The drip of blood never sweeter than anticipation. The August air thick and honey before the rain. The last time Asha walked the streets of this neighborhood the cold sting of a night two Decembers a ago she thought she was leaving for good. Now she returned with nothing good in mind.

Crickets chirped and fireflies readied for flight,the kind of summer evening at twilight you remember riding your bike through as a child. The only difference from this and summer nights of youth was Asha’s mother wouldn’t be calling her in befor dark. Asha did have that anxious feel of school around the corner stirring inside her.

She walked the alleys and drank the air. When she left she promised she wouldn’t see his face again, not at a family reuniom, not at his funeral. But she never was the girl who followed through on things. It didn’t matter of course, nothing of her present life did.

The only thing on Asha’s mind since spring was the death of her little brother. The police had reopened the case and named her mother's longtime partner a person of interest. She suspected from the day he disappeared that Daniel was responsible for her brother’s disappearence. The police questioned Daniel multiple times. Asha’s mother responded with fits of anger followed by leaving the room with a sunken chest if Asha raised a question about what Daniel was doing the day Christopher became a missing child.

Now with her mother long dead and the police telling her Daniel was officially a person of interest, Asha wouldn’t wait any longer for justice. The divide between justice and revenge is a pebble when children are involved. The police waited nearly twenty years to define Daniel as a person of interest, Asha wouldn’t wait another twenty minutes to administer justice.

She gripped the tazer in her rucksack and dropped it deep into the bag. No. There would be no tied man answering questions. She ensured the revolver was still in the rucksack and stepped on the weathered, faded blue porch.

Asha knocked on the door. The house creaked and shuffled behind the front door. Ghosts of her racing up the porch stairs to Sunday dinner, Christmas lights hanging from the porch railing, Christopher playing cards on the top step. She chased the ghosts from her mind.

Asha pulled her green hoodie taut around her face. She readied the revolver. The door opened. “It was you,” she said, her voice like a nightmare walking in the daylight.

A single shot, footsteps.

The world spins much slower when Death comes near. Grandma Ru told us it’s so Death can snatch you before you know good enough to run.

Listen. I know everyone says the virus isn’t any worse than seasonal flu. But the speed it’s jumped from a small village out in some town no one had heard of three months ago to being a global crisis has me thinking maybe Death is slowing the world down.

People panicked. Politicians have either demaogogued or demurred when asked about it. I can’t say I’m confident theu’ss constrain it in time..

The man on the radio said researchers don’t know where the virus came from. They know where the first reported cases are but what kind of virus is it? They don’t know.

3,000 cases in my state. If you calculate the mortality rate in other countries that’s like 900 people gonna die. And we’re talking in the last 6 weeks since the first case rrported in this state.

I called Jamie last night. She didn’t want me worrying. “They’ll figure it out,”she said. She asked to come over but I needed to be alone.

When I was eight years old I came down with the mumps. I didn’t want help from my mother or anyone. I warmed my own soup, poured my ginger ale, did my homework, and took a shower without any help. But the warm body and swollen throat from mumps were nothing compared to blood coughing, pounding headaches, and fainting.

3,000 people in my state infected. Maybe 900 gonna die. And I know grandma Ru was right, ’cus my world has stopped spinning .

The cupboards bare, the grimy fridge ravaged but for the half empty blue box of pasta on top of it, Sophie grabbed the half eaten almond cookie from her school bag. She didn’t eat the half that was missing but when someone leaves a gift on the lunch table you don’t decline. Gifts of abandoned milk cartons, granny smith apples, and half eaten cookies filled the inbetweens when school lunch was days from a real dinner.

Sophie didn’t know what if anything her mother would make for dinner on most nights. When they weren’t eating overcooked pasta they were eating popcorn, maybe hot dogs for dinner.

She took her treat to her bedroom and reached for her favorite book from under the bed and sat at her desk. Sophie nibbled her cookie and flipped pages of the book until she landed on the scene of the grand banquet.

There were days when she didn’t have the knot in her inside every time she thought of her next meal. Days when the time and cost of a meal weren’t unknown. Sunday dinners were the one meal of the week the oven came to life in the apartment. Sophie would find something to do while the oven was working its magic. She would run down the block to aunt Kristie’s place, bike to the park three blocks away, stroll to the market, only to hurry back to smell and feel the warmth of a real dinner.

Her mother planned every Sunday meal meticulously: breakfast was thick french toast with strawberries and powdered sugar with a side of perfectly browned Canadian bacon, lunch was breaded chicken sandwiches with rosemary potatoes, and for dinner, Sophie helped her mother prepare meatloaf, asparagus and homemade mac and cheese. She loved chopping ends of asparagus, tossing them in oil, grating cheese and spreading breadcrumbs on top of the mac and cheese.

Sophie slammed the book closed and raced out of her room reaching for her blue coat on the kitchen chair as she headed out the door. She reached the bottom of the stairs and eyed the greasy brown bags her upstairs neighbor carried passed her.

She didn’t want to ask her friends for food. She didn’t want the look in their eyes when she asked for help, but Sophie had made her mind that she couldn’t afford pride, it’s more costly than food.

She crept through the front garden, passed brown shrubbery and ran her open palm gently over the top of the big red ribbon tied to one shrub. She stood at the front door of Clara’s house waiting for the holiday reef in front of her to spiral and pull her into another time, a past when her father was alive and her family were all together at her grandmother’s place. Not that food or anything was in abundance back then but at least things were easier.

Sophie knocked on the door. No answer. She knocked on the door again, a hurried, desperate knock. No answer. She hadn’t owned a phone in coming up on a full year. Her mother, in her rosy, playful voice, put it to her like this: “You can have a phone or we can have heating in January. Your choice.” She left her friends house and turned onto the avenue walking in the opposite direction of her apartment.

The school held a food drive every year. How many times did Sophie avoid any thought about the families who needed canned peas and lima beans? She had passed the food pantry, a little rectory next to the old Lutheran church, a couple hundred times in her life but never once thought about going inside the building.

A gray wolf foraging in the white snow, a great heron diving at the blue sea, survival is majestic not easy.

Sophie rushed inside the food pantry. Mothers and children walked aisles of half empty shelves, a white haired woman drinking from a small foam cup took a seat in a folding chair against the wall in the back. Sophie stood two feet from the door examining every face.

“Food insecure,” in bold black letters read the fliers stacked on a table to her left. The door opened and she turned into the chill at her back. A father and daughter walked by with placid smiles on their faces, Sophie followed them further into the pantry. She eyed the brown spots on the bananas in a white box and picked a can of strawberries in syrup from the shelf to her left. The woman in the folding chair kept her gaze on Sophie as she carried the can of strawberries with her around the pantry.

Not knowing if your family would have enough food to last the week is tough, but knowing there was a little help when needed loosened the knot in her belly. Sophie paused in front of a shelf of canned vegetables and lost herself in the yellow light glisterng on top of the cans.

The white haired woman grabbed a brown, clothe bag from the folding table in front of her and headed for the familiar girl in the blue coat.

On day seven, the last embers blew before the first death

Lovers and killers, roustabouts and ne’er-do-wells, all people lost the same breath

On day six, the fires grew louder, the cries fell lower

Children and their caregivers thought of what might come

On day five, time crawled and dreams shook

The creatures of Earth opened eyes to the full light of their deed

On day four, the leaders died and the winds howled

Violence of men roared its familiar sound

On day three, votaries sang, laics bargained

If lives only could be bartered from the hand of death

On day two, dialecticians dithered, sciolists studied

Truth of the darkness lay beyond our reach

On day one, the world we know began its end

Time will no more have its hapless friend

The warmth ballooned, punched through the thin cotton cloth. The dog fell asleep on me in that general area before. I looked down for a passing moment and stretched, closed my eyes and sat up. To say it throbbed would be like saying fire is hot. It hurt, not like knife wound pain but peeling scabs pain. I ran to the bathroom.

The little half moon scar hiding in the hairline from the time he fell off the roof of our old house, the autumn colored eyes, his straight black hair. Ansel stood there posing, mocking me. Dreams aren’t this vivid. My brother’s body and my brain. The hell am I going to do with this? I went to Ansel’s room. The room was empty and hollow as it had been since, well, since...

My father's voice rose from the bottom of the stairs. I relived myself, sorry, “Slayed the leviathan,” no shit, Ansel. I hurried to the kitchen table and waited for my own image to come waltzing down the stairs. Could he have my body if he left us months ago? I sat there in his skin. I caught my father's eye: suspicion, disappointment, fear, hope. I can’t remember him ever looking at me in that way. I smiled and turned to my mother pouring coffee, “where's Lucy?” I asked, returning to my father's strange eyes.

My father tasted his coffee and sat his chipped, red mug on the table. “Who?”

You know, your daughter, the one you rarely let leave the house without knowing where she's going and how long she will be there and where she's going after that. I wrote an itinerary before heading to my eighth grade trip to the state capitol. I gave it to my mother thinking she'd get my dry humor, but she looked it over a couple times and said, “call when you're on your way back.”

Ansel never told my parents where he went. He came home three hours late one day and my mother offered to pop his dinner plate in the oven. A 16 year old boy treated like an adult while his 14 year old sister had nightmares of being stalked by her mother.

At school I ran into Ric, my brother’s friend since they were in the fifth grade. He caught my eye and shook his head. I wanted to run my fingers through his sandy hair. But what if Ansel is still around somewhere and he comes back? Absolute cringe. What if I’m still out there somewhere? I hadn't figured this whole thing out yet but I’d only been my brother for a couple hours.

I honestly had no idea what my brothers class schedule was. My plan was to walk in one door and out the other. I meandered the hall catching everyone’s eye. Most of the students looked at me like they were stumbling through a dark attic.

Ansel hasn’t been around since the first week of school. He drove to school that morning and parked his car two blocks away in front of the old Swedish bakery like he did every day since he could drive. But no one saw him get out of the car and no one saw him at school that day. Two and a half months have passed since he left. The search party found nothing. The police have no leads and I’m fairly positive they’ve move onto other missing people or harassing drivers with the wrong complexion.

When I reached the end of the hall, steps from the door, a bald man in sweat shorts and a red polo top placed his cold paw on my shoulder and spun me around. “Glad to see you back. Expect you at practice,” Ansel’s basketball coach, Mr. Riordan said.

I stared with my eyes wide for a second too long. “Right what time?”

Mr. Riordan inhaled through his mouth and ran his thumb and index finger up and down the lanyard around his neck. “Sixth period,” he said. He continued up the hall. I waited until he turned a corner and shoved the door open.

I walked passed the old Swedish bakery and tried not to look where my car, my brother’s car was parked that morning. I made it another few blocks and walked into the oldest taco place in town. The classic juke box sat in the corner to my left, the classic arcade games lined the wall to the right. At the counter I ordered two breakfast tacos and a soda pop. I played Mortal Kombat for a good twenty minutes before a cold air hit my back.

“Ansel. Nice to see you, bro,” the pale haired boy said, his smile like a jackals smile. He looked short to be on the school basketball team. His arms were tearing at the seams like bowling balls in book bag. There were three other boys standing behind him against the wood panel wall not looking me in the eye. My insides raked against my skin, my new found man area retracted to my body. Ansel’s body reacted out of memory.

“Yeah bro.” Did I sound as forced as it sounded in my head? I honestly thought most of these guys greeted each other with bicep bumps and grunts.

“We didn’t think you got out. We heard about you missing, we were like fuck we got to do something.”

Got out? Did they think my brother was in prison? I folded my arms like my brother always did and bit my lip like he always did. “Oh, yeah, I’m out now.”

The boy looked back to his stolid friends. “So where you been?”

I hadn’t allowed myself to think about what could have happened to Ansel, not since a couple weeks after he disappeared. Every terrible possibility came rushing at me in large waves: he ran away because he and our father had a fight, he was robbed and killed and they dumped his body in the river, burned it? He is being held hostage somewhere. He did something awful to himself.

“I was in the hospital. I stayed at my aunts house for a little while after that.” I don’t know how I came up with that lie. My brother did have talents.

“I know you’re cool. I mean, you wouldn’t be dumb enough to say anything.” The three boys against the wall lifted their faces with blood shot eyes. I dropped my arms to the side. They knew something about Ansel.

When the police interviewed us they asked if we knew anyone named Robinson. They said Ansel’s friend, Charlie, told them Ansel was spending time with a boy named Robinson. None of us knew him. “Nah, we’re good,” I said. I held the eye of the pale haired boy for a minute before he bounced his chin and turned around, walking out of the restaurant, the three boys trailing him. “Robinson,” I said, to anyone one of them. The second to last boy turned his cleft chin to me and shook his head. At least I had a face to Robinson.

Charlie is on the basketball team. There had to be something he didn’t tell the police. How do I get him to tell me everything Ansel, I, had told him about Robinson? I waited until fifth period and hurried back to school arriving ten minutes before sixth period.

Mr. Riordan shifted his way into the gymnasium with a tablet pressed between his giant left thumb and a blue folder. He bent over and palmed a basketball from the floor, firing it at me. “You’re early. First time for everything, huh?”

I caught the ball and examined it like I were a God spinning his new planet. I wasn’t given athletic talent. Ansel said I needed more confidence, that everyone in our family could play some kind of sport, but it’s kind of hard to have confidence when your parents treat you like a helpless baby sloth. I stepped down from the stands and bounced the ball of my foot. I laughed and looked at coach, he wasn’t laughing.

The gymnasium began filling with one teenage boy after the other, each one staring at me with an incredulous look greater than the boy before him. They greeted me with pats on the back, hand shakes pulling me close to bump chests. “Didn’t think you were still around,” and,” Ansel, bro.” One of the boys, a lithe, red haired boy, stood back from the others scratching his forearm, looking at me and looking away. There was no sign of Charlie. We started practice. I stood there studying every jump shot knowing when my turn came I’d fall on my ass. The boy in front of me was the taller, sweatier, older brother of a boy I had crushed since like the third grade.

My turn came and I held the ball with both hands at my chest and pushed the ball at the hoop without leaving the ground. As you might expect the ball scrapped the net and fell to the floor with a resounding failure. Lucy’s sport isn’t basketball. The other boys started laughing and Mr. Riordan told me to take a seat. “You’re not pulling that shit this season. I don’t care what you’ve been through,” he said.

How do you ask strangers who knew more about your brother’s life than you to tell you everything? I sat silent in the stands pleading with God that if he placed our lives back in proper order I’d be closer to my brother.

I did want to be my brother. There were times where if I could trade places with him life would be much easier. He never had our parents screening every member of the opposite sex who arrived at the house with a group of friends.

The basketballs hit the court like punching bags. The glimmer of the court pulled me in and I lost time for a minute. I raised my eyes to the door to my right and standing there with a gray duffle bag over his back was Charlie. His dark eyes were frozen on me. I turned to look at Mr. Riordan, and Charlie turned to walk out of the gym. I hurried after him.

He walked fast on a left leg that gave a little every time he brought it down. I ran, fast, faster than I could imagine ever getting somewhere. The long, galloping legs of a seventeen year old boy were a perk of this I could learn to love. I pulled up two feet behind him and called his name but he ignored me and walked outside. I finally placed my hand on his shoulder, “Charlie, we have to talk.”

He leapt away from my touch, slamming his lower back against a railing. He trembled like he woke in a grave yard. His eyes saw galaxies crashing. “You shouldn’t,” he stopped himself.

“I shouldn’t what? Put my hands on you? I thought we were friends.” I laughed a gust of air from deep in my throat.

“How did you get out? I went there to look for you after Robinson told me and it was empty.”

A creeping suspicion of every person in my brother’s life. Charlie, Robinson, the pale haired boy, all had the same fear and suspicion in their eyes that my father had for Ansel, only these boys were hiding a secret. “I managed. Look, I don’t remember everything. Tell me exactly what Robinson told you because I swear I’m gonna beat his ass.”

He swung his face to his left and right, looked to the windows above us. “Well, after you went missing I texted him for two days with no answer. I remembered you said he swindles over at Adams park. When I got there he didn’t want to talk. But I told him I knew he was involved in breaking into the fire captain’s house. I thought he was going to kill me.” My brother knew who committed a crime that was in the headlines for weeks and only told his basketball friend. Did all the boys on the team know? Pale hair boy was involved.

“But he told you what happened?” Charlie inhaled and bounced his chin. “Tell me exactly what he told you,”I said.

A couple of Ansel’s teammates were involved in several break-ins last spring. He learned about the crimes but didn’t say anything, But someone was talking. Yuri, the pale hair boy, was interviewed by the police and one of the boys on the team pointed the finger at Ansel.

There was something else but Charlie wouldn’t tell me. He said, “they knew about you, you know. They were going to tell Pastor Dan.” Pastor Dan is the leader of the largest church in town. He’s made national news with his hate speeches. If they robbed the pastor, Ansel would have fallen over laughing.

The difficulty of accepting my brother was either criminal or abetting criminals evaporated the moment Charlie told me where I was buried.

We drove to this farmland outside of town. At the end of the open acreage sat overturned Earth, wooden house frames were erected, and two wooden stakes supported a sign with a future neighborhood pictured above a green banner that read, “Hamilton Lawn.”

Behind one of the wooden frames an uneven plot of Earth, dark, angry, and freshly dug. The dirt looked like it had been dug and filled a dozen times. Charlie stared at me like I were dissolving in front of him. I grabbed a shovel and started digging.

The world faded gray, the sun became black on the gray; darker, colder still was the air crying in my ear. I fainted.

The conscious stirred in the dark. I slept for weeks, months. I finally woke in my bed. Lucy. My auburn hair tied in the yellow scrunchie Ansel called banana chic. The night peaked through the window. I reached for my phone. The time, 8:30, the evening my brother went missing. I leapt out of bed and called Charlie.

The door fell from the hinges like a rag doll swinging by its last string in the hand of a child. Ghosts of children raced through the house chasing jacks and dodging fists. The man stood at the dark threshold waiting for anything to fuel better feelings than the fear and disgust stirring inside him.

Orson wasn’t the little boy conspiring with his sister to fool daddy to think he finished all his drink last night. The last of daddy’s drink being poured down the sewer in the brightest morning sun before daddy woke, but daddy didn’t need to know that.

He came home looking for something every child born to a man of failed ambition and lapse temper modulation has sought, answers. Not from daddy. No. His father’s chance at redemption died 15 years ago on the bedroom floor of a neighbor woman.

He ran the morning of his father’s passing, well, not quite. The neighbor woman didn’t bother to call anyone until her sister came over two days later. Daddy was on the floor with a red satin sheet draped over him, his work boots jutting out from under the sheet. Orson ran the morning after everyone learned of daddy’s passing.

Fuck. He wasn’t one of these men who blamed everything on his soul crushing childhood. But he jumped from one shit pay job to the next hoping the next city, the next girl, would chase the frightened boy in him away. Orson knew other men with similar lives and not one became anything but a sad fucking country song. Men to mock, men to avoid, men in prison, Orson wasn’t one of these men. He built a life for himself. He found a girl willing to love the darkness when the light wasn’t found.

The problem when you kill a past life to start anew is you kill the good with the hell. Orson killed more than a bad childhood. He hadn’t spoken to his sister since two months after he ran. On that day, he asked Molly to send him all the illegally acquired movies and television shows he burned to discs on his friends computer after school. He hadn’t seen Deep Space 9 in too long.

Molly hadn’t avoided the sad life. She moved in with her aunt after daddy’s passing. But

Molly’s aunt didn’t provide her with any furnishings of a loving home. Molly had a twin mattress in the corner of the basement and on the occasion her aunt remembered, a donut on her birthday. The years passed and Molly became the bitter, the disgusted.

Orson couldn’t stay at his condemned childhood home. He came back to find Molly. He planned to offer her a job working at the daycare his wife owned. He folded his arms and leaned against his black Camaro LS. The ghosts of his past life raced in and out of the darkness beyond the broken front door of his childhood home. The text came with a metal storm ring from his phone. An old friend texted Molly’s address.

Two lost children stood face to face on a dark front lawn. How do you apologize for the sin of abandonment? Siblings will be there when your parents and your significant others are no more. What they don’t tell you is below the surface, when your siblings are all you have left, every scar, sprained ankle, slammed door, broken ego, and shared tear will be there too.

Molly stood with her arms folded, her fortress building new walls every second. Orson opened his arms for a moment and closed them. “I wanted to see. I’ve tried to contact you but you’re not an easy girl to find.”

“The right people know how to find me,” Molly looked away from her brother.

“I wanted to know if you’d like to work for Alison? You could stay with us until you find your own place.”

Molly dropped her arms to the side. “Why are you here?”

“To see you. We’re still family. When dad died I couldn’t hand--”

“When you killed dad,” Molly’s soft voice resounded, funneled around her brother, words heard exclusively by the two lost children standing on a dark front lawn.

Molly knew. The whole town must know.

A better father, a mother who lived, a sister not abandoned, Orson spent every day these past 15 years hoping for what might have been. He stood in the twilight between two lives terrified of both.

Orson hurried to his car. He did what he did another life ago. Orson ran.