By Apostol Mohamed

My brother made considerable efforts to include me in conversations with his work buddies, which for him, may not have seemed considerable in the least. He was oblivious to all social tensions, like he believed everything came as easily to everyone else as it did to him⁠—or maybe that everyone was as tolerant of dusty accounting boys as himself. 

"Did you see that blonde follow Teller into the pisser?" his colleague, Mathers, whispered to him, their shoulder pads brushing conspiratorially. "Skirt hiked up. Fat, swaying ass. I would've gone in myself if I didn't respect the chain of command."

Casey grinned a sideways grin. He could never quite smirk. "Well, Teller? Tell all."

Teller, who'd claimed the window seat next to mine, bristled grandly and heavily, like the weary man of the house adjusting his tobacco pipe. 

"Nothing to tell." He swept a hand over the lower half of his face, then his chin, as if extricating a bad taste.

"An unsuccessful acquisition," Mathers chimed. Casey guffawed. 

"Hey, Cal! Give us the numbers on that! How would that figure into our gross annual product?"

I felt Mathers' appraising gaze settle on me, Teller's joining skeptically from my left. 

Eagerness rose out of me before I could direct it. I stuttered out the mangles of a response, my voice strangled⁠. Prepubescent. 

A clammy hand rose to my mouth in half-shock. I felt myself chuckle, as if this had been the joke all along. Searching for eyes. Expectant Casey. Smarmy Mathers. Steely Teller. 

Doesn't get out much, I suppose," Mathers offered to a smattering of chuckles. "Some men are better equipped with the language of numbers."

"I doubt he's equipped with much." Teller. More chuckles. 

"We all have our off days," Casey shrugged. My brother veiled his sympathy to preserve both our dignity. He did this poorly, because he could never hide anything. Not from me, anyway. He reached across the aisle and rolled his knuckles against my shoulder, bone softened by skin and the fabric of my blazer. He cracked a smile. "Cal just needs a drink or two in him."

Sales always drank on the way to pitches if they didn't have any beforehand, and usually, even if they did. The alcohol caught up to them after the first several orders, Mathers insisting all the while that Bailey's didn't count. Even Casey, so beyond reproach that it never occurred to me that he could be truly drunk, had a wobble in his step returning to his seat from the toilet cubicle, a couple droplets of piss warping the box of his leather shoes. 

By the first half of the journey, sales was incoherent, some taking the initiative to sleep the drink off over the next few hours, before the first layover. I hadn't realized how taut my body was drawn until it loosened, when Mathers and Teller were finally asleep. I hadn't had much, despite Casey's prodding⁠—I would not let my body be in such a state of uncontrol. But that wasn't something he ever feared. 

I remember exactly how he reclined next to me, two feet of carpet between us. Mathers slumped indelicately into the window next to him⁠. But my brother's back was straight, his legs extended and crossed at the ankles. Even at rest, even intoxicated, he had that relaxed grace that came with a lack of anxiety about taking up space. The sun hit his profile like the rim light in a car commercial.

*

Casey tasted wonderful. He was coated in bitter sweat, and stringy bits of his hair caught from time to time in my teeth—but his meat, his meat was ecstasy. 

My brother had been skinnier than I'd ever seen him before he died. He was tall and lean, all dehydrated muscle⁠—qualities preserved in his carcass, its muscle sliding out in solid, unbroken sections when I bit. He was smooth and syrupy, firm and tender in my mouth. All his hunting had eroded and hardened him. The doves he'd hung from his fingers by their talons, the deer he'd lugged on his shoulders into camp. He always gave the best parts to me, slurped up the marrow when there wasn't enough to fill us both.

I'd always thought it was a shame we were born fraternal. He came out bigger and first. He'd nearly consumed me in the womb, which gave him the vitality that would carry him through honors and varsity. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome. He had jet black hair and thick, dark brows. He was toned and square-jawed and impressive-looking against his eventual corporate backdrop. Women compared him to Clark Kent. 

But he was tender too. He was never a dull jock or an edgy finance boy. 

He'd called me ten minutes before we were supposed to board the plane. Sales was running late. "Calvin," he said. "You'll tell them to wait up for us, won't you?"

I could hear him running⁠, his metronomic huffing on the other line, the muffled roar of passing vehicles

"We literally can't leave without you."

He chuckled. "Mathers wanted a pre-pitch drink, and I'm no killjoy or without respect for tradition. So we were on business, you see."

I knew immediately that he'd called just to tell that joke, that he'd deployed it to several colleagues beforehand and delivered it with the same eagerness each time. He'd been one of those kids who was obsessed with the orange knock knock joke⁠—orange you glad I didn't say banana again?—building it up with each repetition like a tower of cards, until the finale, when he'd blow it all down with his raucous punchline. Interstate car trips, pit stops at Applebee's, these were all always orange. 

"Ha ha," I intoned. He returned the laugh bigger and louder, phone static pinging off the corners of my brain. "I'll tell them to save you a spot in the cargo cabin. Or the cockpit. You can curl up at the foot of the pilot."

I felt the impulse overtake him before he spoke. "Cock⁠—?"

"Shut up. Faggot."

"Yeah, yeah. See you soon, freak."

*

When we were in school, Casey was my constant defender⁠—from bullies, gossip girls, errant lunch ladies. Something about me was just reprehensible or feeble enough to draw the ire of whoever was near. On the occasions he wasn't around to protect me, I'd hide in the bathrooms.

"Not so tough without your boyfriend, are you, faggot?" Jeers from outside my stall, each sound sharpening itself against the tile. 

I curled into myself on the toilet seat, knees pulled up to my chin so they couldn't see my shoes. It never worked, and it made my legs cramp, nerves pricking like a thousand tingly spider legs. 

"Dude, that's his brother." Guffaws. 

The leader's name was Dean. He was this brick of a boy, stocky and sturdy and wide. His dad, like mine, had been in the Marines, and Dean had his own homemade military buzz cut, which he never allowed to be longer than a centimeter. He didn't do sports, but I'd seen him break arms and noses with playground plastic. I'd seen him burn kids against fire-grade metal. 

"What's that make him?" he said in his scratchy pea-gravel voice. "Not a Daddy's boy or a Mommy's boy. Little baby Calvin's a brother's boy."

*

Casey started awake the second the plane began to tip. Others in his department were not so astute, not so attuned to our movement through the altitudes⁠; Teller's eyes blinked open when the turbulence set in. Mathers barely stirred when the pilot rattled off protocol through the speakers, flight attendants scurrying through the aisle, glasses clinking in their hands and splintering underfoot. 

Ladies and gentlemen, please remain calm. I am alerting flight officials and directing the plane toward a body of water to prevent a crash. Please remove your seat covers. Masks will drop from the overhead bin…

The voice was shaky, despite a distinct tension that indicated a will to remain steady. I did as it asked, clutching my seat cover to my chest. 

"Casey? Casey."

My brother was looking around bewildered, massaging his temple. Mathers shook himself awake. Teller held his head in his hands. 

I widened my eyes at him imperatively, holding up my cover and pointing my chin at his. The direction managed to pierce his foggy lucidity, and he lugged out his seat cover with excruciating slowness. 

A stewardess demanded single file. Passengers clamored through the aisle. But my eyes were fixed on Casey. I could not leave until my brother did. I felt rows of people pass me by, complaints and haggles behind me, my chances at life slipping away as I stood paralyzed. 

He ambled up⁠, leaning in my direction like an absently tipping planet, drawing me invisibly toward him. I wrapped his arm in the crook of mine. It went slack. With his revoked limb I led us through the throng, twisting and pushing through each stubborn body until we were first in line before the nearest opening, exit sign flashing above our heads. The sky moved by so fast I had to squint to see it. 

"People, I'm gonna have to ask you to jump!" 

The crowd balked. They clamored and pushed around us, like a pulsating bundle of neurons, only Casey and me still and silent at the head. The stewardess' earpiece blinked anxiously. She lifted a finger to her temple. 

"We need to get out now!" 

My eyes landed on Casey's. I still don't know if he fully understood my gaze, if he ever truly got his bearings during the accident. I just remember knowing that this was the pivotal moment, that we could stay with everyone else in this death box or go, together⁠. I stepped forward, my brother's hand knit with mine, our fingers fused like a shared umbilical cord. 

*

My brother and I were suspended in midair for one exhilarating moment, touching nothing but one another's wet skin. The world fell away, and we were the only still points in existence. 

*

In middle school, when Casey was away at football practice, I would be left home alone, and when I was not watching the cartoons and televangelicals on our cable-less TV, Mom would show me her shelves of mementos. My mother was a collector of lives⁠—my brother's, mine, her own. Albums full of baby pictures. Locks of hair. Wedding photos. This is me when I was your age, she would say, or, This is from when Daddy was in the Marines. Isn't he handsome in his uniform? Doesn't he look just like Casey? And I would nod and stare, and she would be looking somewhere else, somewhere very far away. Then she'd coo and go Aww, look baby, it's you, and show me a round, damp body, eyes puffy, hair plastered wetly on its forehead. Somehow, despite all the use she got out of them, those laminate pages always smelled like dust. Here's the two of you. Aren't you precious? Sometimes I wish you were still this small, still nestled in my belly. It was a picture of a sonogram, two baby bodies floating in black water. I couldn't distinguish who was who, but I remember they were facing each other, forehead to forehead, as if locked in an embrace, the outlines of their limbs bleeding into one. 

*

The first time Dad hit Casey, he gave him a nosebleed. The red was shocking against his supple skin. My brother didn't look like he should be able to break. 

"Pinch and elevate." I took his nose between my pointer and thumb. He yelped, staining my palm with his breath. But he let me hold him there, his mouth hanging open in a lopsided grin. His blood felt warm through the tissue.

"Fucker's so mad he'll be gone all night," he guffawed. "He'll come home dizzy and stinking like shit, so if he tries anything⁠—"

"You'll do nothing. He'll pass out on the couch and forget in the morning. Swallow." Casey did. He made a face like he'd eaten cough medicine. "Doesn't feel so good, does it?"

He shook his head, wiping the edge of his sleeve on his upper lip like an overgrown toddler. I swatted his hand, told him it was disgusting, then swiped my thumb across my tongue, rubbed it on his face over and over until the stains disappeared. My finger tasted like copper. 

When things calmed, he took me to the movies. We snuck into Terminator 2 with Ziplocs of uncooked oatmeal stuffed in our pockets and one of those enormous theater sodas between us. On our way out, he used our last two quarters on the bubblegum machine⁠—For Mom, he said. But she was asleep when we got home, so he left them in the key bowl, and we spent the night watching adult cartoons after I had the good sense to order us pizza. 

In the morning, I had to help Mom with laundry, since Dad had come home and as usual, was drilling Casey on the empty street. I watched them through the bathroom window, hovering over Mom with the washboard soap as she scrubbed. Dad and Casey looked like tiny plastic soldiers, identical but for size and wear. Dad had the ball, and Casey was lunging, hard. But Dad would not relent. 

"Soap," Mom said. I handed her the bottle, plying the next garments from the pile. 

When she finished, she wrung our things dry and passed them back to me one by one, her nails pale and dead against her pruning skin. My job was to pin them on the line. 

This time, when I looked out the window, Casey had the ball. He was running, and Dad could barely keep up. Casey slammed the ball into the ground when he reached the fire hydrant, shouting and jumping around victoriously. We could hear him all the way from our floor. A smile tugged at Mom's mouth. 

Dad was hunched over, his hands bracing against his knees. When he stood, instead of being furious, he walked wordlessly over to Casey, clapping, and they began again. 

*

The sea hit us with a crash.

Casey, alive, hacked up a stream of water. Waterlogged, I felt but did not hear myself cry his name. I saw but did not hear him sloppily return mine. For a second I had to suppress the urge to make fun of his lack of dignity. In this wave of relief, this blissful numbness, I could almost lose this place, could almost go back to being my brother's heel. 

Then there was a second, louder crash. 

Casey's face fell open in slow motion, half-sick and half-giddy, his watery eyes following a trail of smoke rising from a corner of sky, tailing a fire on a nearby beach, no bigger from where we were than the length of my thumb⁠. The only speck of land in sight. One wing of the plane jutted from its crumpled skeleton like a broken elbow, its body in flames. I could almost hear the passengers screeching against each other like a chorus of metal parts. 

The swim to the beach was an hours-long ordeal, with Casey's large frame hoisted on my back. I knew, even before we reached it that night, that there would be no survivors⁠—the screeching had subsided by the time we touched land, and the fire had grown and since consumed the plane. And if anyone had the misfortune to still be alive inside it, neither Casey nor I could save them. 

I collapsed in the sand, foamy tides gathering around me. Casey fell on top of me, chin to my shoulder, his beating chest on mine. I felt him convulse through the wetness of my clothes each time he spasmed to vomit, the muscles in his stomach tightening and releasing with painful regularity. Puke mingled with seafoam. I formed myself to soothe him, his back and his wet hair. 

The fire kept us warm. A small silver lining. I felt a restless need to put it out before it spread, but I could not bring myself to move. 

*

Casey woke before me. He was wading in the sea, backlit by the sun, shirt and blazer knotted around his waist, trousers hiked up his calves. He scooped up some saltwater with his hands, then bolted into the forest, small streams leaking through his fingers.

I remembered the fire the same instant I saw it. It wasn't a roaring flame now, but a steady hum. It hadn't spread far from the radius of the plane⁠—but it had spread. 

"Casey! Casey!" I cried into the wall of trees. He came careening into me, knocking me flat on my back, sand spewing. "Fuck, man, watch where you're⁠—"

"Sorry sorry sorry!" He leapt to his feet like he had springs in his calves and extended a hand, dripping with saltwater. In the second he pulled me up, gravity ceased to exist. Through kinetic force, he had unknowingly extended a modicum of his strength to me. 

I braced myself against his shoulder. He was slippery and hard like a dolphin. 

"We need a container," I panted. "A big one. We're never gonna put that out with fucking handfuls of saltwater."

And he was off. I had to scamper to keep up with him. My brother, when given a directive, acted with a determination few could follow. 

*

It wasn't hard to find the source of the fire. The plane had cleared a path, a swathe of broken trees and flattened plantae leading us to the crash site. There were singed bushes and flaming weeds scattered around the radius, which Casey and I tamped out with the soles of our shoes. Sometimes, burnt bones. Dead doves. Little rustles from life too small and fast to perceive. 

It stank of jet fuel and burnt metal, carcasses and manure, the wastes of life and death intermingling in the humid air. The fire, at the center of it all. It drew us like moths. I could not tear my eyes away, even though the mission was to extinguish it. 

Casey yelped when we crossed the clearing. My brother, the savior, fell upon the bed of a fresh spring. The forest seemed to green as I followed. Life blossomed at the edge of the water. 

Here was the answer, so close to the destruction. It was just like him to have stumbled upon it. 

I joined him at the spring bed, and we scooped handfuls into our cracked mouths. We'd dried in that ocean, I realized, sweating under that sun, my brother retching himself dry. I hadn't known the extent of my thirst until I tasted fresh water, and all thought of the fire, all smells and singes and impending doom, all was forgotten except the urge to fill ourselves. 

*

When we were kids, we played football games of two in the parking lot outside our apartment. For a brief moment in our early adolescence, I was taller. He was always faster and stronger. I felt a buzz of adrenaline each time I touched the rubber ball, both because of the rarity of the phenomenon and because it meant Casey was in hot pursuit. I scampered as fast as my skinny legs would carry me, but my brother caught me every time. Tackling was a herculean effort for me, but for him, it was as nature. It was physical law that whatever Casey touched bent to his will. Whenever he knocked the wind out of me, whenever I felt my ribs crush, the ball slipping out of my hands, my face smacking against the asphalt, I knew these were only expressions of the force of God. Nothing more or less.

*

Casey poured spring water from a bowl-shaped shell into the carcass of the plane. All the sweat his skin had accumulated slithered down his back in rivulets. I could have collected it and put out the fire myself, but he'd insisted on taking up the task alone after he noticed my shortness of breath. I'd intended to keep my physical strain a secret, but my brother was a man in that way; he wanted to do it all, for the sake of someone smaller and weaker than him. So I'd gone back to drinking, and then, when I was satisfied, watched him from the edge of the spring. 

Soon he began to tire, muscles bulging with dehydration. The fire had only been contained. It would take more work to put it out. Casey untied the soggy clothes around his waist and wrung them over his head, letting the liquid pool in his cheeks. Some missed its target, dribbled off his chin. He had that animalistic frat boy vibrance, graceless and beautiful. At once, my thirst returned, and I longed to be in his place, drinking the expenditure of his labor.

When he squeezed out all he could, he pursed his lips and puffed out his cheeks, spraying the excess into the fire. It did little to dampen it, but the point was more the thrill and the show. 

He looked back at me, and seeing I was already watching, grinned. He lumbered over to the edge of the pool, next to me, and removed his pants and underwear, sliding them off firm, damp calves. I hadn't seen him like that since we were young enough to bathe together. 

He settled wordlessly next to me, sliding his hand up the back of my head. My face splashed into cool water. 

He'd dunked me. I broke the surface, shaking sheets of liquid out of my hair, swearing to God. He belly-laughed, slipping into the spring like a new pair of slacks. 

*

"You oughta be like your brother."

Dad said this from the bleachers at one of Casey's practice games, on one of the rare occasions when Mom and I got to tag along. Mom had watched for the first half-hour then absconded to the bathroom, was making small talk with one of the younger coaches. He was lean and tall, with hairy, sandy-colored legs. He didn't look muscular, but he had solid, veiny forearms, a trait that indicated strength⁠—one that I at thirteen had tried and failed to locate in my own. Dad didn't seem to notice or care much. His eyes were fixed on Casey. 

After that first nosebleed, they'd had years of arguments that verged into the physical. Casey would come to our room with bruises and wet scabs, and I'd dress them like I learned from teachers after playground altercations, and once upon a time, Mom. At some point, I started keeping the first aid kit under our bed. But every morning, they were up again, doing drills on the empty street. 

My father's destructiveness toward Mom and me was not personal. We were collateral to his temper when it burst at the seams and needed somewhere to spill. With Casey, there was a specific, honed intensity. Their bond orbited rituals of violence. It was their own shared language. Whenever Casey pushed or yelled or fought back, Dad saw him with a clarity he never saw me.

"Athlete, football star, stone-cold lady-killer⁠—soon as he hits high school. He's got it all. Fuck me, man, he's got it all."

I couldn't tell if he was saying it to me or himself. I just remember his face. I'd never seen him focus so hard. His brows were knit, lips involuntarily pursed, sweat dripping off his forehead as if he were the one tackling bodies and running across that flat, sunburnt field. For the first time, I recognized I had inherited something of my father's⁠. I knew that expression. Hunger. 

*

"What're we gonna do, Cal?"

Casey was on his back, cradling his head with his hands. The moon reflected off the whites of his eyes like glass.

"How should I know?"

He turned on his side, facing me. "You always know."

His confidence shook me. I felt a rising responsibility to live up to it. 

"Well," I said. "The captain said something about… flight officials? Someone's probably already on the way. And if not, that fire can be our flare. Good for warmth and cooking too."

The crash had provided several unexpected blessings. All we had to do was forage along its path, collecting half-cooked ground-kill. Most were dead or unconscious. A few were too burned to eat⁠—the same issue with Casey's offhand remark that the plane was already full of meat, which I took as a sick joke. But there was one bird, which Casey found, a white and hay-colored pigeon, that was not totally alive, but not quite dead. It stirred in his hand, blinking up at me when he offered it. 

"It was just sitting there," Casey said, remorseful and amazed. He held it away from himself like it was a spiny beetle or a rat⁠, something he'd have more reason to be squeamish of. "Take it." 

I did. 

We set up camp around the perimeter of the plane clearing, which had begun to stink less. The meat-jet-fuel-metal smell was tempered by the freshness of the spring and the aromas the fire had awakened in the woods and plants. It was bearable, and when I began cooking⁠—Casey, with all his focus on physical supremacy, had never learned to cook⁠—it was ignorable. 

"Don't you think it's fucked," Casey said, "that out of all the places the plane could've ended up, all that open sea, it fell here? Just one turn and no one would've had to die."

The half-light licked his face orange and blue. He was staring at the bird in my hands in a way that seemed almost admiring. I held it by its talons, cupping its belly. It had acclimated to my touch. I could stroke its downy back without fear of protest, except the occasional flutter.

"I think it's a miracle. Or whatever the opposite of that is." I spoke softly. The bird had let me knead my hand up the back of its head, closing its eyes. I pressed a finger to either side of its neck. Snap.

"If I had to be stuck out here," he said. "I'm glad it's with you."

"Okay, fag⁠—"

"I'm serious." He was looking at me with an intensity that forced me to meet his gaze. 

"Alright, man," I said. "Whatever."

We ate without much talk, which is the tell of either a good meal or unending hunger. They seemed more or less the same that night. When we finished, we leaned back on our palms, tipsy with fullness. In my satiation, I felt more honest. 

"Part of me is glad," I said, "that we were the ones to survive. We got this whole place to ourselves."

*

The stockpile of remains only lasted us so long, and at some point, as all dead things do, they started to go bad. They came crawling with maggots, or goopy with translucent, rotten liquid, or else tasting not quite right. I took Casey hunting for living sport, expecting him to take to it as he took to everything physical⁠—and he did. Casey was adept at catching and felling. He was good with a slingshot, with sharp rocks as makeshift knives, even tackling, in the instances it was necessary. He subdued a deer, and very nearly, a young boar. Seemed, even, to enjoy it sometimes, came away bruised and with the same giddy smile as after a particularly good Dad fight⁠—the kind where he'd got in a hit or two back. Perhaps it was just the thrill of getting to eat that night. But he'd leave the kill to me. 

The deer, he held down, torso flat over the barrel of its body. It kept kicking, so he restrained one of its legs, and I went at it with a rock until I heard that brittle crunch. We did both of the front legs like that so I could get close enough to slit its throat.

I got very good at dissecting. Butchering, I guess, would be the right word. I started drying the organs and hacks of meat before cooking them. I'd hang them off the lower branches and let the blood drain out, like decorating my morbid little corner of the clearing.

Sometimes he'd watch me work. I always felt his eyes. They made me aware of my posture, how I was holding the edge of the stone. Made me cut a little harder. The work put harsh lines in my forearms and shoulders. I hoped he'd notice, be impressed. Sometimes, after a particularly hard hunt, I could hear him breathing, panting lightly behind me. 

I found his squeamishness funny, because it seemed so uncharacteristic. I never passed up the opportunity to tease him, call him a pussy whenever I caught him cringing. Usually he'd roll his eyes and slunk away, or retort, call me a freak. Smack me on the shoulder, tell me how I piss him off. 

"Does that ever weigh on you?" he asked once. It was another little bird, another snapped neck. The last of two that day. We were crouching under my tree, its branches long since stained mahogany. 

The question surprised me. I shrugged. "You get used to it."

"Do you?" 

I looked at him. His voice was leaden with a meaning I could not decipher. 

"Does it still bother you?" I held up the limp body of the bird. "It doesn't care, if that makes you feel any better."

He was holding back a grimace. I laughed, tried to give him the body. He shifted back as I moved closer, but I got his wrist, plied his fingers around the bird's neck. 

"Stop, Calvin! Jesus Christ, I don't want it." He spoke as if I'd prodded an old wound. I almost felt bad, but then I felt myself scoff. It just struck me. 

"Hit me." 

"No!"

"What, you wrestle with other boys for years, and now all it takes is me and some dead bird to scare you?" 

We'd stood at that point. He was trying to turn away, but I was in his face. 

"Fuck off." He shoved me. My legs stammered backward. 

"See? Easy. I bet you could knock me out with one hit."

"Shut the fuck up!"

He moved to walk away, but I would not, could not let him. I threw myself against his back. It was like falling upon granite. Even weak he was strong, or I was just that feeble. He shoved me off with athletic precision. I gave my best wobbly attempt at a fighting stance. He crouched. Lunged. The dirt thudded against the back of my skull like sweet, solid vindication. 

He kneeled on me, pressed his weight on my stomach, his palm flat on my collarbone. He could break it, I thought with a thrill. I felt my lungs constricting under him. I knew, feeling his hands stutter upward, that he almost went for my throat. But he wouldn't. 

I grabbed his wrist, pulled it shaking up to my neck. 

"Do it. You can. You know you can. I can tell⁠—I can tell how excited you are by that thought."

He slapped me in the face. A shock of pain and white. 

*

I have this recurring fantasy where Casey kills me. It doesn't always happen the same way, but it is always physical⁠; he asphyxiates me, drowns me, presses my skull so hard against the asphalt that it cracks open, and I'm staining him thick and sticky. He never uses weapons. Always his hands. Sometimes he keeps me alive for hours. Once, he twisted my finger joints loose one by one, until they were flimsy enough that he could tear them from my hand. He picked the little bones clean and wore them on a string around his neck. When he got hungry, he'd pry my abdomen open like a chest and rifle through my insides. Snap off an organ, bite into it like an overripe fruit, its juices pooling under his tongue. The blood loss keeps me untethered from reality, but I feel everything. Sometimes, he dispenses with the formalities and just bites. The imprint of his teeth sinks into my skin⁠—his strong molars and sharp canines, the metal fillings in the back of his mouth⁠⁠—and I scream and shudder. When I'm dead, I am still awake. Enough to watch him dispose of the remains. Sometimes, he carves me into armor or jewelry. Sometimes, tools⁠—in one dream, I am his favorite knife. Sometimes, he burns my bones to ash, so nothing at all is left. Always, he confesses without speaking, like prayer, how much he loved doing it. 

*

We used our soiled clothes as makeshift beds. I hadn't slept in the same room as my brother in years, but since we had always done it that way, it felt only natural to do it side by side. 

Our suits were soft. Softer than the forest floor, anyway. Smelled like sweat and rainwater and me and him, nothing between the humidity of our bodies and the air. I faced Casey's back, and he faced the fire, which warmed his already temperate skin. His hands had always been shockingly warm, even when our radiator broke the winter of seventh grade. A warm tension rose in my abdomen as Casey stirred. 

"Cal," he whispered. "You're…"

I folded my legs. 

"Sorry! I'm sorry, I⁠—"

"It's fine," he said, not looking at me. "Me too."

Something twisted in my gut. I was sick and relieved, and beneath that, in some deep cavity of myself, I was ravenous. 

"We can pretend it never happened," he breathed, his voice labored and heavy. "Just stay."

*

We sat at the edge of the fire. Casey gave me a wet rock for my cheek. 

He'd taken me back to camp, apologizing profusely. The shadows sharpened his frame, leaner and smaller since we'd arrived. I'd told him to stop. It was nothing. 

*

Hunting became more difficult after that. It was likely just the exertion combined with our relative lack of sustenance. But the deep place inside me where all my remorse coagulated attributes it to our momentary falling out. We settled into a kind of peace after, although he no longer sat with me when I cut up the bodies. Occasionally I'd catch him watching from afar. But like all tension between family, it seemed to dissolve unspoken in the thickness of blood relation. 

Our solution was to salvage what we could of the bad bodies, to pick off the rot and eat what was left. This, he was more willing to help me with, after the killing and taking-apart was over. At some point we found the boar he'd almost gotten. Its stomach was open, bleeding out under a half-scorched tree. Other animals were already picking at it; a swarm of flies and what looked like maggots teeming in the rot at the edges of the wound. It was rasping, barely hanging on. I chucked it on the back of the head with a stone. 

We sheared off the rot together by the light of the fire, after I cut the meat off the bone. Generic, de-personified, slightly rotten red meat. I could see the veins in his arms bulging from dehydration, the way he'd shrunk and sharpened.

"Your grip is funny," I said. I scooted closer, adjusted his hands in mine. I pressed him through the flesh, showed him how to cut with more sureness and precision. It was the first time, I thought with pride and a strange lump in my throat, that all my time in the kitchen with Mom had put me above him in some respect.

After some silence, he spoke. 

"You could survive this without me, you know," he said. "For… however many days until they get here."

"Shut up."

"You know how to cook. How to kill. You'd have to learn to hunt, but with the knife, you're already halfway there."

I was silent. 

"Plus," he said. "You have someone to practice on."

He had that intense look again. Eyes wide and orange and blue. The edge of his hand burning mine. 

"Come on, Cal. The passengers are bad. The animals are bad. The dead ones. It could take a while to learn to subdue something on your own. But I'm right here."

He brushed my arm tentatively, not quite taking hold. I shook it off. 

"Don't say shit like that."

He nodded. Looked back into the fire. But for once, he didn't seem afraid.

*

I am lingering by the spring, watching a smoke trail slither into the sky. The fire has stopped growing. It looks about my size. 

Casey lies at the opposite edge of the spring, insulated under a cover of rocks. I don't like to look at the body. The only sign he's there is the copper smear on one of the stones, about where his stomach would be. His limbs are all gone, except for the bone. His face is intact too. I thought that would be the first thing I'd get rid of, but I can't bring myself to touch it.

It's been three days since I killed him. My hair has grown to my shoulders, the rest like a second skin. It keeps me damp and smelling of rainwater. Sometimes sweat. Sometimes ash. There are choppers whirring in the distance. The fire is big enough to walk into. 

*

There's little to tell of the following days. We ate, or we didn't. On good days, we'd shoot down a bird or two. We⁠—he, I suppose⁠—didn't have the remaining resolve for anything bigger. 

We'd sleep hungry very often. I'd watch his back contract and expand as he breathed, while the pain chewed away at my insides. I'd think about what he said. I don't know if I could say it was worth it, but it was wonderful. It was delicious. It was the first time I'd been satisfied in years. If he could still speak, I suspect he'd say the same. 

*

One night after Casey was fast asleep, I dragged his half-conscious body to the spring bed by the ankles. He did not resist. He knew I was coming. 

I sat on his stomach, just as he did me. He tried to push me off⁠. Not very hard. I tussled, like I knew he wanted, and we struggled in enmity for some time, fingers laced. 

I thought bitterly that he was going easy on me, but it may have just been that he was tired and had lost so much of his strength. Or that I, after all my handiwork, had finally gained some. 

After a last labored thrust, I overpowered him. 

I shoved his head beneath the stagnant water. He made tides, little geysers. When they all but subsided, I pulled him out. Too soon.

He came up coughing. His eyelids fluttered, speckled with dew, shiny droplets leaping off his skin. I nearly stopped. 

But his clammy hands encircled my wrist, catching on me the way wet skin brakes against dry. He dragged me up his body, his perfect body, until my pointer was just below his jaw, my palm cradling his Adam's apple. 

But this wasn't fair. This was not part of the bargain. He wasn't supposed to give in. 

"Hold me still," he wheezed, reading the furrow in my brow. "While you do it."

I understood. I pressed myself into him, his throat hard in my hand. His body spasmed and gurgled under mine, and as instructed, I held him down, foreseeing his impulses of movement like they were my own. 

I pinned his wrists with my free hand. The legs would be the bigger problem. My brother stored much of his strength there. Were he at his fullest capacity, he'd use them to throw me off. I fumbled for a rock large enough and quickly found purchase. I hacked the stone bluntly at the sockets of his shoulders. After a minute or two, I knew by his groans and consummate lack of resistance⁠—but for a limp twitch in his fingers⁠—that I had succeeded. 

The legs would be easier with both my hands at his throat, no longer occupied by the arms. I pinned his thighs with my knees, pushing the sharp joints into his flesh. Felt bone and muscle tightening under his skin, the hardness at the core of his body. I could tell it hurt from the keen it elicited. His abdomen curled, his head shaking and bobbing under my palms. It looked like a nod of approval. 

*

There were very few moments when Casey and I expressed unadulterated affection. But once, on a school trip⁠—I had forged our parents' signatures knowing they wouldn't notice our absence until we were well on our way home⁠—he got lost. We'd gone to the zoo, and he'd slipped away to ride the carousel. I sounded the alarm the instant I realized my brother was not with me or his friends, most of whom didn't recognize me as a fellow except in relation to him. I and the frazzled chaperone I was towing around found him bawling by the lost and found. He sprinted to me, wrapped me in a bone-crushing embrace, snot and tears wetting the collar of a shirt that was far too big. Tears I contracted like a yawn. He didn't have to tell me he missed me, that he loved me, or whatever it is you're supposed to say. We knew, like most of the men in our family, that it would've only spoiled it. 

Apostol Mohamed is an English undergrad at the City College of New York. He has been working with and submitting to various litmags since he was a sophomore in high school, including SamFiftyFour, The Marbled Sigh, and the YNUC Anti-Capitalist Zine. His published work is primarily poetry, with an emphasis on colonial violence and connections between systemic realities. His prose tends to ideate on desire, dissociation, and the body. “Wet Skin” is his horror debut. He can be found on his website, apostolmohamed(dot)wordpress(dot)com.