The Graduate
This story was published in Devil’s Lake
*** Nominated for Best of the Net by the Editors
All through school I did my piece to keep my brother at bay—burning sage, clipping my nails, dripping candle wax across the threshold of our home—until one night, like the Poe and James I’d read, he disassembled the earth, the stone, pushing aside Mama’s desiccated baby’s breath and the postcards my sister had mailed to his grave (Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong), and walked the dark streets to our house, where he knocked, troubled but not unkindly, which had always been his way, and piled into a dusty heap at the doorstep before I could answer. After all, his journey had exacted a terrible debt, as the necromancer later explained, and I was never the object of my brother’s seeking anyway. But his essence I’d forgotten, examining the bonemeal—its buttons and its threads—on the doormat, the door wide open, like an eye or a yawn.