Brothers

David B. Silva

Copyright ©1989 David B. Silva

Originally published in Post Mortem in 1989.

Also appeared in the collection, Through Shattered Glass,

published by Gauntlet Press in 2001.

Other Books by David B. Silva

All The Lonely People

Through Shattered Glass

The Many

1.

Some things that happen, it doesn't matter if anyone believes they happened or not. As long as you know in your heart. Like dying with a secret on the tip of your tongue. As long as you don't say it out loud, it's still a secret, and that's all that matters. I guess the only thing that matters now is that Dane is gone. Christ, I still miss him.

2.

I was twelve years old that warm June morning when the thunderstorm somehow slid around the edges of the valley. The night before, on Channel 24, the weatherman had promised it to us. Dane had counted on it; and because he had, I guess I had too. He was the one most disappointed though.

Dane had something special going with thunderstorms. He'd sit upstairs, on the sill of the bedroom window, looking out at the gray-black clouds rolling in over the mountain, the rain just starting to sprinkle, lightning flashes striking gold across the meadow behind the house, and it was always as if he were waiting for something. For as long as I could remember, he'd been waiting for something. I think that was the biggest secret he ever kept from me. We had been born two minutes and thirty-three seconds apart; Dane first, me second; him the strong, healthy one, me the runt – we’d spent every living minute of our twelve years together, and knew everything there was to know about each other. Except ... except I had never understood his fascination with thunderstorms. And he had never told me what it was he was waiting for.

I guess the closest he ever came was in late May of that same year, just about a month before, when he called me over to the window where he was sitting. We were upstairs in the bedroom. For nearly an hour, lightning had been jigsawing across the dark sky like shattered glass. You could feel the thunder rolling across the meadow, thick and heavy, slipping under the foundation of the house, climbing the walls like a shuddering aftershock.

“Look at it,” Dane said.

An explosion of yellow-white light arced across the sky above the mountaintop like a magnificently electrified beast.

“You know what lightning is?”

“No,” I said.

“It's this weird electrical charge that the clouds have to divvy up between themselves. That's how they stay alive, by passing around electricity. They feed it back and forth until it builds up such a strong charge, then they toss off a little hot lightning and start all over again. In the end, it makes them stronger.” He had been staring out the window while he told me all this. And when he finished, he turned to me, his face as peaceful as I'd ever seen it, his eyes a summer-morning green, and he asked, “Does that make sense to you?”

“Sort of.”

I'd wondered it before, and suddenly I wondered again if I really looked like him, if I had that same conviction in my own face. Dane couldn't lie. When you looked into his eyes you always knew you were getting the truth from him.

“Nothing ever dies, Trey. Remember that. Things get tossed off, but that just makes them stronger. They never really die.”

I didn't understand what he was trying to tell me then, but I knew it had something to do with his wait. Looking back, I think he was just trying to tell me that his waiting time was slowly drawing to a close. As it turned out, there wasn't much time left at all.

3.

June had rolled around, and with it: warm summer mornings, long days, and cool nights.

The last morning of his wait, I woke up to find Dane sitting by the bedroom window again. There was something distinctly different about him, but I couldn't tell you what it was. Maybe it was nothing more than the way the sunshine seemed to create a soft, orange-red aura around him. I don't know.

“About time,” he said evenly, without even turning to look at me.

“What time is it?”

“Quarter to ten.”

“Why didn't you get me up?” I felt something soft and warm expand inside me, then a yawn came climbing up my throat and escaped. In its place, it left behind an odd sensation of emptiness. Completely unfamiliar. A little frightening. As if something inside me had quietly changed during the night. I didn't think much about it at the time, only that the feeling was new and strange.

“You're old enough to get up by yourself,” Dane said.

“I know that, but now the day's half shot.”

“You're old enough,” he said again, almost a whisper. He didn't move an inch from the window while I got dressed.

“Looking for the thunderstorm?”

“The storm's not coming.”

“That's great!” I pulled on my last tennis shoe, tying the long lace in a double-knot. “At least we can do something outside today.”

From downstairs, Mom called up. “You finally awake, Trey?”

“Yeah.”

“How about some breakfast?”

“Be down in a minute.” Dane had suddenly shifted his gaze away from the window to where I was sitting on the edge of my bed. There was a reverent, weary expression etched into his face, as if something had weighed heavily on his mind during night. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“So what do you want to do today?”

“That's my question,” Dane said.

“Then ask it.”

“What do you want to do today?”

“I don't know. What do you want to do today?”

He grinned for the first time that morning, and it was genuine. “Put up the rope swing, that's what I want to do.”

“Down at Sumner's Pond?”

“Yeah.”

“Too cold,” I said.

“What?”

“The water's too cold.”

“No it isn't.”

“What are we going to use for a rope?”

“The hemp rope Dad uses on the dozer.”

“To tie down the tarp?”

“Yeah.”

“It won't hold.”

“It'll hold.”

“And what are we going to hang it from?”

“The old oak.”

“I'm not climbing that tree.”

“Then I will,” Dane said.

“Mom'll never let you.”

“Sure she will.”

“Not if you were one of The Great Wallendas and used two safety nets. Not in a million years, Dane.”

“What if we don't tell her?”

4.

Downstairs, Mom was standing over the stove, scrambling eggs. She looked up from the frying pan, and I could see in her face what she was thinking. Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye I'd catch her watching me. Her dark eyes dilated into huge, sad things; her mouth drawn and tight with worry; and I'd realize she wasn't just watching me, she was watching over me. That's what she was doing that morning, watching over me, and thinking to herself: you eat a big breakfast, Trey; you're a growing boy, you need a big breakfast in the morning.

“Sleep well?” she asked.

“Well enough.”

It had been cold the night before, below forty degrees, and the chill was still trapped inside the kitchen walls, insulated from the sunshine outside. I sat at the table, at the only place setting, where a warm swath of sunlight from the window over the sink had lit upon the table top. Dane sat across the table from me.

“You already eat?” I whispered.

“No whispering at the table,” Mom said.

“An hour ago,” Dane whispered back. He had a mind all his own.

I always admired that about him, and I still think back to the time when we were in fourth grade at Brickston Valley Elementary. Miss Riley – she was our teacher that year, we called her Misses Ed because she had the hips of a horse, so wide there were mornings we didn't think she would make it through the classroom door – she caught us sneaking a smoke in back of the greenhouse that winter. It was a cold, damp morning, the grass thick with dew, and it was the first time I'd ever copped a drag off a cigarette.

Dane put me up to it.

If Mom had found out ... cold Christ, she would have brought it all up again, about how sick I was supposed to be and how I'd never be as strong as other kids my own age. She never let up about that stuff. But this was one of those lucky times: Mom never found out, because Miss Riley never told her. I think Dane had something to do with that.

He took me out behind the greenhouse before school that morning. The school had put up the greenhouse the year before. It wasn't much to look at. Half-a-dozen parents had come down one weekend, sunk some 4x4 posts into the ground, rough-framed four walls and a roof, and covered the whole thing with sheets of thick, black plastic. From the east wing of the school, you couldn't tell if anyone was hiding out back or not.

“What's up?” I asked him.

Dane pulled a pack of Marlboros out from his under his shirt. The pack had been crushed, but there were still a couple of cigarettes left. “I found them in Dad's desk drawer,” he said, wrestling one of them free. It came out bent in the middle where he'd tucked the bottom half of the pack into his belt. “Try it.”

“No way.”

“Why not?”

“I just don't want to.”

“One cigarette won't hurt you.”

“I know that.”

“Everything's a gamble,” Dane said, somewhat coolly. “You never try, you never lose. But you never win either.” His summer-green eyes smiled, and that was probably what did it for me. I always trusted those eyes.

“Just one.”

He passed me the bent cigarette, filter first, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. Then he pulled a match out of his back pocket, struck it across the zipper of his jacket, and touched it to the tip of the cigarette. “Inhale.”

I took a long, slow drag, managing somehow to get the smoke all the way down to my lungs and hold it there for a few counts. It wasn't what I'd expected. You see people smoking and it always looks like something you should try. But the taste was flat and dry, and my stomach hitched right away, coughing most of it up.

Dane grinned. “Think you'll live?”

“Longer than you,” I said with surprising difficulty.

He laughed at that. But not in a way I was used to hearing. There was something both sad and unfamiliar about it. As if I'd struck a hidden nerve, and it was everything he could do to keep from screaming out in pain. I almost asked him what was wrong, but I never quite got the chance. That was when we both noticed a shadow moving on the other side of the greenhouse.

You couldn't actually see through those thick, plastic walls, at least not very clearly. Things were always fuzzy and dark around the edges. But you could make out enough to know when someone was coming.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when Miss Riley came trudging around the corner. She never let much of anything slip by her. When you're ten, it's easy to think of your teacher as being as old as the crust of the earth and just about as brittle. But in reality, Miss Riley was only twenty-seven, and you never put anything over on her.

“Trey?” she said, rounding the corner, her wide hips swaying back and forth like the hind end of a horse, her eyes all lit up with curiosity. “What are you doing back here?”

“Nothing!” The cigarette dropped out of my fingers as if it had a mind of its own; it landed at my feet, and I tried to cover it with my right shoe.

“Smoking?” she said, surprised. She looked at Dane, her face tighter than I'd ever seen it, her eyes slit, but she didn't say a word in his direction.

She expects it from Dane, I thought.

“I'm going to have to tell your mother, Trey. You know that, don't you?”

“You don't have to tell her,” Dane said in my defense.

“She needs to know.”

“Why?” Dane asked quietly. I couldn't have asked that question. Never in a million years. But Dane did, and at that moment, it was as if someone had sent a little jolt of electricity through Miss Riley's wide body. The rosy color bled out of her face, and she nearly tripped, backing up a step.

“It wouldn't be right for me to keep this from her,” she said anxiously.

Something in the air had suddenly changed; it took me a moment before I realized it was the charge in the air, the static charge. Like on a warm summer afternoon when the humidity's thick and everything you touch gives off a shock. Only here, on this strange winter morning, the shock was Dane, and I guess Miss Riley must have instinctively known that, because what she was doing was making certain she didn't get too close to him. I could see a cold, white numbness seeping into her face. And I could smell the ozone in the air.

“She's not going to say anything,” Dane said.

Holy, freezing Jesus, I thought, she's scared of him. Miss Riley's scared of Dane.

I looked to my brother. His green eyes were bright and fiery, like I'd never seen them before. For a brief moment, I wasn't sure which one scared me the most ... my teacher or my brother.

“I'm sorry, Miss Riley.”

“You didn't do anything wrong,” Dane said.

“I won't do it again,” I added.

“What are you apologizing for?”

“You know cigarettes aren't good for you,” Miss Riley said, her voice as smooth as she could make it. But she was still off-balance, still trying to play off the fear that had taken her by surprise. “They stunt your growth.”

“Cigarettes?” Dane said with disgust. “You believe that?”

I glanced down at the Marlboro poking out from under my shoe. An empty, childish thought flashed through my mind: maybe Mom had smoked cigarettes while she was pregnant? Maybe that was the reason I was so damn small? But then there was Dane. That wouldn't explain Dane, would it?

“Let's go.” Dane grabbed me by the arm of my jacket; I felt his fist clench and draw the material into a tight wad. It felt as if someone had suddenly taken a hold of my senses. He shoved me away from the greenhouse, back in the direction of the school. “She's talking nonsense.”

“Where do you think you're going?” Miss Riley asked.

“Back to class,” Dane said.

“Your mother, Trey! She'll have to know about this.”

“Don't pay any attention to her.”

“She's going to tell.”

“No she isn't.”

I never looked back.

It took Miss Riley a few minutes to catch up with us in the classroom. She didn't say anything, not a word at first, just came in and sat down at her desk, before finally opening the Social Studies book and trying to recover her smile.

Dane and I sat in the same seats we always occupied, me in the back near the window, him up front in the first row. From where I sat, Miss Riley wasn't the same woman who had caught me behind the greenhouse just a few minutes before; although I can't be certain how she had changed. On the flip side, I guess I wasn't the same boy. I'd learned that once in a while you have to try things just to see what they're like. And I'd also learned that sometimes people say things that they don't mean.

Trey had been right.

Miss Riley never did tell Mom about the cigarette.

5.

“So what are you up to today?” Mom asked.

Dane looked across the breakfast table at me, his green eyes starting to cloud over, and that's all it took. He didn't have to say anything. The message that came into my mind was pure and simple: you don't have to tell her everything, Trey. Some things, even Mom doesn't need to know. It was just that I hated keeping secrets from her.

“Going down to Sumner's Pond,” I said quietly. Dane shook his head. I think it was the first time I'd ever gone against his wishes.

“Oh, I don't know, Trey.” Mom glanced over her shoulder at me, not quite as intently as I imagined she might; then she turned her attention back to the scrambled eggs. “It's dangerous down there.”

“No it isn't,” Dane said.

“The water's twelve feet deep this time of year, still cold from the winter run-off; and you know, Trey, you aren't a strong swimmer.”

“I can swim, Mom.”

“He swims fine,” Dane said.

“Maybe later in the summer. When the weather's warmer and the water's a little lower.”

“See?” Dane whispered from across the table. I looked at him, surprised, because I'd never heard a told-you-so out of him before, and I had been half-hoping he might offer me some help instead. But he didn't. “Some things you just don't share with her.”

“Sorry.”

“What?” Mom asked.

“Nothing.”

“Tell her the way you feel,” Dane said softly.

“But what if she--”

“You're whispering again, Trey. Always whispering,” she said. She dragged the plastic spatula across the bottom of the frying pan, her mind utterly absorbed in getting the eggs scrambled just right. The years had caught up to her. I couldn't say when that had happened, only that that very moment was the first time I had noticed it. A soft, gray-white streak of hair had become visible in the back, looking something like the early morning frost that sometimes formed on the winter grass across the creek. I could almost see her walking ever-so-cautiously through the autumn of her life. Not unhappy with the way things had turned out. But not happy either. I think it was the first time in my life I had realized that my mother was a whole person, not just my mother. And that she wasn't that different from myself.

“I really want to go swimming down at Sumner's today, Mom.”

“Trey--”

“I'm a good swimmer. Better than you think I am.”

There was a strange period of silence, as if she had heard something in my voice that had never been there before. “Okay,” she finally said, staring at me the same way I had just finished staring at her. As if she were seeing me for the very first time. “You go ahead and give it your damnest and have a good time doing it. But I warned you. Don't say I didn't warn you.”

“Really?”

“If you've a mind.”

In the end, I guess it was one of those things that no one could have prevented. The time was just right. Dane knew that somehow; and I guess in the back of her mind, in one of those intuitive areas, Mom knew it too.

6.

“She's mad at you again,” I said once we were outside. Above us, the sky was thinly cast with orange-tipped clouds. But in the distance, hovering over the mountains, there was a different sky. The clouds were angry, gray-black oceans. A thunderstorm was building there. Like a giant rolling wave. Too faraway for Dane, perhaps; too close for me. In the back of my mind I had a sick, awful feeling about that storm. It was something like jealousy.

“I know,” Dane said.

“She's always mad at you, Dane. How come?”

“Doesn't matter, does it?”

“It should. To you, it should.”

“Well, it doesn't, so quit harping on it.”

It had been more difficult than we thought it would be: untying the old hemp rope that held the winter tarp tightly against the dozer. I had slipped the last knot free, then Dane grabbed one end of the rope and started pulling. It unwound from the tarp like a huge earthworm, its head whipping back and forth, sliding helplessly backward through the eyelets until it was finally free. Then Dane had rewound it in short loops, hooking it first between the crook of his thumb and forefinger, then around his elbow, and back again, over and over. Now he was carrying it at his side, and when it brushed against his jeans it made a soft, whispering noise that sounded as if someone were saying: come on ... come on. I was doing my best to keep up.

“Don't you ever get tired of it?” I finally asked.

“Of what?”

“Of Mom ignoring you?”

Dane stopped. We had been walking along a dirt path, through a field of dying winter grass, but now we were standing still and I noticed that my tennis shoes were soaked from the dew. “You ever get tired of Mom ignoring you?” he asked. It didn't sound like a question, though. It sounded like an indictment.

“She doesn't ignore me.”

“Never pays you much attention, either.”

“Sure she does.”

“No,” he said, his voice softer than I'd ever heard it. Soft, but still firm. “She worries over you, Trey. That's not the same thing. She's scared for you. You're like a nightmare that keeps coming back. You remind her of something she doesn't want to remember. She's worried ... and she's scared ... but I don't think she cares. I don't think she ever will.”

It felt as if a great abyss had opened the earth between us, the distance suddenly enormous. I started walking again. “You're wrong. She cares about me. She cares about both of us; she just doesn't know how to show it.”

“Trey, she doesn't even know you. You aren't real to her. You died twelve years ago, in her womb, before you even had a chance to be introduced. Now, you're like one of those envelopes with a window, the ones with the bills inside. All she has to do is look at you and she sees a debt she'll never be free of.”

Miles away, over the ridge of the mountains, the sky lit up with a flash of lightning. The underbelly of the gray clouds turned a sharp yellowy-orange, then white, then gray again. The air was suddenly charged with electricity, and I thought for an incredible instant about that time behind the greenhouse when Miss Riley had been afraid to get too close to Dane because she knew – we both knew – he was giving off something that could hurt you.

Dane finally ran to catch up with me.

“You're jealous,” I said.

He was breathing heavily, his green eyes bright. The tiniest hint of a frown pushed down on his mouth, then disappeared. But I had seen something behind it. Something plain and simple and honest. I don't think he'd meant for it to show.

“You are! You're jealous!”

“Maybe,” he said evenly. “Then again, maybe I have good reason.”

“What reason?”

Another bright flash of lightning lit up the distant sky, all yellow and orange and white. I watched until the golden streaks ran out, then I waited to hear what the thunder would sound like. It was the crack of a whip. A crisp slap against the sky. Followed by a long, throaty rumble that sounded something like fury.

Dane never did answer my question.

7.

Sumner's Pond changed with the seasons.

During the winter months, the runoff washed into Whiskey Creek from a hundred minor gulleys, raising the creek level, and burying Sumner's Pond somewhere below the high water mark. Come spring, though, the rains would slow, the creek level would drop a bit, and the pond would seem to form all over again. A rebirth of sorts. From caterpillar to cocoon. Sumner's Pond always came back again, from cocoon to butterfly, changed in subtle, little ways, but always a thing of extraordinary beauty.

Dane dropped the rope at the edge of the sand.

Through the branches of the old oak tree, I saw a flash of distant lightning, its sharp colors shattering the skyline as if it were a broken mirror.

“Storm's growing stronger,” I said.

There was a moment of absolute stillness, then slowly an angry roll of thunder began to build.

Dane glanced toward the mountains, his expression unreadable. Except for his eyes. It took a moment before I realized what had happened to them, then suddenly it seemed almost too” apparent. They were dark now, the emerald-green fire had faded. It was as if the storm had begun to draw its energy from him, the way he'd told me it drew energy from itself. His eyes had become a reflection of the loss.

“Are you afraid to die, Trey?”

“What?”

“Are you afraid to die?”

“What kind of a question is that?”

“Just answer it.”

“Yeah, I guess. I never thought about it much.”

The far bank was all blackberry vines that had been dormant during the winter, and had only recently begun to show color and vitality again. The near bank was all sand and soft dirt, running up to the water's edge. The oak tree had rooted in the sand on the northern side of the pond. In places, some of its thick roots had climbed above the surface and were exposed. They looked like ancient, mummified fingers.

Dane leaned up against the trunk of the oak, one foot resting on an exposed root. “Who's going up?”

“Not me.”

He stared at me a moment, as if he were trying to decide what should come next. Finally, he said, “It's not as bad as you think.”

“Then you climb it.”

“Not the climbing,” he said. “The dying.”

“I don't see how it could be all that good.”

He smiled flatly, with a touch of visible disappointment. But more than that, I caught a glimpse of sadness behind his eyes. It wasn't there long, and after a moment he shaded his eyes and glanced toward the top of the oak tree. “You really don't want to climb it?”

“No way.”

“Scared?”

“Yeah.”

“Then that's why you should.”

In the distance, over the mountain, the sky ignited in streaks of white-hot lightning.

“You do it,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Better you than me.”

He smiled again, with ease this time. “Maybe you're right.” Then he picked the rope up out of the sand, looped it over his head, and started up the oak tree.

“I'm not afraid,” I told him.

“I never thought you were.”

“I'm not.”

He shinnied up the trunk, past the first giant knot where the wind had torn the limb off two years before. I thought he might stop there for a breather, but he didn't.

Finally, I couldn't sit still any longer. “Wait up!”

Dane waited for me at the first solid limb, one foot shoved into the crook of the limb for support, one arm wrapped around the trunk of the tree for balance. More than once, the sky behind him exploded with lightning, and when he looked down at me he was a dark, faceless silhouette. A scarecrow of sorts.

When I caught up with him, we ended up sitting side-by-side on the thick limb, about ten or twelve feet above the pond. The water was flowing lazily, quietly beneath us. I could see the gravelly silt bottom, the drifting tendrils of moss that had grown on an old, sunken log.

“Scared?” Dane asked.

“Not like I thought I'd be.”

There was a crack of lightning in the distance, a stutter-like hesitation, then another shattering light show right behind it. I started counting off the seconds, vaguely aware that the storm seemed to be moving closer:

---one thousand one---

---one thousand two---

That was as far as I got before the enormous explosion of thunder hit.

It felt as if some incredibly immense force had taken hold of the tree and was shaking it with all its strength, as if it were trying to separate us – my brother and I – not only from the tree, but from each other.

I clamped down on the limb with both hands and held on tight.

Dane laughed above the sky's rumble. “Scared now?”

“No.”

Then, quite naturally, the heavy thunder moved on. Across the field of winter grass. In the general direction of home. And I wondered briefly if Mom would be frightened by it.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Thunder.”

“No, I've heard thunder before. I've seen lightning. A thousand times, maybe. Never like this, though. What's going on, Dane? How come everything feels so ... wrong today ... like you're keeping something from me?”

Dane looked past me, toward the gray-black sky hovering over the mountains. There was something completely foreign in his expression, a strange combination of sadness and joy that seemed surprisingly compatible. “You've changed, Trey. Did you know that?”

“How?”

“In little ways ... ways I don't think you even understand.”

“Maybe you've changed too.”

“Maybe.”

“So what's the big deal?”

“No big deal. I just wanted you to keep that in mind. Things change in life. Sometimes suddenly. But life goes on, Trey. You draw as much energy as you can from your memories, because they'll make you stronger, then you go on.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“I know that,” he said quietly. “That's the whole point.”

Another explosion of lightning etched its deep electric lines into the distant sky.

---one thousand one---

Thunder followed.

Like a rolling quake of the earth.

Dane screamed with laughter.

But it was the thunderstorm's laughter I heard. And when the resounding wave of thunder finally rolled away from us, Dane's laughter sadly rolled away with it.

“It's time,” he said, after a long period of eerie silence.

“Time for what?”

(To go home.)

I can't be certain that's what he said. It came out softly, like a whispered thought not meant for anyone else to hear. So maybe he didn't say it at all. Maybe it was just something my mind made up after the fact. Something to help me explain things. But he said something, then he started to climb the tree again.

“Dane?”

“What?”

“Are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” he said, without looking down at me. It seemed as if suddenly he was in a hurry now. The rope was hanging from around his neck, swinging from side to side, as he used both hands to work his way higher up the tree.

The sky exploded with another splinter-run of lightning, and I realized for the first time that the sky overhead had fallen dark. As dark as Dane's eyes had fallen.

Eighteen maybe nineteen or twenty feet up, Dane sat down on an overhanging limb and began to scoot his way out, over the water. Below him, Sumner's Pond was swirling with dark shadows. Directly above the pond, he stopped, unwound the rope from around his neck, and tied a quick slip knot in one end.

“You don't have to do this, Dane.” I could smell a sharp, tangy fragrance in the air. Something similar to the smell that rises from a lit match. And I thought back to that day when Miss Riley had caught me smoking. And I thought back to all those times when Dane had sat on the window sill and looked out at a faraway thunderstorm as if he were waiting for it to come take him home.

“Yes, I do,” he said firmly, his hands working frantically all of a sudden.

“We can put it up some other time.” The darkness overhead was brooding now, like the darkness of the pond below. Black somehow. Hiding secrets ... maybe not from both of us ... maybe not from Dane, but certainly from me. “Some time when there's no storm,” I said.

“There is no other time, Trey.”

Then everything happened the way it sometimes happens in a dream: with a distorted sense of time and place.

Dane tightened the knot, slipped the other end of the rope through, and gave it a pull.

The sky lit up again, like a fireball this time.

---one thousand---

A deafening explosion of thunder.

I looked up at Dane ... he had slipped somehow and was falling ... I saw his right foot drag across the bark of the tree, as if it were fighting to hold on ... I saw it with such absolute clarity, so magnificently distinct ... his hands reaching for the limb, stretching, coming up empty ... his back arched like the back of a frightened cat ... falling ... falling away from the limb ... toward the pond below ... helpless...

“Dane!”

... and then a sudden echoing snap!

The slack of the rope taken up.

Dane's body suspended in mid-air.

Swinging back and forth.

By his neck.

The only sound in the world the sound of the rope rubbing against the bark.

His eyes were still open, and somewhere in the back of my mind I had a dream that he suddenly winked at me, then smiled, then screamed with laughter because he'd pulled a good one over on me. But it didn't happen like that. His body swung lazily back and forth at the end of rope, each sweep of the arc a little shorter than the one before it.

Back and forth.

Another strike of lightning skittered across the murky sky.

I heard thunder, but it sounded faraway now.

Everything suddenly seemed faraway.

Dane was dead.

8.

I spent the rest of the day sitting in the oak tree.

Within a few minutes of the accident, the thunderstorm quietly disappeared.

So did Dane.

As if the storm had drawn away the last of his energy, his soul.

His body had swung freely back and forth, like a pendulum, driven by its own diminishing momentum. And it seemed as if each time he touched the outer edges of the arc a shade more of him disappeared into nothingness. By the time the rope had finally come to a rest, Dane was gone.

The thunderstorm quietly moved on.

The sky became bright again.

Later, it seemed, the brightness turned to evening.

Eventually, I went home.

9.

Mom was sitting on the back porch, waiting for me. The sun was setting above the mountains, the last trace of the storm gone, just an orange-pink sky left behind. I sat on the floor, next to her chair, my hands wrapped around the chair's arm, and for a long time I didn't know what to tell her.

After awhile, I gave up trying to find the right words, and forced myself through whatever words came to mind. I told her about the rope swing, about being too scared to climb the tree, about the storm, about Dane's fall, even about the way he had ... disappeared. It took me all of thirty minutes to get it out, a painfully long thirty minutes; and there wasn't a single moment when she stopped me to ask a question, or when I stopped talking long enough to see if she was still listening.

Night had fallen by the time I finished.

And Mom was crying softly.

“All these years,” she said, after she'd had a chance to wipe her eyes on the Kleenex she kept tucked under the sleeve of her blouse. “All these years, I was so afraid to say anything to you. You'd talk about Dane as if he were standing right next to you, and I'd look at you, this scrawny little kid who had---by the grace of God---just barely survived birth, and I'd want to shake my finger at you, Trey, because your brother was dead ... Dane was dead.”

She was crying again.

I reached out and took hold of her hand.

“I don't know what I was thinking, Trey. I suppose I always hoped it would go away eventually, that one day you'd realize Dane wasn't really there, and you wouldn't need him anymore. Sometimes that worry weighed heavy on my mind. And other times ... other times I'd close my eyes and wish I could see him the way you saw him. I was always looking for him, half-hoping he'd show up one day as if he'd never been gone. I guess that was silly of me.”

“It doesn't sound silly.”

“Yes it does,” she said, her face expressionless. She stared at me for a long time, then took in a deep breath that seemed to give her new strength. “He died, Trey. At birth. Somehow, the umbilical cord got tangled around his neck, and he strangled. Your brother was born dead, Trey. Two minutes and thirty-three seconds before you came into the world.”

10.

Some things that happen, it doesn't matter if anyone believes they happened or not. As long as you know in your heart.

For a long time, when a new thunderstorm came through, I'd sit at the bedroom window the way Dane had sat there so many times before me. Watching the lightning skate across the gray-black sky over the mountains. Waiting. Half-hoping, like Mom used to do, that he might show up again and it would be as if he'd never been away.

Dane always looked out for me. That's what I remember most about him. He was my brother, my mentor. Always there when I needed him. For twelve years he was there, letting me draw energy from him until he felt I was strong enough to survive without him. Then he was gone.

I guess that's the only thing that matters now: Dane's gone.

Christ, I still miss him.

About The Author

David B. Silva has written seven novels, his most recent, All The Lonely People. His short fiction has since appeared in The Year's Best Horror, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, and The Best American Mystery Stories. In 1991, he won a Bram Stoker Award for his short story, "The Calling." His first collection, Through Shattered Glass, was published by Gauntlet Press in 2001. In 2009, Dark Regions published his second collection, In The Shadows of Kingston Mills.

Other Books by David B. Silva

All The Lonely People

Chase Hanford owns and runs The Last Stop, a little bar with sawdust on the floor and pine paneling on the walls. It, like the jukebox next to the front door, didn't get much play, but it had its regulars. Until one night, when a stranger appears with a peculiar rosewood box. A box that possesses a strange symbol: a circle within a circle inside a crescent. The stranger calls it a spirit box. Something Native Americans once used to trap the souls of their enemies within. As the bar regulars become curious, the stranger opens the box. And unleashes a hell like no other. Chase Hanford awakes from the aftermath, soon realizing bits and pieces of his life are being taken away. Fallen to mental lapses and witnessing strange occurrences, he fights to save his life, his soul and his sanity...

David B. Silva's All The Lonely People is a page-turning exercise in thriller writing." - CNN.com

Through Shattered Glass

Through Shattered Glass, David B. Silva's first short story collection, takes readers on an imaginative journey through the lives of seventeen ordinary people struggling with extraordinary events in their lives.

The Calling: an adult son cares for his mother, who is dying from cancer, over the final few months of her life. As the cancer grows stronger it permeates their relationship, every event inside the house, and eventually leads to a powerful, unexpected ending that seems almost inevitable.

Dry Whiskey: Something horrible happened last night. There's blood on the bumper of the old pickup, and Will's father thinks he might have hit something on the way home from the bar, but he isn't sure. When they hear that Joey Eagan was killed last night in a hit and run off Buzzard Roost Road, Will's old man vows to finally give up his heavy drinking. But drying out takes a toll of its own.

The Hollow: Michael Carpenter is a lonely twelve-year-old who lives in the quiet little town of Appleton where nothing worthwhile ever seems to happen. That is until today. Because today Michael made friends with something alive in the hollow of the old oak not far from home...

Empty Vessels: Thirty-five years have passed since a stranger by the name of Blaine left Marshall's mother an empty vessel, neither alive nor dead. And after years of searching for the stranger, Marshall thinks he might have found the man. Only he's not really human...

Dwindling: A boy watches helplessly while his world crumbles around him as one after another of his siblings disappears.

A Time For Every Purpose: What if a childhood friend unexpectedly shows up on your doorstep one day with a tale of terror that's still unfolding?

Alone of His Kind: After a tragic loss, a man meets someone who has dealt with a similar loss in a most unusual way.

A Night In Fog: A trouble man reaches out to his brother, trying to explain his past action and gradually drawing his brother into a realm where the line between reality and fantasy has blurred.

Slipping: A desperate advertising man, frustrated with the way commercials are flashed before viewers with ever increasing speed, becomes aware of the fragileness of time.

Plus eight additional stories and an Introduction by Dean Koontz.

The Many

Kiel Reed is beginning to suspect there's something wrong with his eleven-year-old brother, Justin.

After the death of their parents, the two boys have gone to stay with their aunt and uncle. It should be a time of healing, but nothing is as it seems and the scars of their father's torment run deep, especially in Justin.

Deeply haunted by his past, Justin turns to The Many for help.

It's a deadly relationship.

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