He hoots

There are moments in kinship that can extract the purest aether, where all energies converge on the most common of pain’s trickery: beauty or.. faith. Sir, that ye of little fortress! They pray we can regard any tale with the most complete superstition from which it had been told. Here is my current torment.

A letter from the homie:

Jerry,

I did what you said. He wasn’t doing well. All his spoilage wreaked in the air. The festering, repugnant stench caused me to yack into my throat, but I chose to chew back and swallow it. It honestly smelled like the defeat of boxered young men too afraid to reveal themselves and a misogynist mentor with his fingers in a wavelike cupping motion behind a naked rear as if to say goodbye, something like, “Ya ain’t shit, boi”. He could’ve walked away, like I did. Well, he made it seem as such, straight to my face during the times we seldomly conversed along his poetic implosion. Every garment I suggested losing was placed back on when we departed. He had a way of keeping you hopeful and in this, forgetful. Granted, the first memories I ever had were that my baby brother was a menace and that we couldn’t exist on the same plane. But ya know, dude, although I violently pecked at him and attempted to drive him out of the nest, he did stay out of my way at least, nibbling on the guts while I got the best cuts.”

PS Keep your nose clean.

Sincerely,

Mathias Brink

I’ll tell it to you straight rather, circles are always too perfect. Why not a line, they are so lovely.

Mathias was there, now before him, he discovered every tact he ever lacked. He was on the inquiry of life; the challenge! His family name was soon to be relinquished as his two younger brothers were either gone or purposefully sterile. “But no, some are literally born non-binary, look at his chromosomes.” Forget about us… (rang some chilling wind). “Do the trees really speak for the toads, launched thirty feet into air? Nah, it’s good ole grandad stirring the pot. Screw the noise, this can be made right.”

His fiancé sat, longingly, at the picture frame window watching her peers stroll her purity, “You need to do something about this, or I...” Mathias was baffled, he knew what she meant and she always kept him in check. “Why have we not bore, why have we not bore… (knowing all too well he still stunk of his brother’s death just twenty-four hours earlier) we’ll have the funds, just make it happen. Look what you did, your family deserves more.”

There was no mending the relationship because he and his brother looked at the resting spot of life differently, how could any being come to a grip on it if the interpreter sleeps? Not even an ounce of the respect he had for his little brother’s journey was truly conveyed along his brief twenty-eight years. A swing and hit, rather. Then on the thanksgiving of plenty twenty, Donnie was found nodded out on synthetic opioids, albeit nothing in his urine was detectable. Mathias cheered, because four months prior, the boy finally had shown fear in his eyes. The Disciples were on him. This had to be the only case. Why else would he need a place to stay and to change his number? Maniacally and damn near jovial, just after this breakdown, he admitted, “There are times I just imagine walking up to you and opening your throat.” So, Mathias cut contact and chanted every night until the day, Psalms 144:1 with the following “Please grant our enemies friendship, love and purification.”

Mathias did wish him gone and soon needed it, yet there was still this lingering hope. And oh, was it received. He didn’t want him completely ridded, only learned, but it was received. His brother had always talked of some secret finds from hiking and that his family was going to be taken care of. For all the damage Donnie had done to their grandmother, he hoped it would cover at least a quarter of the trauma. The comfort kept Mathias well on target and non-existent from the hospice where his brother was rotting now, a quadriplegic and verbally combative to any care, for three seasons.

Then on Christmas eve, three friends who had shared no personal knowledge of each other: His brother’s best friend, Fiancé and his Father’s ex-best friend all mentioned over the phone within a few hours of each other, “You need to reconcile with him.” Mathias knew in the source and this was the most intense confirmation of it since the paralysis of his monster.

“He won’t apologize!”, Mathias wailed out to his grandmother. There isn’t any changing him and yet there, finally humbled was Donnie, sticks and sour skin in soft reply, “I am sorry to’ve made you afraid of me, I love you big bro, I’ll make it up to you…see you later.” They shared only one later.

On New Year’s Eve, Mathias visited him one more time before he passed and just before he parted ways for the night at nine o’ clock when the facility closed, a Barn Owl perched on a low dead branch of a White Pine just outside his window. He never noticed the critter or cared to until Mathias pointed it out, “Oh wow, he’s really going at it.” “Hoot, hoot, hoot”, the beast was in a frenzy.

Eight days later as he laid his palm on his brother’s cold forehead, Donnie’s eyes, glued open, were stuck on the Pine tree. There it was again, the Owl.

Donald left his brother a fortune. A few large, precious stones and gold he stumbled upon on a river bank just before he overdosed. This is what his fiancé spoke of but she didn’t mean to do all this. Donald didn’t want his decrepit body seen by his friends and family. He Chose to be cremated and buried beneath the Pecan tree at their childhood home and Mathias was to have no part of him! As they discussed his memorial options, the immediate family was able to view him one last time and as they trailed out, Mathias hung back a short ways and with a swift snip of some pruning shears, took the first knuckle of his baby brother’s pinky finger. They wouldn’t notice.

Sadly, the process of crafting a son (ensuring final responsibility) took too long and Maria gave up on their wedding. “If you can’t give me a child, I am thru.” But gems always have this peculiar way of working even greater magic and five years later, Mathias had his son. Garret was his own flesh and blood and his new lady, wife in fact, just as fiery and tempestuous as anything he ever cherished, was never told how his son was born or where he came from. She was never shown a smidgeon of the potentially nefarious intent he had for his brother or any details of his death.

And this is where I draw the line, no one can escape oblivious fate.

Garrett was a good child. Though, like any of us, he was quirky and who knows how it could have happened, but there was a particular eccentricity that held Mathias in a stupor of silence, something that he never begged the source for. Garret identified as Owlkin and it was something that tickled his wife to her core. So much so, it was all she could speak of to her friends and to her folks. Garret didn’t deserve this kind of ridicule, but Mathias, choked up and secretive, couldn’t reveal the truth. What would that do his son? How would his wife react? He already had the night terrors to deal with, his son hooting over them every full moon..and what would she gain from knowing.

The boy pleaded with his father to leave her for years; that a new mom would be intelligent and accept him for who he was, yet Mathias just sat, quiet, patient for the eye of this insanity to peek open. He told him once in his life of a thing that held weight, one truth, “Garret, listen, we will always determine our bully, so it’s up to us to decide who we are.”

He and I bonded during the height of his brother’s suffering, we had become best of pals up until Donnie left and we remained in contact every few months or so, then nothing. The authorities never found the boy, only Mathias and his wife, a disemboweled tangle of goo in the master bedroom and a picture of barn owl saying,“He hoots”.