by C.T. Millis
Chapter 21
Stephen and John became bothers again after Sophie was born. By the time he graduated college, Stephen had made himself an institution in his new wife’s life. He noticed her smile grow smaller over the years he knew her, and he noticed that her voice shrunk the way his mother’s did as he grew up.
Sophie was no surprise to him. A daughter, a son- it did not matter to Stephen the way it did to most people. He just wanted a family that was his. He was drunk with the power that the possibility of creating the exact life he wanted gave him. All along, his wife grew to near-silence. He and his brother occasionally painted the interiors of houses or installed windows on weekends to earn extra cash. As Sophie grew, John began to test the limits of Stephen’s rage.
He would show up late to a job site, or not show up at all. That seemed to have no effect on Stephen. John just would not get paid for the work he did not do.
But John could make Stephen’s wife smile. They only went out on a few dates in college, and he never made any moves on her back then. He did not even have enough time to decide if he wanted to really pursue things with her before she fell in love with his brother.
Now she was torn apart. After they got married, Stephen stopped letting her go out with her friends and would not let her call her family as much as she wanted to. By the time they had their daughter, she was only allowed out of the house to get groceries or go to the bank. John never said anything about it to her or to Stephen, but he knew she wanted out.
So, it was easy to steal her away. First, John created moments for her that had nothing to do with Stephen. He made her smile. The first time he kissed her, Stephen walked into the kitchen. John found the line that would tip Stephen over the edge, and he prepared for it.
When Stephen dragged John into the garage, John pulled out a pocket knife and drove it into the arm Stephen had wrapped around John’s neck. It puckered under Stephen’s skin on his forearm, but did not go deep enough to keep Stephen from pulling it out of himself and driving it into John’s wailing stomach until he lay cold and quiet on the concrete of his garage floor.
Stephen’s wife did not dare to open the garage door while Stephen cleaned up the blood and wrapped his own arm in a rag that was lying around the garage. Stephen was able to wrap an old tent around John and carry him like a bag of dead leaves through the deserted night-time neighborhood to the woods behind an old man’s house and dug deep.
Nobody would notice John being gone, when his rent was due his landlord would assume he skipped town broke. Their mother had not talked to either of them in years.
Stephen spent the night cleaning up and showered through the sunrise. He wore a long-sleeved shirt to cover the bandages on his arm and walked downstairs to see his wife and daughter eating breakfast. Sophie was sleepily eating corn-flakes and his wife was carefully dodging his eyes.
“Ready for your eye-appointment today, Sophie?”
