Wilma

No, we have not found him yet. Our brother. This is not about that. That is that and this is this and we wish you'd all just find ways to move forward, as we have, though our bellies have frozen in place from that very moment we did realize him lost. They refuse to take air as deeply down as they used to--this would mean conceding to some truth that we are not ready to yet concede. A stack of dollar bills has appeared through our mail slot, and we can only suspect we are being bribed for something. For keeping quiet? For keeping our noses to ourself and to the chronic stains left upon the underarms of our tank tops? Yes, we wear tank tops. Even here. Everyone wears tank tops. Everyone.

Otis Redding is softing through our ears, and this calms us. You are tired, and you want to be free, he says. And we say, yes, well, who isn't, and who doesn't? There are headaches leapfrogging down the line of us, here at our long, newly-stained wood table. The tallest among us felled a tree and the shortest helped him craft from it this table, and the brother of most-middling height did the staining. The rest of us, we just watched. That is the job of people who fall into no distinct height category (of which there are the primary aforementioned three (shortest, tallest, middleingest)).

We have gotten used to doing lots of watching, and it has, perhaps, made us somewhat lazy. Were we to re-enter the "real" world, were we to separate ourselves from our isolation and attempt, say, to get a job at the Home Depot, or the Price Chopper, we would automatically assess the heights of all of our co-workers and figure out from there if we could be rightly expected to do any work. Likely, we would not. We would insist that we were not relegated to any position but that of the "watcher," for obvious reasons. We would be fired. We would be forced, then, to return here. Which is where we belong. Which is why we do not leave. Which is why it was an especial blow to lose a brother to any world outside of the one we've created to keep us. When we lose ourselves and each other, we expect it to be due to natural causes. Within the home. This is the most important part. The home was built to birth us, to sleep us, and, eventually, to kill us. Not the snow, not the sex-wild light of the moon, not the dry mouth of the badlands, not nothing but this.

We'd like to move in the direction of discussing dogs more regularly. They are perhaps the only beasts fit for entering into our private conversation, this one we've been having. Today we met a beast named Wilma, with one leg very swollen and round above the knee, and a tongue that hung out the side of her mouth all of the time. She is medium-sized and soft grey with streaks of white and the sweetest face you've ever seen. Mostly it's the influence of that tongue, which makes her look a bit dunce-y, which she is not. The tongue belies her. Sometimes, when she rests her head upon her paws, the tongue drapes over one or both paws like fabric. Wilma is a bright star.

Sleep calls for us, too early we reckon. It's rain, and it's cold. The problem with relegating all work to only three brothers is that they begin to resent the rest of us and then to purposefully harm their backs in order to develop stoops and grow shorter, or the opposite. We have wondered at the shortest brother's recent habit of hanging from a bar he's placed in the doorway of the bathroom and letting himself dangle, quite limp, there. We've noticed he is always sitting with his back very straight at the dinner table which is also the everything else table; he is looking taller, but he will still always be the shortest.

We tell him we will always love and respect him, but we don't always mean it. Sometimes, when he's off working, the rest of us will privately make debasing jokes about various parts of his body, like his hands, and we rarely feel bad about it. We are not always good people. Sometimes, we just need to gossip. Sometimes we realize it is awful to be speaking this way of a brother, especially when one of us still remains lost. Other times, we don't realize anything at all. Until later, staring up at the ceiling. Then we remember everything that's ever happened to us and fall asleep just like that. Remembering.