How to Hang Up on Your Suicidal Brother 

The ring of the phone casts a certain duty, a rippling flag shadowed by the plummeting sun. You’re made to believe that this is beautiful, as you finger the green button, accepting what comes next to fill the balloon of audience. The settings change from month to month, so you listen past the hum of his words, and listen for something unique. Locked in the trunk of a drug dealer’s Caprice, at the edge of a bridge over shallow river beds, self-checking out at the grocery store, at work, near metal presses, the stench of melting plastic somewhere in the ether. Act, he begs, while you obey traffic lights and laws, seat belt tight around your collar bone. Everything secured. Tires dashing grit to the side of the road, pelting fast food cups, a single pair of shoes, swaddled by dirty cotton panties. You offer to come to the bridge, to the factory, to the supermarket, to the root of despair, offering to untether your anchor, and wade into the waters of mania; remembering the punches you threw and took on the chin, neither of you shattering, but in the dark, you’ve found the brittle spots, miscolored skin, the hang of visceral fat ivying around joints and organs, threatening to leak you of the livid oil of your machinery.

But he bulldozes past your excuses, the dirt fertile, burying you up to your knees, caught. Parked in a parking lot of a high school you never attended in a state you’ve escaped to, where the only action you have left is to answer the phone. He calls you names, brings up slights from childhood, demands you even a score you’ve long considered paid. He reminds you of your other siblings. Says, we’ve got a balance sheet. Everything in life comes with a tally of interest. Guilt a currency he’s learned to traffic in. Never mentions weapons or plans, everything indirect.

You want to tell him about the tobacco fields, the way the leaves look like elephant ears, to remind him of the nights at the county fair, trying to get the girls to sit with you on the tilt-a-whirl, how everything and everyone is fucked up, but there are globs of happiness, scattered, waiting to be mapped, that shame is a societal construct, a scaffolding of destruction, that he could refuse to climb to the top.

You want to tell him that your son confuses the actions associated with the stoplights. Red means go, and green means stop. The color splashed on everything. Equaling hunger, passion, anger, the whip of the cape, followed by the stab of the blade.