Somethings Burning

         I sit in my brother’s room, glassy eyed, blankly staring at his trophies, gathering dust. My head swivels in a mechanical, inhuman motion, and I take in his pictures of past victories, now fading. The dust that erupted when I sat down on his bed, untouched for the three months he’s been gone, is making my eyes red and watery. I’m still trying to convince myself that it’s the dust as I clamber off the bed and close the door, leaving the dust to settle.

         My family is being interviewed after the funeral. My mother, in tears, tells the reporter my brother was a hero. My sister-in-law (Ex-sister-in-law, I ponder), is crying her eyes out and is barely coherent. Through her screams I can make out the phrase that my brother was an idiot and a fool. She’s muttering excuses as she stumbles to the bathroom. My father sits in stony silence, unspeaking and unmoving, his eyes as dry as the rock he resembles. The reporter turns to me with her painted on face and indulgent smile, and asks me about my brother. I say the only truth I can. “I miss my brother.”

         I’m reading my brothers obituary. It regales me of his past exploits as a soccer star, his college valedictorian status, and his recent marriage. It reads that he was in grad school, so he could become a teacher and shape kids’ lives. I start to dry heave as I read this and I soon throw away the paper. It’s only been five days since the fire, but still I can’t bring myself to think about it.

         The funeral is a sordid affair. There’s none of the laughter that my brother would have wanted. I see only weeping, tear-stained faces in the crowd of relatives I barely see and friends I’ve never met. This is not what he would have wanted. My brother would have wanted laughter, stories of his life told and-. I have to stop. Thinking about my brother in the past tense still hurts. Even three days later, it hurts worse than any pain.

         I’m the first of my family to see my brother’s corpse. The firefighters try to hide it from us, but the sheet snags on a on one of the neighbor's bushes and I watch as it’s pulled from the gurney. Like a magic trick, the sheet pulls away, revealing my brothers blackened and charred body. As soon as I see it, I know the image will stay with me forever. The lipless rictus of white grinning teeth, the peeled skin, so much like burnt bark. It’s the eyes that shock me into speechlessness. His bright ice blue eyes, so full of life and humor, now just shriveled like raisins in the bottomless pits of his sunken and blackened sockets. The EMTs hurry to cover the shell of my brother with the blanket, but I’ve seen enough to haunt me for a lifetime. Distantly, I hear myself mumble his name.

         My brother stands beside me as we both watch our neighbor’s house burn. I can hear the screams from the sidewalk, but I don’t move. It almost seems impossible that a human voice could penetrate the sound curtain of the roaring flames, but it does. The flames are scouring everything in the house to ash, objects and human beings. I gaze, still stupefied, but my brother, as always, bursts into action. He tells me to call 911 and sets off running toward the house. Vaguely, I remember his stint as a volunteer fireman, and I start to feel some hope. As I fumble for my cellphone, I see my brother kick open the door and he runs in, backlit by the flames, and I think one word. Hero.

         We’re playing Mariokart when my brother pauses the game and sniffs in the air. He walks to the window and asks me, “Something burning?”