THIS IS THE OCTOBER THE PARTY had a Batman theme. Your younger brother’s birthday; it’s held outside. The sky is a deep, swollen gray. His friends are there. All of these little kids dressed up like superheroes and villains. The party’s going pretty well. The cake is a big Batman face, nine candles stuck out from it. Years later, your brother will be diagnosed only after they find him wandering a northeastern college campus, painted in mud, bleeding out loud demons. The demons will speak a newly invented language, as if in tongues, and when asked who he is, he’ll name an invented man who can do everything at once. Every single thing, at once, he’ll say. He will identify a lineage of family that disincludes his actual family or anyone you’ve ever known. But let's stick with this day, years before. When lightning shoots a platinum slot through the sky and the largest hemlock in your backyard cracks midway, and you remember the word thorax aloud because you’re thinking of the throat of the tree as the dumbfounding snap hisses and Gary, this is your brother’s name, blows out his candles. The breaking tree falls away from everyone, and your mom grabs the cake just as the downpour begins, and everyone rushes inside. Inside, crouched wet and smearing in the room: several Jokers, Penguins, some characters you don't recognize, and surprisingly, only two Batmen, of which one is of course your brother. Your mom is dabbing the cake with paper towels, and you can see it’s held up pretty well because the fondant is probably made out of oils and sugars that would withstand graver natural disasters, and your brother, you remember this, the sweet look on his face, he’s fine, he’s happy, he has friends. He’s a good kid, earnest, diligent with schoolwork, only, in years of retrospect, exhibiting quiet moments of odd behavior, a couple of lingering expressions of paranoia. But this is the Midwest, a Midwest of a certain texture, where many things discussed intimately and publicly alike on the Coasts do not exist because there’s no language for them here to make them real. And it’s funny, too, because looking back from an adult remove you see the illnesses in so many members of your family, like brief snaps of a drawn blind, letting a blast of light in, for instance, finding your father sitting alone in a plain chair he’d pulled from the kitchen into the living room, weeping into his hands. Or—well you could go on here, but outside the living room window, the sky is green and purple, and small earthly details are tearing up and flying about. Retrospectively, you see this sky, a giant brain of memories in airborne scraps of trash, smashed factory brick and striped smokestack, a vast lot of Fruehauf tractor trailers, the brownfield with all the bleached bones of small creatures, the neighbor whose wife’s advancing Alzheimer’s sends her wandering into fragments of space lost, her husband at the door, Have you seen her?, swatches of flying little league summers smash into old corroded hand tools from some ancient enormous cellar beside the coal chuted furnace, all spinning and lifting in weather beyond the window where your mom’s finished dabbing the slick rain from the cake, she lights the nine candles again and your brother’s eyes light, too, in that traveling moment, nine catchlights, nine years of promise, he’s superheroing in his bat-gear, and you’re his older brother, you’re still superheroic by simple fact of your nature to him, your age and the expectations of simple common ascendancy, and it’s no good, is it? but, look, then and there you can’t see the future, how little help to him you’ll one day be, you don’t know that in the memory, the memory is pure, timeless, the memory’s face is unlined, the memory has frozen only that naive moment, and you’re concentrating on his light, and there he is, happy, and it's his birthday, and the weather embedded in time bodes like the weather out beyond the glass but you’re all safe inside, watching him, resolute, and the candles’ light grows in your mind, grows until it fills the room with its light, like a halo or aura or angel whose enormity gives its contours to the pure phenomenon of storming photons, a collusion of energies, and he's blowing out all the candles, his breath making a circulating train, just that one breath as you hold him there you hold him still his exhalation taking the light, now extinguished, and everyone cheers and this, this is Gary your younger brother, and outside lightning strikes again, as if cheering along as if laughing soundless here now in the silent house of memory, lightning like a mind: opening brilliantly, closing down the dark. •



David Ryan is the author of the story collections Alligator (C4G Books), and Animals in Motion (Roundabout Press). His work has appeared in the O. Henry Prize anthologies 2022 and 2023, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Soft Union, Conjunctions, Fence, and elsewhere.

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