all my brother wanted

Will Smith plays a cop in this movie. We watch him on the couch, your baby sister and I. She, who was not yet born when I knew you best. The speakers make such deafening sound. Subwoofer. A thought couldn’t be had if you begged it. Our uncle is so proud of this. Purchase. Black people love to leave the stickers on their new things. The sheetrock on the walls is crumbling. The wooden joists behind the dining table are exposed. Our aunties play cards and whatnot. Your baby sister sighs. “All my brother wanted to be was eighteen.” Everything in this room is half finished.

In movies, there’s a music score to punctuate great loss. Emotion is buoyed by the seesawing of strings and other mallets tapping strings. It’s Christmas at our grandmother’s house. There’s a piano inside the boy. Nobody has a mustache yet. Our grandfather still hides his porn in a basket under the television. The gun against the wall like a broom.

You waddle up to me and hold my finger. “I want to show you something.” Your whole hand fixing to mine. The creases make maps and territories. Lines on palms showing all the things I’ve failed to keep. Your smile more pink than white. Hair clipped to a 1 all around. “I want to show you something.” I look down in your hand and nothing is there but my own hand. I look back in your eyes, and you smile at the joke you made.

Nobody eats at the repast. I’m in the last row of the funeral home. Seven rows ahead there are boys. There are boys with their heads down. There are boys in the pews pulled so strongly by grief you’d think they had moons. Boys so crouched inside themselves not even their grandmothers could recognize them.

They can do amazing things with years, you know. Once, I folded six months so clean that the ends touched. I say, “hold still” and I mean “I can’t talk about that.” The casket looks gray from here. Nobody has peeled the plastic. A life is to be had, as in lunch. Sometimes the greatest gift you can give someone is to let them be small in your arms. Sometimes I hug my father like he’s my son.

I don’t know all the details. Only where, and when, and with what. I know as much as the police, and that is a horror. I am afraid to know more and that is a horror. I know this because she wore a sweatshirt with your face on it. Your sister, who is now older than when I knew you best. I am sitting in the last row of our family’s side. Anyone later than me causes a draft in the sanctuary. Do we still have school tomorrow