hear yourself say, surprised that your voice sounds like your father’s, deep and forced.
“You sure?”
“Yes. That tattoo was his first one,” you point to the trinity shape stamped on your brother’s chest, his first crude and rebellious attempt at body art. You try not to look at the gaping holes across his chest.
“Okay,” the mortician zips up the bag again, and the last thing you see of your brother’s face are the laugh wrinkles around his eyes. “We’ll need you to sign some paperwork and then you can leave.”
He heads to the door and pauses when you don’t follow. You’re still watching the bag, waiting for the body to move.
“Can I say goodbye?”
Maybe this annoys him, because he takes a deep breath and looks at his watch.
“Sure. I’ll give you some privacy.”
You wait till the footsteps sound far enough away before you slowly pull on the zipper, each metal click opening your brother’s carcass to the world again. Even dead, his face is laughing, one eyebrow permanently cocked upwards from a run-in with your grandmother’s end table when he was six. His normally full lips and chin look shrunken and slightly purple, cheeks pulled and worn.

You can name every single tattoo. You know every story behind the damned things, even though you wish you didn’t.
Because, if you didn’t know that the climbing dragon on his back meant he had joined the Triads, you might have slept more at night your sophomore year of college and wouldn’t have failed basic economics. 

If he hadn’t driven to your dorm to show you the three stars needled across his shoulders you wouldn’t know that each star represented one of his brothers, and you were the blue on in the middle.

And even though you laughed at the time, you wish he had not shown you the two cherries tattooed above his penis and the five lines next to it representing each girl he’d slept with. You were thirteen when that happened. He was fifteen.
Someone drops something one floor above you, and the noise makes you jump. Hospitals are always too cold. Pulling down the zipper more, you see the cartoon turd still smiling and waving at you from his bellybutton, the result of buying his own tattoo machine and getting drunk.
Telling yourself it’s not gay, you open the bag a bit further, wondering if the zipper will get caught on your brother’s penis. It doesn’t, but you don’t look at it anyway. You already know he had the world “Head” etched above his left ball.  You saw it when he used his pride and joy to slap you awake your final day of college, as a way of congratulating you on finishing a year early.

You never understood why he had tattooed the ladybug pushing a lawnmower onto his inner thigh, maybe some kind of lost bet. The six-point northern star above his heart is for your little sister Aurora, who would’ve turned twenty-two this Easter if she could have beat the leukemia.

The hanging rooster below his knee was his best party trick, one you’d love to forget. He took your girlfriend aside at last year’s Christmas party and whispered “I have a cock that hangs below my knee”. She never spoke to you again, not that you ever blamed her. You never should have invited him to your office party.


Now that the bag is fully opened, you look at your brother’s cold, bluish-white body. You remember what your mother had said when he came home with ‘God Forgives’ tattooed down his ribcage.
“You can read that boy’s life in those tattoos.”
That was when he had gotten out of rehab; before he lost most of his teeth to meth; before he started carrying an armed holster.
The lip of the bag is covering half his shin, but you know that a demon covers the back of his right calf, an angel on the other. He designed both after Meghan came back from the abortion clinic. You walked her into the house and waited on the porch till the muffled conversation turned to dry, violent screams. That’s when you bolted into the living room and grabbed your brother from behind just as he started to swing.
“No one would want to carry your bastard demon!” she had screamed.
He put down the baseball bat, tears leaving dark marks on his wife-beater.
“You bitch. Why the fuck did you do it. Why.”
“I saved that baby! I saved that baby!”
You grabbed your brother’s wrist and squeezed till he dropped the bat.

The angel carries a dark haired baby, and the demon looks remarkably like your brother. 


A cart rolls by in the hallway, and you smell the sharp tang of rubbing alcohol and detergent.
When did he get “Fuck” on the bottom of his foot? The ink is still dark and fresh, not the gray blue smudge of his old work. You touch his big toe, which doesn’t move and feels like ice jelly. His ankles are chaffed, raw.
“Please don’t touch the body.”
Jumping, you turn and see the mortician leaning in the doorway, disapproving your actions.
“Sorry,” you mumble, feeling hot.
“You are going to have to hurry, we can’t keep the body out of the cooler for more than fifteen minutes unless we’re doing an autopsy. Policy.”
“Okay.”
Goodbye, laugh lines.
Back in your car, hands on the steering wheel, you look down at the newspaper still lumped on the passenger’s seat.
“A body was found in the Houston river,” you read, as a sick heaviness swells in your throat. “The Caucasian males’ body floated to the surface when the rope tying him down broke. Police say the man was shot six times in the back. Gang tattoos indicate the murder was part of the continuing violence—“
Your phone rings.
“Hello?”

A bird shits on your window. You’re out of cleaning fluid, but you turn on the windshield wipers anyway.
“I’m at the hospital.”
Now, all you can see is a white rainbow.

Young Irony

“Amy.”

“What.”

“Get out of your bed.”

“No.”

“Amy! Get out of your bed.”

Amy glared through the bars of her crib, staring at her older brother with a hearty scowl.

“Dad said we can’t get out of our cribs,” she said.
Caleb’s three-year-old brain knew dad had said so, but dad wasn’t here in the room. Dad had gone right after prayers and One More Story Time. Pitted against his desire to climb out and play with the legos was his little sister, Amy, who would later go on to earn the nickname Stubborn Mule and Iron Legs. The two were correlated.

Negotiation tactics were needed.
“Amy, just put your leg over crib,” Caleb had stopped whispering and was now pulling at the wooden, slightly-chewed-soft-by-other-children bars on his own crib.

For a moment, she thought about doing it, swinging one leg into freedom. What Caleb wouldn’t understand till many years later, however, was that this particular younger sister had an above average intelligence. She understood (even at the tender age of two) that in order to swing her leg over, she would have to stand up and climb over the railing.
It would be a direct defiance to her father’s stern command that they Stay In Bed.
“No.”

Her favorite word once again defeated Caleb’s attempt at anarchy.

Then, in a moment of psychological brilliance, he understood what he needed to say. A command would never sway her. It would have to be something much more terrible, something unbearable for the stubborn two-year-old in the adjacent crib.

“Amy,” he said in a slow, calculated voice, “If you don’t get out of your crib and play with me, I’m not going to be your friend.”

It was Sophie’s Choice, a colloquialism incomprehensible till she was 15, and even then she would never watch the movie. Or read the book.
Defy her father and she risked a spanking.
Deny her brother, and she would lose the friendship of the ever-suave older brother, who at the moment was thinking about Barney and the other yellow dinosaur.

“Okay.” 

She pulled herself up and lifted one flannel, pink leg. Just as she hoisted herself over the edge, the door opened.
Mom, who had been crouching behind the door, burst in just as Caleb’s padded, onesie foot hit the floor. She had been waiting, this time, waiting to catch the seeds of rebellion before it sprouted into full blown, illegal lego fun. Caught by the empirical authority, the rebels had no choice but to submit to their spankings.

Fifteen minutes later, the two were once again enclosed in their wooden caged cribs. Amy still sniffled, mostly out of an indignant anger towards now un-cool older brother.

“Amy.”

“Go ‘way.”

“Aaamy.”

She turned her head towards the wall, squeezing her eyes shut. A remnant tear appeared and followed the wet path on her cheek, dripping onto her ducky blanket.

“Caleb, now I’m not going to be your friend!”

Authority usurped, tables turned, the two fell asleep.

Young Irony.