A Memory Apart

I remember the geography of that morning,

the smell stitched into the air,
the texture of fear on my skin,
the shape of the light

on the first dawn

beneath my new stepmother's roof.

Something was misplaced.

Some things.

I was one of them.

Not someone.

A thing.

A prop in her private theater,
a clot in the bloodstream of her vengeance,
a burr beneath her skin,
a too-beautiful boy,
an inherited trespass,
an original sin still breathing.

We sat cross-legged on the living room floor,

loosening a knot of wire hangers,

their crooked necks entwined

like silver snakes

guarding a crib.

When the tangle surrendered,

she chose one.

Unmade it.

Straightened its purpose.

The metal cinched around my throat,

winter-cold,

its bite narrowing the world

to breath,

to panic,

to survive.

A trauma was planted there,

seed-deep,

sending roots into places

I would spend years trying to dig through.

The room wore curtains like blindfolds.

Afterward,

a closet swallowed me whole.

She cast me into its dark mouth

only after securing

whatever victory she required.

Inside that narrow place

of dust and forgotten coats,

I sat down

and understood.

Childhood had just ended.

It lay folded beside me,

boxed away in a place

without mirrors,

without witnesses,

without echoes.

In that darkness,

I became an extension

of sins that were never mine.

Her unfinished grief.

Her fractured borders.

The child she'd surrendered after being raped.

The wound she dragged through life

like a rusted chain.

My younger brother was there too,

forming different memories below her gaze.

Not beneath her selection.

This memory of cruelty slipped past him,

and what escaped his body

took permanent residence in mine.

Now he recounts that morning

in a different language.

A different grammar.

A different syntax

A different landscape of truth.

Nothing unusual happened,

he says.

He was busy steering spaceships

through Asteroids,

vanishing into pixels,

winning an escape hatch

I never found.

He rarely appeared on her radar.

What he didn't witness

fortified him.

What I witnessed

built a projected movie in me.

His game became the after credits.

My strangulation became a prosaic plot.

An initiation

into a house already broken

before I entered it.

When she finally opened the closet,

she smiled.

The smile of someone watching

a public execution.

My bones felt burdened with its marrow.

My neck learned to stiffen.

Memory dispersed itself that day,

storing fragments

in separate helixes

of two developing brains.

My brother’s fragments protected him.

Mine sharpened themselves.

That morning

he began to mistake me for a liar.

After all,

if horror never visited him,

how could it have chosen me?

How could I be the selected piece,

the sacrificial pawn,

the body singled out

and severed from its own mind?

A body scented with kerosene.

A body painted

in the colors of being thrown into chairs.

Brother,

what else has disappeared?

Did victory feel easier

without me rendered on the screen?

Without my suffering

included in the graphics?

One day,

show me the closets

in the home you live in now.

Show me the hangers.

Remember how the next day

she snapped rubber bands

against my neck

until the skin flowered red,

then covered the marks

with one of your turtleneck sweaters.

That happened.

You saw enough to know.

Or almost enough.

The sweater is gone now,

I suppose.

Discarded.

Donated.

Reduced to threads and dust.

Like so many things.

Memory is a second chance

with a predetermined ending.

It circles back,

wearing a different face,

only to arrive

at the same grave.

And still,

brother,

I love you anyway.

Please remember to trust

me in your heart.

I will always remain before

and after the times,

releasing you from any guilt

and sharing my recollections

around the fires we start.