I was a beautiful baby, luminous. I must have hurt my brother’s eyes.
When I was two he wrapped his fingers around my ankles and hung me out the third floor window. All I remember is that his hands could save me.
Nine years older, from dad’s other marriage, he was a half brother not a whole brother. He halved me, had to have me, made holes in me, he made me whole.
A time bomb, that’s what Mommy called Matt. He played with matches, there were burn Holes in his Wild West bed spread.
I was always going upstairs with my brother. He was always taking me upstairs.
In his mother’s house on Mole Street when dad and I come to pick him up for the weekend, there’s something he has to show me upstairs. He’s wearing a white undershirt and his curly black head is bending over something on the table. It’s a plant he’s bending over, under a plastic lid. He crooks his finger at me, “Come here.” He lifts the lid and says real slow and smiling ‘It’s a Venus Fly trap. Put your finger in and see what happens.” “I don’t feel like it.” “Go ahead, you crybaby.” “I don’t want to.” And when I don’t his face isn’t funny anymore, he takes my wrist and pulls my finger till its right near the hairy green mouth. His fingers are hot and damp and squeezing so tight they’re red. And when I go back down to daddy, I’m crying, but it doesn’t matter because daddy wants to forgive him.
And there’s the other kind of upstairs too. On the Wild West bed, when mommy isn’t home and daddy’s downstairs. Matt gives me airplane rides on his feet, drops me down so I’m lying on his body, he touches me and makes me do things, so that after that, everything in the house and on my body is in the wrong place. He makes me not tell, but all the time after that I can’t sleep, and mommy always says, “You can tell me anything, I won’t get mad at you.” So late at night when she’s in the bathroom, I get up and go in, crying: the kind of crying where I keep taking in breaths but none come out and she hugs me but I don’t have words for everything’s wrong, that hands and legs and mouths aren’t where they’re supposed to be and that it’s all my fault.
I put myself to sleep at night by counting all the beds I’ve ever slept in.