the brother was my age, not a looker.  my parents were nervous and slicked his hair back lovingly.  their hands touched.  I had other presents but I was thinking about the blood in my body and about Stephen.  Stephen was an across the street foster I for a summer could not separate from.  his nose was constantly chapped because his parents found out he had no manners at the table and would have his older sister sneak up behind him and hood him with an empty feed bag.  I went in with Stephen once saying his sister had called him a ******* and his parents liked me enough that they soaped her mouth in front of me then tied a string to her seemingly always loose front tooth and then tied the escaping end of the string to the **** of an open door and slammed it.  because of this honesty Stephen and I were allowed to watch a movie where a white man and a savage pressed their wrists together after cutting them.  the movie looked away from the cutting so we improvised.  it didn’t make us any closer.  the night Stephen ran away I didn’t wake up without having to ****.  it was my dad found him days within the week making boxes a mile gone at a pizza shop because he said his name was Billy and would work for free.    

I looked at the brother and couldn’t see it being so without my blood.  but the brother pulled me to him anyway and I could feel in the heat of his elbows all the time he’d spent mourning the loss of Stephen.