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Your brother dies a quiet death. He dies perhaps on a Monday, but it could just as easily have been a Tuesday, or a Wednesday. You do not know exactly when. You do know him, though. You know that he could never have left you, and that, for better or worse, he always kept his promises. You know that when you arrived home on that Monday, or that Tuesday, or that Wednesday, that he had not been there. There is no body, no person at the door of the cramped apartment you shared to unceremoniously announce that your brother has died. There is just the slowly burning realization, and then, him.
Your fraying couch houses your brother, or at least a semblance of him. His hands are folded politely in his lap, his hair has that freshly-dyed gleam, and his gaze is fixed directly on you. You have a good eye. There exists no divot in the couch at the spot that situates your brother. The sheen to your brother's hair does not distract you from the fact that you can see right through him. His movements are slow; he works on a delay, bugged. You cannot see your brother's chest rise and fall. You know all of this, that he is fake, that hallucinations are a normal part of grief. Your school bag, the ratty thing, falls to the ground with a dull clatter regardless. Unlike him, your movements are nimble when you frantically tear across the room to reach him.
As expected, your hands swipe cleanly through him. His figure distorts where you have touched him, and a profound sense of coolness pervades your body starting from your hands, but he reforms nearly instantly. He does not say a thing. That is fine; your voice can be enough for the both of you. Sluggishly, you sift through your mind for your next words. What is there to discuss? Yourself, chafed raw by loneliness? Him, perfectly composed and residing solely within your head?
When your brother got angry, that flawless countenance would slip away from him easily. Even in anger, he never liked to insult you. In moments of blind rage, he would never touch you. He preferred maintaining a professional distance; when time simmered his emotions down, you came to realize that distance was integral to his work. The worst insult your brother could permit himself was "fool", or some variant of that. You play the part now. Your hands support you, pressed firmly into the sofa. You are so close to him. Your mouth still will not move, but then again, you have nothing to say.
He does, with that practiced reserve of his. You hear his voice before you see his mouth opening. "Sister Dearest, why the long face? I'm right here, can't you see?" Your eyes shut slowly. In your chest, a brother-shaped hollow has formed. Maybe it has been there since the first night he didn't return home. Maybe it has always existed, and you have only cared to recognize it now.
Your voice trembles in a way that his never did in life. You have no good response. "I miss you," you manage. Eyes closed, you cannot see his expression change. You do not think it does. You do not try to touch him again. The couch feels rough and uncomfortable; you could not expect anything better from the price your brother had got it at. It is preferable to trying to reach a ghost. It is not that you do not want to open your eyes. You know that you could, and that he would be sitting right there, hands still laced together delicately. The idea is just far too exhausting, and you are a simple person at your core.
"Silly girl, I'm right here," your brother says. "How can you miss someone who's never left?" His voice is so familiar. It is the same cadence, the same light-hearted tone, the one he would default to when he did not want you to realize your own helplessness. It does nothing to ameliorate the asperity of your want. He has left, and you are all alone. And you want to remind yourself of that, and you are able to remind yourself of that, but you cannot bring yourself to accept it as true.
So, he stays. Sitting there on your decayed couch, mouth lagging behind his voice. "I know," you say. "I'm sorry. Can you help me with my homework?" Your voice cracks. Your mouth is very, very dry, but you are not thirsty. He does not react to it; he is a ghost. Your brother would have mentioned it at the very least, would have lamented that he was not able to record the moment. He would have told you that you needed to do the work yourself, and then followed it up with an easy acquiescence informed by the truth that he would always be there to handle the work for you. The ghost of your brother just places his hand over yours, cold in a way that his hand never was.
"Bring it here," he says simply. You pull yourself away from the couch. Your knees ache, surely made pink by extended contact with the floor. You cannot see them to confirm; your eyes are still resolutely closed as you fumble your way towards the door and your messily dropped bag. You shake so violently picking the bag up that you nearly drop it once more. When you lift your head and open your eyes, your brother is sitting idly at the kitchen table. He has always been one to emphasize convenience, so you never push the chairs in. The light flickers. Three seconds later, your brother's head tilts upwards. You fix your eyes on the floor as you stagger over. By the time you finish fishing all of your papers out of your bag, your brother has already started to inspect the ones that had been retrieved earlier. Dumbly, you are sat in your seat, staring at him.
He looks the exact same. He is, or perhaps was, fifteen years old, and it shows. His skin is smooth and pale; perhaps that comes from his status as a phantom, but you doubt it. He always made a great deal of effort to maintain his appearance, after all. You should know; he turned that blade on you, too. He would say that it was out of care for your figures that the fridge was in its natural state of halves: half-full, half-cool, and half-broken. You know better than that. Not a single hair on your brother's head is out of place. You notice that he has just touched it up; no hint of your natural pink color peeks through. Your brother always smiled apologetically at you when you watched him dye his hair from the bathroom door. Somehow, you do not think that this version of him will do the same. His eyes are as sharp as always. His face is set to be carefully neutral, but you know in your heart that nothing has changed about it. When the time comes, his disgusted look will still stay the same, and that resigned expression he makes when you say something he dislikes will not err. You are both young, so perhaps the phrase "eternal youth" cannot apply just yet. But as you watch your brother hover over homework you know how to do, you think that the words suit him.
You follow his gaze to the paper splayed out on your small table. Like everything else in your apartment, it is old and damaged. You do not know what to say. The work you can do. Talking to your brother you cannot. Things are always like this: he will come home, exhausted and frayed at the edges. You will try to help him, will offer to store his things in the closet and make him something to eat. That pained smile of his will be pasted back on his face, but he will deliberately avoid your touch until he has showered. It always hurts, and privately you are grateful for that, thankful that you have never acclimated to his pain. It would be terribly easy to do so. You can envision it with enough actuality that it scares you each and every time. Your brother's pain is a mundane and inevitable thing. You do not want it to be that way, but you cannot fight against laws like this. Just as anyone needs air to breathe and food to function, your brother needs to hurt to live. Daily, without fail, you would sit silently on your side of the couch and listen to the water run. Your brother never dallied. He never turned the bathroom lights on and never used more water than he had to in his necessary abstemiousness. You would take those precious minutes and try to find something to say. Nothing ever came to you. Not then, and not now, either. You cannot say anything at all.
"Sister Dearest, I'm beginning to suspect that you've been abducted and replaced by a doppelgänger," your brother says. "This sort of thing is something even I know how to do, and you're the one staying in school." Mutely, you rummage through your bag for a pencil. Your head is bowed, so you cannot see your brother's face, but you presume that there is a smile there. "Of course, I would know immediately if you had been replaced. I'm not foolish enough to not notice a paltry copy of you, Sister Dearest. Had there been a fake here in your place, I would have surely interrogated them until your whereabouts were revealed. Fret not." Each word has a barbed feel to it, lodging deep in your heart. You find your pencil at last. Words still fail you, so you turn to the table and begin to do your work. Your brother tuts. You do not hear anything, but the chilliness of the air indicates that he has drawn nearer. He touches your shoulder. Your blood turns to ice where he does. "Sit up straight," he says patiently. "A slouch is unbefitting."
You straighten up and turn to look at him. "Can you leave?" you ask. You do not want him to, of course. When his ire overtook him, you naturally nurtured thoughts of leaving. You are not the kind of person to live in a box. You never liked the halved nature of the fridge, or the gentle fixing of your posture, or the products your brother would generously share with you. Those nurtured thoughts of leaving and that distaste for your brother's antics never bore fruit. You are still here, sitting at the same shaky wooden table, in the same small apartment. He is still here, too, in that box alongside you.
"Do you want me to?" asks your brother. The real one would have been quieter. The response would not have arrived so quickly. He would never have asked that. You move your pencil. The tip is blunt, and the eraser is basically used up. The sound of it scratching against the paper is pleasant. You hope your brother is looking at it, and not at you. You know that that hope is unfounded. His eyes will always be on you.
"Yes," you lie. "Just out the front door is fine." With the docility of a trained show animal, your brother makes his way to the door. You watch him as he approaches. He looks back at you, and then at the door, and then leaves. It is not a major affair. You do not feel any different. The carved hollow in your chest remains. "You can come back," you say. He returns through the front door, his body forming in segments.
"Sister Dearest, you've forgotten to remove your key," he chides. "There are bad people out there. You need to be careful, even if I'll always protect you." Your nod is a dull, obedient, and practiced action. You shuffle towards the door, retrieving your key. When you turn back, he is sitting in his seat once more, back facing you. He was particular about where he sat. Not out of any specific safety reason, or anything that you have come to associate your brother with. He had asked you where you preferred to sit, and you had said that you liked to face the door, and that was that.
You live in a box, and no amount of staring at the door will change that. It is all you have known, and you hate that you stay. When your brother was alive and kept grounded by his body, you could not have left. He would not have permitted it. That is a terrible thing in itself, of course, but it provided a safety net of sorts as well. You can walk out right now. But where would you go? He is not here anymore. You are all that remains to prove his existence. Nothing of his was truly his. The fridge, in halves, belonged in part to you and in part to him. The closet, also in halves, is not split evenly. Your clothes breach his side of the closet. Still, you would not say that your brother loved to share. But he loved you, and so he did.
You take your seat once more. You are right in front of him, and he is looking into you. The chair is too shoddy to permit you the comfort of drawing your knees together in front of your chest, so you sit with your back cautiously straight. You do not want to pick your pencil up. You do not want to see him walk out the door. You and your brother are not built to be wanting people. In situations like yours, it is impermissible to want much at all. He was good at that sort of thing. Out of that painful necessity, he had to be. You never had to be good at it. So, here you are, left wanting.
Your brother's voice starts out soft and pleasant from intimacy. "Hey," he says. "I died for you. I'm dead. You know it." Yes, you do. You may not be able to see his body, which could be rotting in the depths of a forest somewhere, but you know it. You do not say anything. You cannot say anything. Unbothered, your brother continues. "You're older than I'll ever be now, my younger sister. Are you going to leave?"
"I can't," you say. A sudden burst of frustration spreads through you. It is wildly greedy and melts the ice in your shoulder. Your brother hums. It is easygoing in a way that you know he was never allowed to be when he lived. It is also fake in the plastic way that you have been forced to associate him with.
"You can," he says, deceptively innocent. "I want the best for you. I always have. In the closet, on your side, there's a safe. The code is your birthday. You can go anywhere with that money. So, why stay?"
"Will you stay with me?" you ask. Suddenly, you do not know if you want him to. You do not want him to leave, but if you are the one leaving, it seems less severe. Your brother has a bored look on his face that he would never have worn in reality. He never was bored around you. You had found it annoying then, but you miss it more than anything now.
"Silly girl, I exist because of you," your brother responds. "Sister Dearest, I know you and your perception. There is nothing here to be sentimental about. You can leave. I cannot stop you."
Desperation bleeds into your voice now. "But will you stay?" You do not reach your hand out. You want to, but the frigid feel that would ensue dissuades you.
"I will say what you want me to say," your brother says. "I will go if you want me to. And I will stay if you would like me to." He pauses. You are a wanting person, which means you are also an empty person. You know this, and so your brother knows this, and so he sighs. "Tears ruin your pretty face. Why don't we go to the bathroom?" If your brother were alive, he would have gently grabbed your shoulder and steered you there. As it stands, he simply walks behind you. Perhaps walking is not the right descriptor, either; you do not know what ghosts do. You do not want to know. You take the first step into the bathroom, looking back at him. His face is passive—everything about him is. "You should turn the lights on," he says. Your hand mechanically flips the light switch. Pallid light floods the room. Nothing about your apartment is dirty. Your brother worked like that, struggling to compensate for the easy manner with which he called himself sullied. He would always have bleach handy to take care of the dye when things got messy. He never called for you, would wave you off if you tried to help. Your brother would just tell you to do your homework, and to let him take care of the dirty things. You look into the clean mirror.
Your brother stands behind you with that distinct transparency of his. Your eyes are rimmed red. You do not want to look at yourself, and so you look at the version of him reflected in the mirror. Nothing has changed. You wish something had. You wish that you could see pink roots growing out, that his touch would regain the warmth you used to take for granted, that he would speak the way he used to, no matter how much it may have hurt. You wish that you could have died with him. A part of you wishes that you would die right now, standing in front of the mirror with some form of your brother next to you. You wish and you wish and you wish, so you might as well go big. You wish that you had been born as one person, not as the halves you are now. That way, you could have died as one together. You would have shared the burden equally. You would not be living in your box.
You turn the faucet on. Cold water pours onto your hand, and you desperately scrub your face. Your movements are rough in a way your brother would never have approved of. He just stands behind you, not saying a thing. When you surface, your whole face is faintly pink and thoroughly sensitive. "I want you to stay," you say. It is the wrong choice, and you know it, and he knows it. You have known it from the moment you got back home. This is all a hallucination, and your brother is gone, but you will remain in your box.
"You should leave," your brother says. "Leaving is for your own good. I've failed, so don't think anything about discarding me." He has not failed. You are too scared to leave. "But, fine. Go ahead and do your homework, Sister Dearest."
You nod. You turn the lights off. You do not look at the closet as you head down the hallway towards the table holding your homework. The pencil in your hand feels awfully unreal, and the characters you write are jumbled and messy. Your brother does not comment on them, so you do not fix them.
When you go to sleep that night, on that pullout couch, trying to ignore the roughness of it all, you face your brother's side. He rests on top of the sheets, and he stares directly at you. The light filtering in through the window passes cleanly through him. You have that brother-shaped hollow in your chest. As long as you are in the box, you will always have it. Even when you leave, which a person like you will do eventually, it will stay. Your brother has died a quiet death. Someday, perhaps on a random Monday, he will die once more. When you throw out the dye he used, or when you finally open the safe, or when you leave your box completely. For now, you are scared, so you go to sleep facing him and pretend you do not notice the way he does not blink or breathe.