MY BROTHER CARMEN

JUDE AND KIT WERE WALKING AROUND MY MOTHER’S HOUSE. I hadn’t been there for a few years, but we’d ended up there somehow, and I watched them, perched upon the landing of the wooden stairs Carmen and I used to throw ourselves down; sliding on our mattresses like they were sleds. Carmen 12, I 7. Kit was laughing, hard and barking, and I couldn’t tell what was so funny. My ear didn’t extend that far, so I leaned over the edge of the landing and lowered my head down as far as it would go through the beams. It couldn’t hold my weight, and before I knew that the beams were breaking or cracking or vanishing. They gave out under me, and I fell down— down through the wooden floors and then landed back on top of them again, in a heap in front of Jude and Kit. 

“Oh, my god.” Jude said something first. It sounded like “Oh, my god,” but could have been any other variation of any other mildly-polite exclamation that seemed to lack any urgency. When I looked up at the two of them, they were wearing my old elementary school uniform. Kit’s skirt was rolled up, I could tell, and so I asked her why she had done that. I hadn’t made any effort to get up off of the ground; out of the pile of my limbs. At my comment, she seemed offended, and I showed her my own skirt, rolled up three rolls high on my waist. She looked disgusted and Jude put his hand up the back of Kit’s shirt. When I stood up, it became apparent that my skirt was far too high; that Kit had maybe only rolled hers once or twice and here I was, a harlot, with my skirt rolled up to brush the tops of my thighs and nearly expose my underwear, frayed and old and embarrassing. 

I tried to roll down my skirt, desperately, while Kit and Jude moved into a corner to kiss. The following things all happened, in a relative order, seemingly all at once: 

1 There were track marks all down my arms, both of them, that were leaking pus and bleeding, and

2 when I was scared and watching Kit and Jude seemingly make love in the corner, I looked up to see

3 Carmen barrelling down the stairs, clean-armed and alive; pink-cheeked and smiling, on his mattress-sled, 

4 with Kit and Jude looking so happy to see him

all the while I stood there like a ghost and then I realized I was a ghost and Carmen soared right through me.