Brother and Sister

by Blake Foster-Wagamon

Content Warning: References to Domestic Abuse, Blood

My brother, once human, is now a deer. I had no other choice but to change him. It was that blue filth that begat his transformation, that gluey sap that filled his water bottle, the obscene stream he’d squirt into his gaping maw and gargle, gulp and swallow. Day and night, he downed electrolytes and salt and salt and salt. I remain clueless as to where he garnered his affinity for the stuff.  

We were muddy children together. The odd shrinking lake would tide us over in the summer heat. Fresh water was our friend. Within that long stretch of nothing between school years, we stumbled barefoot over cracked asphalt to the muddy shore where we played mermaids. His tail was purple with shimmering scales. Mine was semi-translucent, blue. We would splash each other with thick, green water, laden with pollen and amoebas and invent new dangers which we spied through ancient bottles of Bud Light. These were our kaleidoscopes, brown and green visions through which the world’s borders warped and split. We took the rare blue bottles we unearthed home to show our mother who, in the singular act of mercy she ever showed us, reluctantly displayed them on the kitchen windowsill. There, they would refract the short winter days, rays of holy light cast like waves on the orange peel wall. 

Those were the years before my brother learned that mermaids are for girls. Men, he told me at the tender age of nine, are built for battle. They are beasts. They don’t pretend. They only sparkle with the shark tooth shine of a medal after a war well-won. Guys like him fight and win. 

“Like dad did,” he proclaimed while puffing his chest and shoulders, with his mouth drawn tight and his tiny toes dug into the sandy lakebed. I had my doubts. Such small feet couldn’t possibly carry a soldier, but I was at a loss to counter him. My ten year-old tongue and girlish demeanor weren’t accustomed to talking back. I had only begun to learn about war from the long hours that our mother spent unconscious, dreaming to the tune of talk radio. 

By the time school years gum-stretched into graduation, I’d long stopped paying attention to his plans. Jobs for young people, my primary concern, had become scarce, and so did my brother. He was in-demand among his peers. I heard him called a “social wonder.” He was, in short, a popular douche, and I could not wait to leave him behind with our aging mother. She was wasting away, then, but her backhand still packed the punch it always had. I walked away as soon as I could, eager to roll down my sleeves and never explain a single bruise to a nosy swim coach again. I abandoned my brother that year and I didn’t look back until he had already applied to enlist. “Like dad did?” I asked. He hummed on the other end of the call. He wanted to stay with me before bootcamp if I had extra room. Two weeks later, he was napping on my couch while I worked within the confines of my bedroom. Even muffled, his snoring carried through the walls, a guttural growl. I had invited something dangerous into my home. 

Over our first dinner, following a first course of failed small talk, I asked him if he was afraid of dying. He cried out, offended at the insinuation that he would ever die, much less feel fear. The image of him sobbing at age six struck me. He cradled his sliced-up foot, still bearing shards of the shattered corelle bowl, white knives tipped in blue, that neither of us had seen protruding from the lakebed. He feared his own blood more than anything. I feared our mother would make him bleed more. It occurred to me that I still wanted to protect him.

I cleared my throat of the thick steak he insisted on for dinner and asked him if he knew what a drone strike looked like. He beamed. What he said next wasn’t clear, or wasn’t coherent, or I wasn’t listening because I was too preoccupied with the bomb hanging over both of our heads, the arcs our country’s missiles carved in the sky every day. I saw craters crafted by warplanes chiseled into his dimples and so I changed my resolve. Protection would be granted. All I had to do was to keep him from himself. If he wanted to be a beast, a beast my brother would be. 

The next morning, before the sun rose, I incanted the word tiger into his protein powder. I enunciated clearly and imbued the shifting pile of powder with the certainty that he would become something mighty but respectable. He would have eyes that glowed and teeth to tear me to shreds but he would resemble my brother more than the deceitful scorpion that had wriggled into his flesh. I replaced the container quietly and tiptoed back to my bedroom so as not to wake him. When he rolled off the couch around ten, he decided to skip his shake, and the spell faded by the time he left for the gym. 

Next, I told him he should be a wolf. I spent three days spewing facts about how they’re misconstrued creatures, how rare a lone wolf is, why the concept of alphas makes no sense. “Wolf packs are composed of complex social networks. It was a dickface scientist who deemed them misogynists and we’ve all lived that lie ever since.” I barked this information to his stubbled face which sank into boredom by the third syllable. He responded with a hum and left in search of drinks, one last hurrah with his boys before he was sent off. He did not see the importance of these facts, the way we map our desires onto rocks, trees, and people until they become our own demons and must be destroyed. I wondered what parts of him he saw in my face. What part of him was it that he wanted to kill?

I saw nothing of value in the destruction he craved. I recused myself entirely from his sense of justice. I excused myself from life. My brother had been transformed, by life or memory or worse, his own doing. He occupied his own body, but had grown strange. And what is my country if not a strange body, a mess of nerves and ventricles pulsing with a common land that demands and takes and sucks the life from its people, promising more? How could I go about untangling a national nervous system? I pictured nerve endings laid out neatly side by side like embroidery floss, that I could braid them back together like my own brittle hair. 

The final day of his stay came and I was hopeless before the softer side of my brother appeared. I caught him shaving in the bathroom in which he had made a fine mess and he cut himself, a thin rivulet of red carving his face in two. He froze. Blood dripped from his jaw down his neck, and I had no idea what was bothering him so much until I realized we were both looking at our father’s face, clear in the mirror for the first time in fifteen years. 

I loved my brother. And I finally understood what he’d spent his life chasing. I wanted to scream at him, to tell him patriotism was an illusion. There was still time to fix things! He could sleep on my couch forever if he wanted. I would have found a way to put up with the gym smells and the fake smiles and how he kept the news on all the time just to sleep. I would have told him anything to keep him out of that war but I couldn’t, so in a last-ditch effort I made him thirsty. 

I hid his water bottle. I stuffed our father’s canteen out of sight. I shut off the tap and told him a water main had broken down the street. For a whole day, I deprived him of so much as a drop until finally he broke down, weeping on the floor without his brackish medicine. That’s when I pulled out the good stuff: a bottle of Powerade I’d kept hidden in the back corner of the fridge. I knew he wouldn’t resist and in doing so cast my spell. He practically cried when I produced it, a neon blue marvel of beverage engineering. I smiled and handed it to him. I ruffled his hair and he took three grateful swigs, suspecting nothing. It was simple, then: a wish uttered with my eyes closed, calling upon every gentle thing there ever was. The bottle fell to the ground. I squealed with glee. When I opened my eyes again, there was one less human in the kitchen. A deer stood in my brother’s place.

I set to work quickly. I tied him up with kitchen rags, encircled his strong, furry neck and resolved to keep him there, sparkly, docile, the way every man should be. Finally, his forlorn eyes and uncertain, gangly fawn legs were plain for the world to see. He brayed and I consoled him by mussing his head and regaling him with tales of beer bottles and mermaids, how there will never be sea glass in the midwest but we could pretend for the rest of our lives if that was enough for him. I tied him to the fridge handle so he could feed himself if needed, and I told him over and over again how glad I was that he chose to stay with me, how happy I was to be related to such a gentle soul. The forgotten Powerade spread between us. It coated my toes—his hooves—sticky and sweet, a thin sheet of blue expanding across tile like the rolling tides neither of us had ever seen. I could think of my brother better this way, with an ocean between us and without the teeth or guns of a predator. 

The calls would come. Friends and acquaintances would ask what happened to my magnetic, ferocious brother and I would tell them that nothing had changed. He was still there with me. I had taken him and one less man would leave this country a murderer. There would be one pawn fewer in the war game and I had made my brother a peaceful creature at last. I wouldn’t lose him. Yes, all would be just fine. 

🜁🜄🜂🜃

Blake Foster-Wagamon (they/them) is a fiction writer and library technician working in the Denver area. Their work has been published in Partially Shy Magazine and COOP: Chickens of our Poetry.