By Jessica Bryan
In the last photograph I have of my brother, he stands in a field of wildflowers. He seems small, like a toy soldier, as the flowers—daisies, larkspur, lilacs—surround him. I don’t even know where the picture was taken, but the waves of an ocean are visible, and I try to remember when he was near the ocean. I feel as if I’ve betrayed him by not knowing more about his life.
My brother, who is six years older than I am, used to write me marvelous letters while he was in college that were full of talk about fanged frogs, growling fish, and fearless rats. I counted the weeks by his letters.
By the time I got to college, he was living in Kansas. He wrote to me about locusts eating birds and how he could see balls of pink meat clasped between their legs. He saw brown bats, in swarms, twisting like knife blades in the sky. When I read he had begun painting skulls on black velvet, I was afraid for him.
He wrote to me from Omaha, shortly after I graduated. He was going to the stockyards every weekend by train to watch the Judas cow lead the cattle across planked bridges into the slaughter pens. He said, “Their jagged echoes were like nails in my head.” He told me he liked to think a lot about white paint. I understood. White was clean, not problematic, not at all like his life.
When I finally moved east, I would only get a few letters from him each year. He told me about black eels crawling out of the sea. He was locking doors again. There was someone in his mirror, Father Goodnight, who cried red tears.
I hold his last letter to me now, lines scrawled on dingy yellow paper: “It is later than you think. There are things not ready for this world, getting ready.” I imagined only dark things–monsters in shadows. Death is lurking.
When I think of him, I imagine him being under water. I imagine a shipwreck, and I can hear it: the storm, the boards breaking off waves, carrying me down and away. It is pitch dark, but I stay at the bottom, where there is no light, where nothing has color.
Wow. Heartbreaking.
So evocative – grief you can almost touch.
Thank you: a very nice compliment.
Such vivid language about distances, the slipping away of time, and the dread of impending loss. The brother’s gradual descent into darkness revealed through taut sentences and brilliant imagery is very powerful. This story will stay with me. Thanks.
Thank you for your wonderful feedback.
Vivid images — “balls of pink meat,” for instance — move this story quietly along through the grief.
Thank you for your comment.
Well written. That “What could have been” aspect of the story, which is not expressed, lingers somehow in the air if not on the page.
Impressive also is the restraint of the writer in not knowing the answers to his brother’s struggles with his demons.
As the youngest of 9 children, I am very much aware of the emotional and geographic distances life can bring — and what (I hope!) reading and writing can provide as help in dealing with these distances.
Thank you for your comments. I appreciate them–and I especially empathize with your concluding thoughts.
Such wonderful words. As a sister and my best friend for many years, we know his soul.
Yes, Patrick. Yes.
This is not what I expected! It definitely had a occult horror vibe. But was sad. Hard balance to get right.