To My Brother, at the End of the World

      By this point we’d long exhausted the pantry, and I’d been dreaming of a white cake with pink and purple flowers round the edges and Welcome Home, Dad! scrawled in golden icing pen across the centre. “Come on, Flounder. It’ll be fun. How long has it been since we’ve had cake?”
But when we got there, packs of sharp, skinny children were elbowing each other in the eyeballs over measly handfuls of rice. A gaunt old man crumpled like a paper bag into the gutter, and you said, quietly, “No matter what happens, someone always ends up hurt.”
      I remembered how our father used to read me poetry in the flickering firelight of his study – how I used to curl up like a dumb, lovestruck puppy at his feet, soaking up all of that incomprehensible Wisdom and Tragedy in starry-eyed silence.
So I replied, in a solemn, important voice: “It’s because people are mutilated. By either love or no love.”
Looking back, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to say that right then, but whatever, I was, like, ten, and feeling pretty crushed-up and hopeless inside. You gave me a dubious look. “What does that mean?”
Irritation flushed hot behind my face. “Never mind. You’re too young to know how people really are.”
“We’re the same age.”
“Whatever,” I snapped. “Let’s go home. We’ll get that flour another time.”
But secretly I didn’t know either how anyone could be mutilated by love.
I thought about that cake again, and underneath my favourite yellow bunny sweater, my stomach was churning like sharp machinery. 

This whole thing began the night it started raining firecrackers.
Before that, we’d been basically one and the same. Sometimes it was hard to tell where you ended and I began. Like the spot where a river pours into the sea.
Then they started blazing their way through the city, those little sparky dancers, melting it down and smashing it to cinders. As we sat shell-shocked by the window, I watched them flash like New Years’ Eve fireworks on the wide glass domes of your eyes, and knew that, in some way, I’d lost a piece of you forever.
Dad left us two weeks later, on a cold, spiky Wednesday in December.
He was going to Italy, the note explained, on a job that would get us some money. It didn’t say what job. He’d be back in a week. This was pretty standard of our father, bouncing around the world like a frog zipping between lilypads on a choppy pond. It was wacky timing though, considering the fact that, last he’d seen it, our city was kind of resembling a giant scorched pizza.
In the upstairs bedroom, I watched you shake off the night’s sleep like a soft pink flower sheds its petals. Outside, something fell and crashed.
“Morning,” I said, over the noise. “Guess what! I had this totally bonkers dream earlier. Remember that time when we went to Tokyo with Dad? So, in the dream, we were in that hotel, remember, the big one with the pool on the roof. Except the pool was, like, filled with donuts and ice-cream. It was awesome. By the way, Dad’s gone to Italy but he’ll be back in a week.”
I bit my lip as I watched your body go rigid. “Italy?”
“Yeah, Italy, isn’t that sick?”
Your small white fingers tightened around the sheets as another blow sounded in the distance. “But it’s almost Christmas.”
“Yeah, and have you seen the prices around here lately? He’s gonna bring us back, like, a gazillion tonnes of spaghetti and meatballs. And probably an entire library’s worth of classic Italian literature too, that big old bookworm. It said so. In his note.”
You sat up. “He left a note? Can I read it?”
I paused, folded it in half. “Yeah, I’ll read it to you. Come on, let’s eat Coco Pops.”
In our sleep, I guess, our father had stocked the pantry chock-full with a generous supply of microwaveable goods – baked beans and canned corn and minute-noodles, as well as a stack of paper coupons to be exchanged at the market a few blocks from our place. Relief rushed through my brain like a tidal wave, cool and clean and heavy. I’d been having stress dreams about you going hungry.
There were other dreams too, of course; dreams where I watched you get blasted to bits, over and over, outside the medical centre near our old school, or even worse, where you watched me get blasted to bits and had to live on, alone and all carved-up inside with fear, that image flickering hot behind your blank ghost-eyes forever.
You could say that maybe I was a bit anxious. I didn’t let any of this on.
The days went by like the slow ticking of a clock’s minute hand. The house felt so cavernous and spooky now that it was just us, like that movie where Jack Nicholson goes bananas and starts having visions and slamming axes through walls.
Insanity wasn’t completely off the table, with all that chaos banging on outside. I’d been watching over you like a psycho-nanny, so that I would know if you went unravelling from my fingers, spiralling deep, deep down inside yourself again.
“If you could be any Disney character, who would you be? I’d be Ariel. Aaaall my old school friends used to say I had hair like Ariel. I guess that makes you, like, Flounder, huh? Hey, don’t frown! Flounder’s cool. He’s got a good heart.”
I twisted around. You were curled up in the lap of Dad’s old armchair, sullen, sulking, tracing little shapes on the whites of your bony knees. “Don’t be a guppy,” I mumbled, turning back around. “Spaghetti, remember? A lifetime supply.”
A few minutes passed. Then you burst out crying.
“I don’t wanna be alone anymore,” you spat through streams of pale snot. “I don’t want anyone to die.”
You’re not alone, I wanted to say. But for the first time in weeks, nothing escaped my mouth but air.
The TV babbled away in the background, but I think, to you, it was just another layer of noise.

There are things I want to keep from you. Images and such. Cityscapes burnt and blackened, plumes of thick smoke rising slow from the ashy skyline. Wailing bodies being fed into the mouths of ambulances curbed tired and breathless by the smashed park gates. Children flattened in the street like worms smooshed on a rainy pavement.
A girl and a boy huddled, trembling, in the stomach of a dirty bathtub, as the walls crash in around them.
And I want to make it stop, want to cover your eyes with both my hands and tell you that this isn’t how it is, isn’t how it should be. But that would be a lie.
Because this is it. This is our landscape.
“People are just not good to each other,” you whisper, in a voice that sounds a lot like our father’s. We’re sitting by the window, near where flies cluster on emptied milk cartons and old bowls of cereal. Your little pink fingers are warm in mine.
“Everything will be back to normal soon, guppy. He’s coming back soon.” I run my hand through your scruffy hair. “Look!”
        We rise up, above the droning flies, to where the world is momentarily silent. Over, in the town square, they’re raising the Christmas tree.