SmokeLong Quarterly

He called me by my brother’s name. He smiled as if that settled something. He looked at my sister and said, There you are—young again, and back where you belong. He asked if we had fed the dog we buried when I was seven. He called him by the right name. Then he looked for him in the corner. His mind kept opening the wrong drawers and pulling out the right grief.

Mom’s gone, my sister said, and tried to add I’m not h— before he touched his finger to her mouth.

She’s here, he said. She lives in the rain, where the water has learned how to hold her. Pray for rain, he said, like a farmer.

Then, as if a switch had been thrown somewhere deeper than memory, he said, The light in this room is borrowed. Give it back gently.

He asked for water and forgot to drink it. He said the curtains were too loud. He held up his hands and studied them with mild astonishment, like they had wandered in from another life.

My hands have forgotten where they live, he said, and laughed once—small, embarrassed—because he could hear how strange it sounded.

He watched the window the way some people watch a mouth they are trying to read. You were always the one who listened to the weather, he said. Not the forecast. The weather. The part that doesn’t have to be correct to be true.

I didn’t know what that meant. I wrote it down anyway, like an instruction I might understand later.

Don’t trust the version of me you’ll remember, he said. The real one got quieter and quieter until he fit inside a single word.

What word? I asked.

Later, he said. When you’re not ready.

Outside, the sky thinned itself into pale threads, as if it were unraveling on purpose. Or making room for something. I wanted to ask what matters. What stays. What I’m supposed to carry out of this room, and what I’m supposed to leave behind with the machines and the clean sheets and the disappearing names.

He closed his eyes.

The things that matter don’t explain themselves, he said. They just stand in the doorway. They just wait.

I thought he was asleep. I stood. I touched the doorknob.

Without opening his eyes, he said, You’re still listening.

I was.

I still am.