My brother Jimmy was born with a patch of loam under his left nipple. When I was very young, I often asked to touch it, and he'd pull up his favorite, green polo and turn before me proudly like an older person displaying a new tattoo. The patch was the size of a quarter. My fingers came away smelling of silt. He died at the age of fourteen.
While he lived, Jimmy was charming and had many girlfriends. He was blond and handsome, with an endearing smile. Every week, I'd see him talking to girls on our block, smiling, dipping his head close to theirs as if to steal a kiss. I saw him steal a few. That year, I suggested he plant a bean sprout in his loam, but he refused because once a mustard seed had embedded itself in his skin and was painful to extract.
I thought that as long as he had the patch, something should grow there.
"Aw, Beck," he said, "I don't want something growing from my chest. You are brain dead."
"Am not," I said. "A bean sprout is not a mustard seed."
"Close enough. Just don't tell anyone about it, okay?" he asked. "Not at Show and Tell. Not anywhere. If you do, you won't be my sister anymore."
I did not tell anyone because I believed him.
When Jimmy was a kid, he had been an athlete, but as he grew older, he took to smoking dope with other kids. At one time, he could throw a football fifty yards and hit an object the size of a number two on a jersey, but later he was lucky to make the hamper four feet from his bed. Still, he grew taller every year.
I looked like my mother, short and stout, but everyone said my brother looked like he'd come from someone else's family. He was then 5'10" and my father was 5'11" so my father became suspicious of mailmen. Often, he'd look a Nordic carrier over as if to ask, "Is this the one?" He and my mother slept in separate beds. At the time, I thought this was normal.
We lived in a three-bedroom house on Idley Court, two city blocks away from children so poor they did not have costumes on Halloween. Jimmy got to know them and abandoned the kids from our street. He stayed out after dark. He lied, cheated, and stole.
He told me, "They say everything, but they don't mean it. Don't bother to listen. Do what you want." One night, after my parents had gone to sleep, I caught him in the basement with one of his girlfriends.
Her name was Patrice. She lived on the corner in the green house with red steps. They squirmed on the couch: Jimmy's pants near his knees, her legs, like stubby taffy, wrapped around him, and they moaned as his white buttocks pistoned up and down.
She lifted her flabby arm and pointed at me, standing in the doorway above the stairs, and Jimmy growled, "Go away, little sis. Don't tell." He had not taken off his shirt. Later, he told me not to mention what I'd seen and asked if I knew what they'd done.
I said, "No."
He said, "Good." He was nice to me after that, though his eyes were bloodshot and the odor of sage continually seeped from his clothes.
"Did you let her see it?" I asked.
"What?"
"The spot."
"No." he said. "Stop talking about it."
He showed me a locket he'd stolen from the department store to give her, but by the time he was ready to make the offer, her father found out about them and would not let Jimmy near his house. Her father was a police sergeant whose squad car was habitually parked out front, a big, hairy man the neighborhood kids feared.
From the middle of the street in subsequent weeks, Patrice could be seen in her living room, staring out her window, those pudgy fingers of hers pressed to the glass, her green, deep-lidded eyes wistful. She cried at random and frequently, her eyes meant only for Jimmy; it was as if she thought by standing there that Jimmy would find her and echo her sadness; then they could exchange long, house-to-house glances like thwarted lovers. Jimmy tried for a week or two—but suddenly, began to kiss another girl.
One morning, I saw her unhappy family clustered at the doorstep of 1101—Patrice, with her small suitcase in hand, the handle clenched tightly. They stared at each other with dewy eyes, and I saw them huddle together as I ran to get the paper for my father. Her parents had spoken to mine the night before.
I remember I'd watched my father rip a check from his checkbook, then her father take it, and this was followed by the quiet shutting of our door. The whisper was that Patrice was pregnant, but when she returned, her eyes were sad, but her belly did not grow. Still, she hated Jimmy. She spray painted "Prick" on his bike, then pelted it with eggs.
Jimmy was unrepentant. Our parents reasoned with him, explained to him and finally yelled at him. "Jimmy, why do you cause trouble? How will we pay for this? What were you thinking?" Following a lecture, Jimmy always did something bad.
The next day, he stole a bicycle. My father tried to get him to tell whom he had stolen the bike from, but Jimmy remained silent. His eyes, once joyful, went hard. To compensate for criminal activities, he was grounded and assigned a list of chores. He performed each with a maximum of negligence. He ran away twice that year.
At thirteen, he almost set the house on fire.
I'd watched him take a piece of newspaper to the stove, set it ablaze, and carry it burning through the house to light a firecracker, one of the quick-flaming varieties known as Ladies' Fingers. The firecracker exploded beautifully on the road, but Jimmy threw the singed remains in a trashcan beside our house. The trashcan was full of used briquettes, a broken down cabinet, and paper odds and ends—so the flames rose quickly.
Jimmy laughed as they escalated, drizzling them with the hose, but he did not spray them directly. The heat melted the can into a nubby ring on the pavement; then the neighbors, two Mexican men, ran over and doused the fire in earnest. They pulled the flaming can from the house as storm clouds gathered overhead, loosing a torrent of rain, but Jimmy wiped the smile from his face only when my mother arrived.
Standing in the downpour, she began shouting, starting with, "Jimmy, how did the fire start?"
Jimmy shrugged.
"James Elliot Peter, how did the fire start?"
"I don't know," he lied.
"You need to take responsibility," she said, and then yelled at me, "Becky, what the hell happened here?" It was a good question: A portion of roof had been charred, and musty smoke trailed from the doused can while the odor of singed plastic filled the air. Jimmy sent me a pleading look. He hissed, "Shhh," under his breath.
My mother shook my shoulders as if determined to shake the answer out, then asked softly, "How did it happen? Please, Becky, tell me what happened."
My brother glared. "It's not my fault," I whispered. Rain pelted my face. I was freezing. My mother let go of my shoulders, holding her hands over her eyes, and the rain slid from her fingers like water from an awning. Both neighbors glared at Jimmy.
One said, "Your son did it."
The other said, "Do you see how close the can was to the gas-main? The whole block could have gone up." They returned to their houses, shaking their heads.
Later, my father said, "Don't play with fire, son. If I've told you once, I've told you a million times." Jimmy, long adept at looking contrite, feigned sorrow. From then on, our neighbors avoided us, but Jimmy did what he pleased, and "Piece of shit son," I heard my father say from his den. "What's wrong with him? Why does he make this the house of Sisyphus? I'm toting that damn rock up the hill, again and again." My father adored mythical matches for his troubles, but Jimmy then delighted in bringing home a worse element: addicts from downtown and pickpockets from the bus station.
From my room, I often heard the whoosh of his window opening and the click of a Bic lighter. When he was fourteen, the police came to our door and Jimmy was taken to Juvie. He had graffitied a fence, shoplifted from the drugstore, and stolen from our mother's purse—though the last crime went unreported.
His face aged. His high Swiss cheekbones looked gaunt. Stalking through the house at night, he consumed all bread, lunchmeat, ramen and any other quick-eat foods. It seemed he was always growing. He was 6'2" the last time we measured him. "Jimmy is eating us out of house and home," my mother began to whisper. She avoided confrontations.
Though our house was on the "good side" of the lots, we were always broke due to fines for my brother's criminal acts, and my mother's resultant shopping. For hours after Jimmy's misdeeds, she haunted the malls, so her closet was full of shoeboxes: "Shoes. The only thing fat people can buy in cute styles," she said once, and her receipts were stored on the upper shelf. She also bought clothes sized to fit the terminally anorexic: 0, 0+, 1 ˝. My mother was a short Sally Struthers with a pear-shaped figure.
Furious, my father held the diminutive clothes up to her bulging waist and said, "Who did you think would wear these, dear? Your midget twin?"
"I have a right to my things," she'd say, and go out the next day, dragging more home. We learned not to question her. My father believed that she was addicted to the friendly hello of clerks and her own plastic purchase power. It was three years before they bought me my first bicycle.
That year, at the age of seven, I failed the second grade. No one at home seemed to care. "What is this book about, Becky?" My teacher would ask. All teachers looked the same to me, old with false smiles. I didn't reply. At recess I sat at my desk making loops and loops of spirals, with nothing but lowercase Ls for pages. The other children did not like me because I lied all the time, but I could not stop.
"Becky," my teacher persisted, "Can you really expect me to believe that a pet turtle destroyed your permission slip for the trip to the fair?"
"Yes," I said. "I used it to pick up his poop."
I had no turtle. When she called my parents, they told her they had forgotten to sign the permission slip—and why was she making such a big deal of it anyway?
"Your daughter will fail," she replied. "How much help is she getting at home?"
"It's second grade, not brain surgery," my father said.
"If you were teaching her, we wouldn't have this problem," my mother agreed. "Obviously, she has picked up this lying in your class."
They were wrong. I learned it from Jimmy. When my father asked, "Jimmy, did you do your homework," Jimmy always said yes. He got worse and worse, and my parents were beside themselves. "You children are turning out poorly," they announced—we would be criminals, whores, reprobates.
Strangely, after the fire, my father pushed their twin beds back together, and they spent hours communing in their room, as if on second honeymoon. For the first time, I heard my mother's girlish squeals and the heavy clunk of their oak headboards meeting the wall. I believe my father reinitiated the sexual part of their relationship to curb her spending, but whatever his reason, this did not work.
Jimmy spent hours gelling his hair with extra-hold professional supplies. He had quit smoking pot, but moved onto uppers. Our parents were seldom home, and Jimmy then chased so many girls, he used the phone incessantly.
My mother, unwilling to be without a phone herself, installed him a private line. She also bought him a family-sized box of condoms. My father, oblivious, never said a word.
I kept tabs on Jimmy from the hallway, spying at his door. "I know, Gigi," I heard him say, "I miss you too. Can't wait to see you. Will you come over on Sunday?" Jimmy's face, once smooth as a fresh peach, became pitted. When he hung up, he immediately dialed again. "Hello, is Carla there? Hi sweetie, what are you doing? How about Saturday? My parents are going out of town and I'm supposed to be watching my sister, but she's eight. She won't bother us."
As the months passed, his loam hardened. A sizable lump rose in his shirt. I thought it would be like a spot of dirt that could be rubbed off, and perhaps would finally be gone, but when we moved the next year, his skin broke out in a rash. The hardened lump appeared the size of a tennis ball, then flattened. Twice a week, the dermatologists tended the area, but no one could decide what might be done.
The spot widened and spread across his chest.
My father said, "Jimmy, you have to take better care of yourself," and lifted Jimmy's shirt, muttering, "If you bathed more, this thing would die down." Then he dug his fingers into the mound and ripped at it with his thumbnail.
"It won't die down," Jimmy said. "But thanks for your support." He rolled his eyes and my father kept digging. A rivulet of blood fell slowly across the dirt and down Jimmy's abdomen. Jimmy flinched. My father looked disgusted.
"What are you looking at, butt brain?" Jimmy asked me. "At least I didn't fail the second grade."
My mother said, "Becky, you need to be patient with your brother. He was born with a deformity and that makes him angry." Jimmy's response was grabbing a crystal vase and flinging it into the fireplace. My mother began to cry.
For years, I would remember her saying these words: a deformity. Even now, at thirty, I remember the tone of her voice, placating and fake. My father shook his head and swept the shards. He said, "Jimmy just doesn't take to the right way, and Becky will not learn, so perhaps the Lord is punishing us all." He perceived himself as Job, and had many times recited the Bible in the hopes Jimmy would change, but one day, when Jimmy had fallen asleep during a lecture, I noticed my brother had inserted earplugs.
We were assembled in the family room again, debriefing style, on the plush, 1970, thrift-store sofas. While my father spoke, my mother's eyes darted from object to object, over the rusty Singer, into the oak entertainment center, and around the limp ferns in their tiny silver pots. She had a black thumb, so several plants were dying, but she would not look at them nor throw them away. Perhaps she couldn't bear to admit she'd killed them, but glancing away from their ruin that afternoon, she touched her perfectly coiffed head and began to pull tendrils from the base of her scalp. I inserted my hand in the couch cushions to feel for a penny, or a pen, or an appealing piece of lint.
". . . And what I'm saying," my father continued, "is that we need to work together. We are a family." He cleared his throat and said, rather ridiculously, "Together we stand, or united we fall! Emma and I did not raise you children to embarrass us. We want you to succeed. Jimmy? Jimmy! Are you listening?"
"He's sleeping, Dad," I said, though in hindsight, I now believe he was coming down, a bad amphetamine down that lasted for days.
"Well, wake him up," my father shouted.
"I need air," my mother said.
"What are you breathing now?" he asked.
"The scent of wasted words," my mother said. "Your lectures would put insomniacs to sleep."
My father sneered and left the room.
My mother grabbed her purse and walked out, saying, "There's dinner in the freezer, Becky. Heat it up."
Jimmy slept peacefully. He looked so kind when he was sleeping—not the boy who threw dirt at cars, or stole my parents' keys to make it with girls in their car. He looked friendly then, like he was really okay, a nice kid. "Jimmy?" I whispered. "Dad's gone."
There was no response, so I poked him, but he didn't move. "Jimmy," I said, louder. He said nothing. Sunlight filtered in from the window behind the couch and he looked almost angelic. I pushed my index finger into the open space between his waistband and his T-shirt. I lifted the fabric higher. I had not seen the spot in a while.
On his chest, the swath of dirt wrapped all the way around and started to reach his sides. I ran a finger across it. Dry as a dune, it crumbled. My finger smelled like plain dirt when I retrieved it, uncultivated, like a field rendered barren long ago. Beneath the dirt was a layer of moist, red clay. He awoke.
"You saw it, didn't you?" he asked. His eyes blinked open like a tortoise, the bloodshot strings of broken blood vessels contrasting with his blue irises.
"Yes," I said.
He nodded. "It's growing, Becky," he said. "It gets worse everyday."
I asked, "What if you watered it?"
"I take showers," he said. "Nothing works." For the first time in a long while, he was not arrogant, just honest. He gave me a measuring look. I stared down at my purple shorts and bit my lip. He picked at a zit on his chin. "Becky, I'm falling apart," he said. "I've been such a fuck-up."
"What if you start doing good things? Right now?"
"I tried that last month. I raked the lawn. I put out the trash. I tried to be nice to Mom. It still grew."
"What did Dad say when you did those things?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing." He scratched his head and said, "I think it grows based on what they think. I can't go to school anymore. The patch used to be small, like a smudge of dark dirt, but now it's turning to clay—staining everything red. All of my clothes. The sheets. Everything." He looked at me and announced, "It's growing. I can't stop it."
I asked, "If you don't go to school, what do you do?"
"I go out in the morning and wait till they leave; then I come home. I erase the messages from the attendance lady and go walking in the park on Holmes Street. I like to walk in that park. I don't even go for girls anymore."
He stared out the window and then let a scowl settle on his features. He asked, "Did Mom go shopping?"
"Yes."
"And Dad to the den?"
"Yes."
"Status quo," he said. "Try to learn something at school. I'm going to take a nap." He did not get out of his bed for weeks. Every day, my mother went and fed him. She called the school to inform them of his illness, but they told her he had not attended in over a month. Because he was awake for only three or four hours a day, my mother did not have the heart to punish him. My father was too busy.
A dingy reddish-brown settled around Jimmy's face. He got worse and worse. One day, I came and knocked at his door. "Come in," he muttered.
My father said that when we were in his room, we were supposed to talk quietly, so, "Hi Jimmy," I whispered. I had come to tell him I had received my first A in class.
"Hi Becky. What are you whispering for?"
"No reason. How are you feeling?" I said louder.
"Crappy, how the hell are you," he bit out.
"Fine" did not seem adequate. He was miserable and I did not want to appear less miserable. "Okay," I said. "I'm okay."
"You should be okay," he said. "You can walk around."
His sheets were coated with clay from his ankles to his neck. "I just came to visit," I said.
"Okay," he hissed. "You visited, now get the fuck out."
I left his room in tears. That night, my father called a family meeting. Jimmy was left in his room.
Have you looked beneath the sheet lately?" my father asked, pointing toward Jimmy's room. We hadn't. He put on a serious face and said, "My son is turning to clay," and closed his eyes. "I am Job. I swear." No one paid him any attention.
My mother spoke softly, muttering, "I've tried to look under his sheet, but he gets angry when I try to take it. It should be washed. It needs to be washed."
"He does not want you to change the sheet," my father boomed, "because the growth has taken over his legs."
"The growth," my mother repeated, slowly, like noting the Latin names of flowers, then wrote these words in a tiny black notebook and started to cry. "My therapist," she said, by way of unnecessary explanation, "wants me to write down the things that upset me here."
"Might as well just tape-record your whole damn day," my father said then, but while they glared, I figured it was a good time to announce my success.
I said, "I got an A in my spelling class today."
My father looked up with a horrible grimace and replied, "Can you please focus on something other than yourself, Becky? Your brother is terminally ill!"
I said, "I'm sorry," as my mother wrote down "terminally" and "ill." Then nothing was said for several moments until my mother murmured, "What will we do about the growth?" and my father hollered, "He came out of you that way. You figure it out."
"The growth must go away!" my mother shouted back, blood flooding to her face.
"The growth," Jimmy then shouted from his room, "the growth, the growth, the growth, the growth," almost chanting from the musty darkness.
My teacher called the next day. She said something on the answering machine like, "This is Mrs. Nichols. I'm calling to let you know that Becky has had a breakthrough and received an A in the class spelling test yesterday. If she continues this way, she may yet pass the grade."
My father's response was, "Of course, they can't flunk her twice."
My mother said, "What he means is that that's great, dear. Good job!"
"Bureaucrats," my father breathed. "They've got to cut some red tape somewhere. Can't go around flunking everyone."
I went to Jimmy's room. His lights were out. From his window, the amber glow of a street-lamp made an imperfect arc over his bed. "You sleeping?" I whispered.
"No," he said.
"Dad says you're turning into clay."
"It's true, but now the clay turns into dust. From loam to dust to clay and back to dust."
I paused. "Can I touch it?"
"No!" he said, looking away toward the yellow light. He acted as if I wanted to see his penis. "I heard the answering machine," he said. "That's good you aced that test."
"Thanks," I mumbled. I did not tell him that for the last month I'd checked myself in the shower for dust, or loam, or anything. "You should have planted something in it," I said. "Maybe it would have stayed in one place."
"Turn on the light," he replied.
I did and he pulled the sheet close to his chin, staring into my eyes. His feet, then uncovered, had turned to dust. "I'm trying not to move much," he said, his toes pointed toward the wall, perfectly formed like anatomical sandcastles. "Now, watch this," he said. He twisted his leg slightly, and his foot broke away from his ankle, the two parts separated by a thin black line. "The dust reaches my chest now," he said then.
"How can you stand it?" I asked. "How does it feel?"
"Like sand on the beach, my body first felt wet, but now it's drying out. I'm about to be gone from here, Becky; I feel it. Guess Mom and Dad will have a hard time explaining this one." He laughed harshly, then said, "Old fucker never liked me anyway. Before you were born, he used to say, 'You sure we had sex that month, Emma? You sure?' And I could always hear him." Jimmy paused for a second, reflecting, then turned to me and said, "You need to get the fuck out of here, Beck. They'll let you go. Just tell them Mom and Dad are nuts. Tell them neglect. Tell them anything."
He stared at the ceiling and closed his eyes. He fell asleep immediately.
The next morning, I peered in and his head had turned to sand. His entire body, except for the broken off foot, was pristine. I stared at his sandy corpse for a long time. He looked handsome, white, and motionless. His clothing was the only splash of color.
My mother peered over my shoulder and fainted. She bumped her head on the bookcase and took some time to recover. My father entered the room and poked my brother's chest with his index finger.
The perfect facsimile of a ribcage crumpled. My father poked again. Jimmy's legs became mounds of dirt. As if to test the power of his pointed finger, my father glanced Jimmy's arms with his fingertip, and they too fell apart. He was about to touch Jimmy's head—the only thing left that resembled him—when I yelled, "No, don't touch it. The head is mine."
I took Jimmy's purple duffle, gently placed his head inside it, and swept the remains of his hair into the bag with a hand-held broom. I took the whole thing to my room, but my parents left the rest of the body there as if Jimmy would reappear, which he did not. When Jimmy's parole officer called, and my parents could not produce him, the officer came to our house. "He turned to dirt," my father kept insisting.
"He slept in that bed," my mother said. "Take samples from the clay. DNA."
He looked at my parents like they were crazy. "I think he ran away again," the officer said. "Maybe the sand was an elaborate plot to make it look like he was sleeping.
My parents conferred. They looked as though his explanation would do them fine, except that they knew the truth. "Perhaps, you're right," my father said. "What do we do now?"
"Just wait. He'll show up."
The parole officer called once a week for many months. Suffice it to say, Jimmy never showed. My mother lifted the fitted sheet from his bed, with the sand rolled neatly inside it. She deposited the whole thing in the trash. She cried as she did this, but once the evidence was gone, she acted as though Jimmy had indeed disappeared. She got thinner, "from stress," she explained, so one by one, white tags fell from her mall garments like irregular snow.
Other parents expressed concern, Jimmy's picture was put on milk cartons, and my parents were surrounded with support. I grew up with people saying that my brother had run away. Somewhere along the line, my parents internalized the lie. Whenever my mother saw a mop of golden curls on a fourteen-year-old boy, she stopped and stared; her face went pale. The age of the boys she looked at never changed. Even in death, Jimmy claimed their exclusive attention.
Jimmy's room was left unaltered. I could go back today and see the football on the top shelf from his younger days, the trophies, the model airplanes, and the dope pipe, made of foil, stashed in an old baseball mitt. My parents had frozen him in a good era he'd hardly known, a fabrication of their collective memory; and when they spoke of him afterwards, he'd never aged past eleven, when everything was sunshine and loam.
Eventually, I went to college and got a degree in horticulture. I landed a prestigious job, rented a nice house, and lived alone, speaking to none of my swank neighbors. I did not know who they were, nor did I care. The duffle, carted through many moves, was still intact.
I had tried to plant a bit of Jimmy at every house I lived in, tried everything to make him grow. Sometimes, I caught myself looking at the dust asking: Did he exist? Was he real? Was this sand, sifting through my fingers once the skin of an adolescent boy who'd wooed a hundred girls?
Yes, I concluded: It was. There were only a few handfuls left, and I tried weeds, flowers, vegetables, and mustard seeds, but nothing worked. Finally, I succeeded with a Spartan Floribunda. The petals of this rose were coral pink. I sprinkled his dirt among the prepared soil and waited.
Rosebushes are not easy to grow. They require the right light, vigilant pruning and almost perfect conditions. Quickly, Jimmy's bush extended branches above the ground, but as I waited to cut springtime buds, I noticed none had grown. On each stem, instead, were thorns, gnarled and dark, shining with an almost patina sheen. Flowers never appeared. Leaves grew in sparsely. His bush was two feet wide and three feet tall—the largest rosebush in the yard.
My father, with whom I had kept in contact, came to visit one evening. He had recently divorced my mother. He did not call first but arrived on my doorstep, and I led him quietly to the back yard. Once there, he pointed to Jimmy's bush immediately, muttering, "What's wrong with that one? It's ugly. A goddamn Goliath of ugly!" All around were vibrant tulip stock, Gerber daisies, Spanish moss, and zinnia. In the greenhouse, I'd grown several species of rare orchids. "Only thorns," my father said. He leaned in and pointed with his index finger, which brushed the tip of one. He quickly pulled back his hand as a drop of blood sprang to his fingertip.
"Don't touch that one," I said. "It's sensitive and has lost its bloom."
He moved onto a new part of the yard, sucking his finger and pointing with his opposite hand. He had the same weighty walk, looking older but unchanged.
As he strode the yard and twilight dimmed the landscape, I imagined my plants shriveling, one by one, fading and crumbling into dust. The shadows in his wrinkles appeared deceptively dark and deep like the crease between a sandy foot and ankle. "Would you like to go in, Dad?" I asked. "I'm not feeling so well. I'd like to get off my feet."
"Let's sit on the bench a while," he said. "You can tell me about your dead-end job. The bureaucrats, ha, they run everything these days. All of these state-funded operations are going down the tubes."
"The bureaucrats," I echoed, staring at Jimmy. "Actually, this business is privately owned…Let's talk about Mom. Have you seen her lately?"
"No," he said. He stared up at the Spanish moss and lapsed into silence, then said: "Your mother has not changed. She's still spending her way into a corner."
I yawned and asked, "Do you mind if we call it a night? I'm exhausted. Come back any time. Tomorrow, if you'd like."
Abruptly, he rose to leave. "I'll do that," he said, patting my back in his version of a hug. "And I'll let myself out."
"Goodnight," I said, waving as he left, but I did not go in. I sat on that bench until the sky was so dark I could not see my hands before my face. There was nothing in my vision but the night sky and light of a distant street-lamp, coming from the north.
In the dark, I could almost imagine Jimmy's roses blooming, or perhaps I forced myself to imagine them, but in that moment he was alive, real again—like the fragrant scent of silt on fingertips, lingering in my memory, both beautiful and grotesque. And that's how I remember him now. Jimmy does not change though sometimes I imagine his body as a million grains of sand, scattered to the refuse of a city dump, or a large lump of clay on a red stained sheet. Sometimes, I see him as a plot of fertile soil where nothing beautiful will ever grow.
Then, I remember the ruination that one straight finger can do—pointed toward and rupturing a heart.
Copyright © 2001 AZX LLC
