4.25.2025

BROTHER

I have a brother and once I had high hopes
for him. This would have been 1963
so he would have been nine. It was the weekend
of the first Kennedy assassination
and we had the TV on like everyone.
Sunday morning we watched Lee Harvey Oswald
catch a bullet from Jack Ruby in real time
and Mom said she could swear Oswald knew that man.
Meanwhile, Brother had dragged our sister’s dollhouse
into his room, with six small human figures
and all their furnishings. He moved the bathtub
downstairs to the family’s wallpapered parlor,
then laid one of the tiny humans inside
and placed the others in a semicircle
around the tub, a band of plastic mourners.
He did all the voices himself—the sobbing,
the wailing, the muffled sniffles, the mother
screaming now you’ve gone and done it you bastard.
By the time of the second Kennedy hit
Brother was almost fourteen and still holed up
in his room, only now with a radio
tuned to the air traffic control frequency,
scanning for a Boeing 707
to crash in our backyard on final approach.
Brother turned into a man who sells brake shoes.