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JUNE 2022

Written by Michael Kurt | Illustration by Laura Helsby

When I was thirteen my brother was taken by a light that I did not see but felt through the wall we shared. I was asleep. I woke up. I don’t know why. I was hungry and alone in my room, it was dark except for the feeling of light from around the door.

And then he was gone.

The police came an hour after I woke my parents, but refused to find anything. They said he ran away. They didn’t want to hear how, when it happened, all the hair on my body stood on end, shifting up and then towards the wall, towards his room. Or how the posters began to melt into the wallpaper as if they were an egg on a basketball court in summer, sizzling, or how the room smelled like kindling and shook in waves of something I couldn’t see, but felt at the core of my body. Windows rattled, coming away from their tracks, and the filaments of dust and light, which I read as time, slowed, midway between existing and not. Shimmering. Saturated. Time without form.

They left, not long after they came, without answers. I sat in the kitchen, too afraid to go back to my room, and waited until my head got heavy. Thirteen, by two months and three days, I was just starting to develop the desire to live a life far away from home and was now without a brother to run away with.

It took a long time, but I forgot about that night. Years, maybe a decade. Sometimes it came to me in the weird ways things come in dreams, pretending to be other things, not there at all. And then, it would appear as a void. Something missing. But I couldn’t tell what. I could see it in the stars, on a clear night, or as a lightbulb blinked out. Over and over, as ghosts of light when I closed my eyes. For more than half my life.

On the day I realized the memory of my brother was gone, it came again. I was thirty-three. We were up early. It was a nice day. We had breakfast at the kitchen counter and planned an entire day at the soccer fields. Our oldest son was eleven. Our youngest was eight and chronically shy. I told him he could bring his Game Boy Advance, even though I knew his father would hate it.

It was our turn to bring snacks.

“They’re not going to like it,” Mike said, after we’d already left the house. He had recently started to wear the kind of buttoned up shirt the other dads wore. I have been trying to notice him more. I have been trying to acknowledge the changes he thinks are positive.

“It was a hit last time.”

He had new shoes and he’d cut his hair short. He looked like he wanted to talk to me about running. “Kids don’t like apples.”

“Well, kids don’t like anything, so they might as well have apples,” I said, not really sure if I was making a point or not.

At the field, allowing my thoughts to drift in the direction of where kids were running both towards and away from a ball, I managed to complete the list of positive things my husband was doing for himself. Tomorrow, I promised, I would start on a list for myself. All the positive things I could, and would, do to continue existing a little longer. When the kids went back to school, and my husband went back to work, and as the laundry was purring softly from the other room: this was when the list would be allowed to manifest.

No one complained about the apples, but the coach decided the team should go to Sunshine Pizza, where they had an arcade and free refills on the large pitchers of soda. But, more important to my own childhood, they had a model train that ran the entire edge of the ceiling, passing from room to room, through fake towns and tunnels and snow-crowned forests. 

On the way home, I decided that the manifesting had to start tonight. If I were to wait to improve my life, I’d wait forever. “When we get home, I am going for a run,” I said to my husband, who wasn’t fully awake. He turned, with his eyes closed and head deep in the headrest, and muttered, “take a flashlight.”

I left immediately because I knew if I allowed myself to get caught up in the stains on the soccer shorts, I would not have the strength to will myself to run. My shoes still fit, and I took a flashlight with me—turning it off and on as I passed the living room so my husband would know that I listened and that I cared.

It was a June night. Almost hot, almost raining, and full of pollen. I thought about turning back for allergy medicine, or a long-sleeved shirt, but knew that if I allowed myself to turn around, I’d allow myself to walk, and then stop, and then go to bed early without stretching or running or manifesting anything. So I plodded along. Doing what I called running. Block to block, I told myself I could make it until the next stop sign without slowing down. There were no cars on our street, or the next street after that. Just even, clean sidewalks. Empty roads.

I could hear myself breathing. It didn’t take long to get winded. After a short stint of confident running, where I felt like things weren’t too bad, I began to feel my true age. Deeply. In my knees and chest. But I tried to keep on anyway, for a few more blocks. Just to the next stop sign.

A cyclist passed opposite me, quickly, barely a blur, and I felt embarrassed to be seen out of breath. It pushed me on, farther, one more block. Then again, another block, for fear of being looked back on from a distance. And it felt good. It felt like progress. Like after however long it had been, I could still make room for health and my own wellbeing; for my aging body and my positive—in the middle of this thought, I was hungry. Not terribly, but suddenly hungry. There wasn’t a breeze, it was calm, and I desperately looked for the cyclist who, just a moment ago, I willed to never be seen by again. Maybe he too was weak and would turn back soon, defeated by the night. The hairs on my neck, then head, then all of my body, rose. I could feel them against my clothes, on end, pushing against the fabric. 

I had made it to the stop sign at the end of another block. I tried to read the name of the street, but it melted, green and white, reflective letters, and became unrecognizable streaks on the pavement, pooling, then growing thin, before seeping into the gutter. I grabbed for the pole, but it was below me, and my arms cycled through the empty air before the tree limbs and leaves tore the skin of my hands away. I plowed through the trees wildly; flailing, the hunger growing. Will I be alive?, I thought, passing through bits of trees, after this, crashing along the rooftops and against chimney stacks. My shorts snagged on an S-hook, and ripped, and the wind was cold on my bare skin. This is a proper neighborhood, with crossing guards and a baseball diamond, and an elementary school, where you don’t show the bare skin of your ass, I thought, as I passed through windows and walk-in closets, past mirrors and stacks of books on window sills. I crashed through drywall, which became a powder and decorated my arms and face, then I was out the other side of the house again, into the night, careening through ranch houses and cottages, barely alive, but somehow still able to think: This is not the body of a young person.

For years after my brother was gone, I wanted so badly to be taken too. Away from our parents’ house, away from the school that he would have been in, just a few grades below my own—with the same teachers, and tests, and hallways filled with old blue lockers. But nothing came. I watched every movie with aliens, I checked out every book I could find at the library. As soon as I could drive, I went to the desert alone and turned off the headlights, trying to find true darkness and the feelings I had that night.

By the time I had met Mike, I had given all of it up. I’d found nothing. My little brother had been stolen in the middle of the night and there was never any evidence that he would be back—or that I could be taken where he had gone—and it was time to move on. It was time to live.

Mike came home with the idea that he could be a better person. If he had better habits, if he ate better, and lived cleaner, and slept for eight hours each night. If he drank water and listened to podcasts about thinking clearly and better eating habits, then he could feel right. He cut his hair and bought new running shoes; he started stretching in the morning before work; he wrote down all the things he was grateful for, and when he woke up he read them quietly to himself; and he’d done it. For now, maybe, but for himself. And I was ready to do it too. I was ready to be happy.

I wasn’t sure at what point I started to feel the pain, but I know it lasted for longer than anything I had experienced before. Time became light and then sound, then time again, and a crashing, banging sensation ignited somewhere beneath my skin. I realized that I was no longer in the neighborhood, cascading through everything, but also that I was not in the sky. It was hard to perceive at first, but the pain and the brightness was not infinite. Somewhere, far from where I was, there was an end that appeared as a small opening, then a mouth, then a hole, and a quarry, and a well, and then brightness again, opening. The burning numbed the pain of my broken limbs, which I wasn’t sure were real anymore. I imagined my body gray and red with viscera. Ribbons of arteries and vessels, tissue from bone like threads from an old sweater, unraveling.

If this was the light that took my brother, and therefore the end, I could only imagine that he felt a tremendous amount of pain. And that I did too. 

“Are you alright?” the cyclist asked, having made his loop of the neighborhood. I opened my eyes to a faded poster for a missing cat named Wednesday who was white and brown, with a bell on its collar. It was dark except for a few streetlights and what was probably the baseball field over the tops of the houses, casting rays through the treetops.

It was quiet. The cyclist looked at me for a long time without getting too close. “Where do you live?” he tried instead.

I thought about my body, reformed and whole again. I thought about Mike and my brother, and my children, and felt the sweat cool on the back of my arms and between my legs. I tried to speak, but instead a long line of sinew arrived from deep in my stomach, filling my throat, and made it hard to breathe. I vomited. Then I was able to breathe again. And fell over.

“Can you open your eyes?”—A brightness came. I could hear my body screaming—”I need you to stay awake,” someone was saying to the shell of me. “Can you squeeze my hand?”—An ambulance, a passerby, and an entire neighborhood began to glow around me like stars reflecting off of the desert at night. ”There she is, it’s alright.” I was lifted by hands touching the rawness of my material body, but inside I was floating, transcending pain and life, somewhere else—“You’re gonna be alright.”—because the pain was no longer a feeling— “It’s alright now,”—it had become something sentient— “Do you know where you are?”—and controlling. I thought about the moments of my life when I had known pain close to this. I thought about my children being born and my car being hit from behind, and my head hitting the glass of the windshield because I had forgotten to put on my seatbelt and the road seemed so calm without headlights. I remember searching for any evidence that something existed outside of our own life, or world, or universe—“What’s your name?”—and wished deeply that we weren’t doomed to be so alone. My mother arrived at the hospital; it was a weeknight; it was cold outside, but not winter. Someone was shooing away the leaves with a broom, trying to catch them before they got to the waiting area carpet, where they would be crushed by idle feet. I couldn’t remember my name, or what town I was in. But I remembered bright lights in the rearview mirror and feeling alive. Like there was something with me in the passenger seat, and the inside of the car had become clean with light. I let my foot slip off of the gas pedal, and the car slowed down, and my body went slack, and my hands came off of the steering wheel. I let my mind quiet and suddenly I was eleven in Sunshine Pizza, after a soccer game with my dad, and the team were all playing in the arcade. I watched the train go around the restaurant, through the tunnel, then behind the counter where they took your order, and back out again. There was a conductor painted on the side of the engine car, waving his striped hat, passing by. He smiled at me and made me happy.

I never found the point in the desert where I crashed my car in college, or where they’d found my body, which had been thrown several feet. The wind swept the glass away and buried it. My blood dried and my car had been towed to the junkyard outside of town. When we left the hospital, my mother asked if there was anything she could do. She said she felt helpless. She said she felt like if she lost both of her children, there would be nothing left to live for, which is something you say to a child that is also hurting.

When I went back to school the next term, I decided it was time to let the search for what had happened to my brother die. It was time to meet someone and start a family of my own. It was time to be a part of something else.

At the hospital again, now my mother’s age, I knew I would have to forget tonight, just as I had before. Despite the existence of my body, if I were to live, I would have to continue to ignore the fact that something else existed in the universe. I knew that if I allowed myself to again be taken by those forces, everything around me would suffer because I would not be able to show them what I had seen in the light.

By the time Mike arrived at the hospital, all I wanted to do was sleep. Our children were with my mother, our house was quiet, and my life was empty, again. Mike put his hand gently on my leg, but didn’t say anything as we drove home. The house felt like it was a mile from the driveway. 

My brother came from the arcade room, almost running back to our table. “I don’t want to go home yet,” he cried to our mother. “I want to play with everyone.” He looked at me, as if I had the power to do anything, then back at our mother. “Can we please stay a little longer?” he begged. “Please?”

Tomorrow, I will cut my hair and buy new clothes. I’ll write down all of the things I am thankful for. I’ll drink water and stretch my body and eat salads for every meal. Tomorrow, I will try to run again.

To Mike, in the car outside our house, I asked if we could stay a little longer, and in the voice of my father, he said: “yes.”