Drove Dogs
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I hadn’t seen my brother in years. Now here he was in my sideyard, shoeless and waltzing. Through the blinds of my bedroom window, I watched him sway to the left and then to the right, 1 2 3, 1 2 3, snapping on the downbeats. I’d never seen my brother dance this well. But it really was him—he was wearing his favorite camo cargo shorts from the summer he was fifteen and I was twenty-one.
The fights we once had drove dogs from their masters. They knocked old women down and entertained the strong, the cruel, the stupid. Was he dancing an apology? Why now, at an hour of night that did not exist? The numbers on my alarm clock made no sense. They were bigger than even the ultra-wide business end of military time.
I watched my brother take his shirt off. He had a new tribal tattoo that morphed as he moved… no. That was a shadow. And there was the scar from when I clubbed him with a snow shovel. That fight was over leaving food out for roaches. My brother swore that if he turned over in bed and looked out his window, he could see me down in the alley every trash night, glowing white below the streetlamp and letting the roaches climb my arms and laughing high and girly.