His Brother

The legend spoke that he was just five men, equally less than one whole. That his style equated five different styles but that never the two were seen. The Italians had begun to disappear first, and there were suspicions that racism was afoot. The children ran through the fields at night and enjoyed games of lecherous woes and gratuitous follies. We watched with abandon from the veranda we had so come to love. While you and your followers prepared a feast inside our beloved hovel, he came to view me from below the panels of the floor.

I would request a photograph, a memory, some proof, that he existed as but one man and not a manner of five. He requested in return, a hug, and I could see a sadness in the beast that the children never thought to perform. A sadness that only you would perceive as well. It was a secret I must keep from all but yourself. He was your brother. And you had only one brother. I clicked the shutter and I hugged the saddened man. I declared myself your closest brethren, as if he were one man of a religious order, I too could be so. He ran into the darkness after the incessantly frightened children.

It was winter and we drank in celebration of the reveal of the man who we feared and revered. I rolled cigarettes for our visitors and told them of our miraculous discovery. You were yet to know, for it was a secret. Your mobile device would make light of this fact some time the next day, as we saw him pace in the front grounds with a satchel too heavy for his shoulders. You asked if perhaps this was some form of medical sadness that inflicted him with a wanting so strong that he would hug someone to death. I warned you that perhaps it was a form of psychosis, and a doctor should be called.

She would be the doctor that would go with you that night, to drink in solace and find what was wrong. She told me that you would request some form of sexual payment from a woman so strong, and that she would refuse, but you would herd her to a point of no objection, and she would succumb. I would be to tell you of this, and I would want to impress your one brother, the man of many men. You would refuse this possibility, as she was but a simpleton in times such as these. Your brother would giggle and request that we play scrabble.

He would leave you this night, as you slept on the veranda we had so come to love. He would leave you in sadness and once again become five men in a winter so harsh that he would need to embrace, in order to survive, his need for human contact.