My Quirky Novel - Chapter 2 - brotherlove

Her brother called me a new-moon-sissy, cause he thought I was either a hippie or that I was gay. Or, maybe those words held another kind of abstraction for him, and they did in their own way mean that I was a special kind of sissy. A rarity, the once-a-month kind that took people's sisters and daughters and broke them in some strange arcane kind of way where they would never be fixed. He told me he'd pound on my kidney's till I pissed out blood. I got all consumed with the image. Would it just be sorta milky-clear watery blood piss or just blood, lively and newly red as though it came straight from a gash in my kneecap?

It barely matters anyway; he took what little life he had, and like the last bit of gel in the toothpaste tube squeezed it all out over his walls and floors. Lee won't ever forgive him, she still says so sometimes as we sit outside and wait for the cold of dusk to catch up to us. To shake our bones until our teeth hum like old refrigerators.

When Lee slides in next to me she breaths her sorrow and hunger and wanting for money and time out into the back of my hair. I feel the way she moves and settles on the thin mattress and with her added weight I can almost feel the hard thin carpet that covers the floor. She puts her entire weight against mine and I am the little spoon. I lay back into her, put my butt in her crotch and feel her pubic bone through the thin pants she sleeps in. Her little breasts press into my shoulder blades and I can almost feel them deflate on the jagged bones that are cresting my back skin.

Just before the sun wakes up, evil intentions fresh from dreams, to burn the masses once again, I get up and set about working in defiance. I dress quickly. I can't shave or shower. I take to staring at myself in the mirror for the minutes those activities would have filled.

My skin is gray on my face. Three weeks of stubble but I don't have it in me to grow a beard, it never really seems possible. My hair looks too dark and a little wet, and clumps and mats on my head, it's disgusting really. I haven't touched it for fear that maybe it's hard, covered in some thick crust or wet with weeks of oil and sweat. I stink, I can tell. I imagine little bits of shit and dirt clinking to the forlorn follicles that vomit long and thin strings that I'm still calling hair.


I drive to work but listen to nothing except the humming of the tires as they fight against the road. Droning my hears the road said the words to me again, the words that have been on my mind since yesterday haunting me. The pale ghost of her brother, overly healthy and fed, stomach just ripe, a little to big to fit exactly inside of his pants so it spills over slightly.

I am a new-moon-sissy. I was right. I'm not a writer. All I think about is the sun and the moon.

I'm the highest order of fuck up because I lied outright and did exactly what I said I wouldn't. And even though mostly it was an accident, I took his sister and I broke her good, and now she'll never be the same again.


We got up at 8AM. We were shower soggy when we stepped into the mid-October sunlight, the air was warm in pockets making anyone uncomfortable enough to bully you into wearing long sleeves. The thermometer betrayed you in that respect.

It was 2002 Lee had Bob Dylan's hair. I couldn't keep my hands off her stomach, it was smooth and fresh pink, bounced at the touch. There was something of mine growing somewhere beneath there and I felt like it was the shame I could only hide with my fingers.

She didn't show a single sign. We had waited six weeks just to be sure. We stayed at her parents house but we didn't tell them why. Her mother made an obvious (and mostly wine fulled) declaration that we should get married once and for all. We had been together for 3 years then. Her mother had gone on about that until Lee's brother died, at which point she locked herself into a room and didn't say much else on the subject.

We shared a cigarette in the car. The feeling of my lips where hers had just been took some of the weight from the situation. I started feeling sick, I could only imagine what Lee was feeling. She looked out the window and didn't make a sound except the little sucking noise she made when she took her drags. She told me that she didn't mind smoking since she knew what we were about to do, and she knew she was going to see this to the end.


The road still hums it's gentle haunting and the smokestacks loom quietly ahead, white pavement glows with a liquid film, the white hot sea of the sun come down to consume anyone foolish enough to be caught out walking their dogs.

After work I sell the last of my books, including a few old and first editions that I collected from professors in college or got from my father. He was an unquenchable scholar on weekends, picking up old copies of Whitman, Hemingway, whatever else he could find. I haven't told Lee that I've been selling them; mostly because I don't want to burden her and her empathetic sadness that she holds like water in a broken glass, so careful and it keeps dripping out. Our time together lately has been so spare that I hardly feel it worthwhile to fill her up with such sour emotions and let her walk around all high-school-crush broken for a few days.


My hands shook, it was freezing inside the waiting room. It was unbearable, the silence ticked out with the steady broken-faucet drip of the clock on the wall. Almost a relic in these times. I think to grade school learning to read such a clock, and realized that there are children alive and aware today that can't begin to know how to read one of those. They have far to little practice, they have spent their whole lives sleeping in our digital dreamscape.

Lee's arm is hot on mine, the skin on my forearm cools and she leaves a pale stain where the blood fled her touch. A ghost left her handprint on me. I remember the stark image it drew it my head, of our unborn girl placing her future hand on my arm sometime down the line, when Lee and I were old and still happy in the quiet way where we read our books in the same room, leaning on one another, but never say a word. It killed me. I was a coward.

The man at the bookstore looked my copies over slowly. Turned all the pages. Looked for mars or marks. He is quickly satisfied with his findings, and hands me a hundred dollars. I contemplate what to do with it as it dries my hands.

I hit the curb and already my pocket is sweating. That pack of cigarettes doesn't seem so selfish anymore. I feel like if I take one out it will self immolate in the weather. I'm sticky with sweat, glistening really. The more I wait the more I realize this is part of the prescription when it comes to being outside, you form a thick film; an interesting side-effect of the human cooling system.

Lee has already left for work when I get home. There is a note on the table. Love is all it says. The power is out, the house is tinted in brown light, the toilet bowl is brown, our lungs our brown. Love. I put it in my wallet.