We raise our brother on nos, sit downs, and stops. You cannot go out. The outside will hurt you, if they see what you are you will be killed or worse. We help him to bed and dress and clean him because he is too weak most of the time to do so. He never fully manages to inflate himself after his birth that left him long and thin and insubstantial as a wisp. We bathe him roughly, we bathe him perfunctory and try not to remember his rubber duck toys and colorful foam soaps and the clapping games we played in the tub when our roles were once reversed.
Then, we go out into the night, and we find a companion for him to drain.
• • •
A wintry night. Long-suffering midwife and strung-out single mom and cries of pain.
We are triplets born at the same time, except not really. First, the twins: we come out easily enough, despite the excess of blood and mucus, and the way we almost fracture our mother’s pelvic bone. As if we’d been in a rush to get out, to breathe in clear air. You’ll understand why.
Next comes our brother. He emerges fully formed but gruesomely thin; like a newborn alpaca, uncoiling out of our mother’s womb as if he was the human intestine, small and compact at first but impossibly long the more he unfolds. Half-dead. Deflated, really.
Then, of course, he begins to suckle — not for milk, though. He’s always gotten his nutrients elsewhere, energy hungrily inhaled to produce more energy; and soon, our poor mother grows thin and papery, while he inflates himself to a malformed teenagerhood.
What about the midwife, where has she been during this whole time? Passed out and crumpled like a forgotten coat in the living room corner, not even rousing when our mother whimpers.
And us? The twins, baby-fat and womb-hungry?
We are alone, all alone in the world. Nearly get forgotten too like the midwife, pushed like so much dust under the sofa’s dark crevices and left there to petrify like fallen crumbs of food.
Except, our brother looks up from our mother’s limp, leeched body. He crawls over to us like he’s learning to walk with each new step, and he scoops us up from the floor, even as we flail and cry. He holds us to his slimy, concave chest; then, almost buckling under our weight, stumbles over to the rocking chair. There, he settles us on his chest again, croons, and rocks us.
And that is our first memory, and our first glimpse of the burden we call brother.
• • •
“Come back soon,” he says, “I don’t like being alone. The walls feel hungry when I’m hungry, like they’d rather swallow me and my hunger up.”
Except, today he is too weak to say all this, so it comes out more like a mewl. Mewl. Mewl. Mewl.
We remember when we were small and he was his unchanging self, he told us stories about cats and how each litter can have more than one father. We wondered then if that was how we three came to be. Us, the twins, were from one father. A human. Our brother was from another. An energy leech whose feeding residue took physical form in the womb alongside us.
The one who hunts starts the truck, waiting as the old engine takes a while to warm up. A cigarette or a static-y love song from the dashboard radio might help pass the time.
The one who stays behind helps our brother with his art projects. He’s been getting really into bead art lately, but his spidery hands end up cramping only minutes into a project.
Then, the one who hunts drives into our college town to find a body for our brother to feed on. We call it hunting but sometimes it’s bribing and sometimes it’s cajoling but most people come willingly enough if we choose right. Some are relieved that he eats all their bad memories and leaves them drug-happy in the aftermath. Others, the bad others, he sups on their energy so they would not have any left for their bad deeds. We find them in street gutters dive bars university libraries cemetery gates thrift stores job-seeking centers churches. Our brother takes care of them, and they take care of our brother. Or they don’t, and we kick them out. Or he drains them too fast of their energy, and we get rid of the bodies then deal with his tearful remorse. It’s sometimes tender, though most of the time it’s not. It is what it is.
The one who stays behind tries not to let our brother know when some of his regular feeders has committed suicide — for this reason, we do not often let him watch the news. This is to protect his feelings, just like our brother didn’t tell us that the goldfish we once kept in a jar when we were little had died because we overfed them with our oppressive love.
The one who hunts tries not to remember our mother. All big-bellied like and grieving our dead father, she didn’t have enough of herself left inside. Nothing to give to us, to him, her stunted children. Her milk was dried up, and her energy was too. Drained too far too fast when our brother latched and suckled. Similarly, the people he feeds from are not often as strong as they like to believe. Sometimes they feel empty, too.
Sometimes, those who hunt and those who stay, we feel empty too.
• • •
The one who is a janitor wears a full-body uniform of gray canvas.
The one who is a cleaner has lighter clothes and a big apron that loops around the neck and waist.
If the clothes are crooked, the one across from the other corrects their fitting. If there is a smudge across a face, the other one licks a finger then swipes it clean.
Both of us work at the same university, cleaning after careless professors and untidy students. We were never students in any kind of class, though we suppose we learned plenty sitting at the feet of our brother, by that same rocking chair where he held us after our births. When we asked him once how he knew already how to read and write despite nobody teaching him, our brother shrugged and said, I just do. The one who is a janitor snuck into a philosophy lesson once and, afterward, asked the professor if someone can be born knowing all the hidden secrets of the world. The professor had talked about memory, transference, collectivity, and other words that had felt foreign on our tongues. Then, the philosophy professor stared at the one who is a janitor curiously, almost hungrily. We still can’t really understand what that look meant, but we know this: when he was in the womb with us, our brother ate everything he could, trying to fill his deflated body, absorbing everything around our mother as if it was his own.
It makes us wonder sometimes, how we are still here, and not absorbed.
Then, we finish getting dressed for work, pinning our name tags on our uniforms last. One of the regulars our brother feeds on — a petty criminal who always babbles like a baby after a feeding — helped us with our fake papers. Gave us identities on shiny laminate paper next to our photos. But they are not names we recognize as ours. The photos, too. We touch each other’s face, then our own. We never learned how to differentiate ourselves because what use is it, really? There is us, and there is our brother. We grow old and he does not, and we wonder sometimes if when we grow old enough, we will be babies again, babies rocked on our brother’s lap.
There is only us, and only our brother. The world comes second place.
Only us. Only him. There’s no I about it.
Although, we wonder sometimes what would happen if he wasn’t here to keep us and the world together.
• • •
Other times, the people he feeds on become addicted to him. Like right now. We exit the house to go to work — a rare simultaneous shift that has us anxious about leaving him home alone even though he says it’s fine, he’ll be fine, we worry too much — and outside, we see a young man bumping against the house’s grimed walls face-first as if he was a lost bumblebee. He bounces back then returns again and again, clawing disjointedly at the windows like he thinks he can peel back the cardboard taped over the inner side of the glass.
We shoo the young man away, shoo, shoo, we grab a broom from the garden shed and swipe it at him when our hisses prove ineffectual, and he cries out and asks after our brother but we say no, no, he won’t see you, he doesn’t need you anymore, you stupid boy, leave before he drains you for good like he did his own mother. He drained her dry, and we saw him too.
He doesn’t need you. He only needs us to take care of him. We were built for this. We were trained for this. We were meant to take on his burden from womb to grave.
Usually, we don’t bother telling him about the stragglers bumblebeeing outside his window, and he doesn’t ask, does he? But we tell him often: aren’t we good at taking care of you, you burden, aren’t we boulders? Aren’t we Atlases? He read the story to us, years ago. Carrying the world on your shoulders. Which means he is the world, or at least our world.
We don’t remember if he complained when he raised us. Did he? We know he used people, he sang to the people in the streets and they gathered like pilgrims around the house to help him with baby supplies and to give him their energy to suck on and to pay all our house bills. But he must have complained. Must have thought us twin burdens. The one who hunts and the one who stays were once the one who cried and the one who teethed and the one who hungered and the one who soiled every diaper and the one who only settled at the sound of his lullaby.
But we’re all grown now. We hunt and we stay, and we work to earn our keep on this strange world.
So we grab the garden hose and put it on its highest setting, and we use the pressurized stream to propel the bumblebeeing young man away from our property. And he yelps and tucks his tail between his legs and stumbles away for now, and then we get into the truck and drive over to the university for our cleaning shifts.
• • •
Inside her office, we sit on chairs that rustle leathery against our uniforms, and we dig our nails into the granular underside of her wooden desk. The Dean has coral-painted lips and chunky jewelry wrapped around a plump throat. Though she is our age, she reminds us of our mother. And she smiles maternally too, enough for us to feel all hot in our work uniforms.
“Are we in trouble?” we ask, thinking we did not properly clean this or that stain, student party puke or teacher heel scuffmarks on the floors, or we forgot to shine the whiteboard until it gleamed or we fiddled wrong with a piece of technology whose use is too foreign to us.
We picture the police breaking down our door, dragging our brother out while he’s crying for us, asking what he did wrong, all plaintive and mewling like a kitten, like an abandoned runt.
“No, no,” the Dean steeples her fingers and smiles in a way that is meant to reassure.
There is a picture of a child on her desk, a little girl in bed surrounded by a princess canopy and a coven of stuffed animals. Smiling with an IV sticking out of her too-pale arm and monitors looming behind her.
“Did we not do a good enough job?” we try again and, again, the Dean smiles.
“You did, you did. You’re both quite good at being cleaners. Cleaning your own tracks, too. But I know what you do when you’re not here. You have no next of kin on your work papers other than each other, but I know about the brother you keep in your house.”
We wonder if some of our brother’s bumblebee pilgrims were students, if they found the Dean, if they tattled. We wonder if the Dean followed us home, if she saw us and our brother through the cracks of the boarded-up windows, her eyes pressed close enough for the folds of skin around them to get all splintered. If she saw our brother at his weakest, while we tried to get him out of bed — the childhood bed his unchanging body never outgrew. If she saw him asking us to play with him, board games and vintage toys, and all the made-up games that used to make us laugh when we were little and he was big, and that we refuse to play with him now he is little and us big. If she saw him begging us to go out on a drive with him, to take him to the forest so he could feel the grass between his toes, and us saying, if they catch you, they will trap you, they will kill you, they will vivisect you to find out what you are. Us telling him, we don’t even know what you are. Thin and semi-inflated with noodly arms and legs too big for his body, trembling whenever he tried to put too much weight on them too fast. How he was usually too fatigued to even open the door we locked behind us every day. How he had always been that way, and he still raised us to what we are now. Stunted like him. But here. Here.
“What do you want from us?” we ask the Dean who won’t stop smiling. “Money?” We don’t have a lot, but we could make some, we could get one of our brother’s followers, a rich one, a daddy’s boy or restless entrepreneur, to give us some bribe money. We could bring the bribe to the Dean hidden inside our work bags, a dirty thing among our cleaning supplies.
“No, no,” the Dean says. Her finger is stroking rhythmically, lullaby-like, over the gilt edges of the frame that holds the picture of the sick little girl. Daughter? Niece? Alive? Dead? Trapped in the frame? Trapped? Trapped—
“That poor boy, that beautiful boy. Your brother. That’s what I want from you.”
• • •
When dinner is cleared away, we prepare a bath for our brother and we pour in as much bubble soap as he wants, hell, we even throw in a bath bomb full of glitter we will have trouble cleaning later; glitter that will stick to our hands like blood. We put the rubber ducklings inside too for good measure. And our brother, long and thin and inhuman, stretches out in the tub, then sinks deeper like a barracuda, smiling for the first time in what must be years and years and years.
And later, when he is sleeping, when we have tucked him in and put the new stuffed octopus in his grip and kissed the salt of his forehead, we close the door to his room and creep over to the living room to dial the old rotary phone. The number belongs to the Dean who told us, call anytime. Who said: I’ve been looking for someone like him to give meaning to my life, someone to care for, someone who will need me like my daughter once needed me. I’ve been waiting for someone like your brother to come along. So let me take him off your hands. Let me help.
So we call the number and we say, you can come over. Come. Please. Unburden us.
• • •
This is what we think about when we unlock the door and let the Dean into our house.
“Here he is, my child to care for at last,” the Dean coos, entering the derelict hallway with her heady perfume, clacking nails, and maternal voice filling the cramped space between boarded-up windows.
We move aside, part like a sickened sea to let her through. The Dean breezes past the living room (our rocking chair, our piles of books and games) and into the bedroom where our brother sleeps his exhaustion away. We do not immediately enter the room after her, afraid of what we’ll find there. We stare at each other, mirrors mirroring panic, mirroring shame, mirroring what have we done?
And when we do enter, when we stumble into our brother’s room, we blink and blink for a long, drawn-out moment that reminds us of our births. The Dean lies sprawled out on the narrow bed, and our brother hovers above her, looking the most alert we have seen him in years. Then, he curls down over her prone body, his head tilted as if listening to some private radio frequency, and he is thin and long and wispy as ever but suddenly gaining unimaginablesubstance—
He’s in survival mode, we realize, and suddenly we are too. We sprint over to the bed to say, we changed our mind, you can’t have him, we won’t give him away.
But our brother silences us with a sideways glance, tender and scolding, and he says in his ghost-thin voice, “Shh, she is sleeping. So let me tell you a story.”
And he does. He tells us that the Dean had a daughter, he tells us about something called Munchausen by Proxy. Like the storybook I used to read to you, with the delusional baron who lied about his grand adventures of riding on cannonballs, fighting giant crocodiles, and traveling to the moon, remember? And he continues, her daughter, she was a healthy girl, fatherless but growing happy enough, too happy in fact, too fast, and soon she wouldn’t need her mother, soon her mother wouldn’t be needed, and the Dean couldn’t have that, could she? It was settled, then; some sacrifices would need to be made. So the Dean started feeding her child poison, bit by bit. Not to build immunity, no. This was to build dependance. Her daughter would always need her, need her mother to take her temperature and lower the fever with kisses and cold compresses, help her out of bed or, if there wasn’t enough time, hold a bucket under her chin for the girl to puke her sickened guts out. And the Dean took care of her poor girl, and did not complain, not once. Until the poison was too much for such a frail body. Such a flaying body. Such a fetid body. And oh, a Dean would never do that, would she? A proud, working, caretaking single mother. All her students love her! The police never suspected.
Our brother keeps the Dean’s limp body on the bed while he relays all this to us, and he adds, she needed someone new to take care of, someone who was frail but just inhuman enough that they wouldn’t break like her daughter had, didn’t she? Didn’t you? —and he doesn’t stop sucking her energy even as he addresses us. The Dean does not move, only her awkwardly bent leg twitching with sleep jerks and a blissed-out coral-painted smile on her too-far-gone face. Our brother doesn’t stop looking at us while he recounts her misdeeds, his lips locked bloodlessly on her skin, growing paler with each slow suck.
And we think, if our brother could see all this just by feeding on her energy, then he must have seen the scene in the Dean’s office, the devil’s bargain; seen us trying to pawn him off like a kitten so it wouldn’t be drowned by its unwilling owners. He must know we thought him a burden, our burden. And shame digs sharp-nailed fingers inside us, as he keeps suckling. And we remember our mother, how we never suckled her, she never fed us, oh how we hungered! But we were held. By him. We were held.
I was held. You were held. Always.
So we/you/I go to the woman. The child killer. The one whose body our/your/my brother now curls around like a kitten, a baby. He is killing her. He didn’t consciously choose to kill his past feeders unless they were bad, and she is bad-bad. We/you/I are bad too. But he does not hurt us/you/me. He makes room for us when we climb on the bed close to the woman’s unconscious body. It is still warm, but not for long. Still, we make it last: we lay on her chest like triplets, like we never did with our own mother. We crawl under her arms until her flesh cradles us, and we cuddle our brother close too, the brother we cannot let go of.
And the three of us together, you, me, him — we put our mouths on the body, and we feed.
