Brother Triptych
- May 24, 2024
- 3 min read
by Fatima Zahra
brother
a knock on the door and the skull poster hanging half supported; half dangling so the bones are sliding off onto the pale stucco; yellowed not by the sun. the boy’s shadow is above him; sketched on the underside of the bedframe in the void between the torch-light; beamed by a hollow curved inwards like the crescent moon. a monster can slides out to roll until it crashes with the door and rolls back; one must imagine sisyphus happy. he looks at his shadow and then the dark around him and feels for his chest where there is nothing except for the calvin klein logo in the font panned from one shoulder to the other but it collapses inside; like a volcano of a victoria’s secret model. the bomb explosion from within the wall knocks again; the white door getting redder by the second from all the gunpowder. the boy rolls out; stares at the door in meat cuts all over the carpet. they don’t clean themselves so he rubs his nose out on the carpet and sneezes dryly; nose mucousless in shock.
brother
of course he breaks his bones like this; 145 pounds on the bar on his second week in this nirvana XXXL pump cover and sri-lanka manufactured fake adidas grey sweatpants. he is always there to feed him half-raw lobster by the kilo and rub out the knots in his back by hitting him there again and again until it is only the adrenaline that can exist and not the pain. he listens to Montagem Coral on repeat; airpods grimly sliding against his ear wax and the hair trailing down his sideburns. he will be there to buzz cut him at 4:23 AM with the late night news reruns about all the murders they forgot to joke about; hair trailing down his shoulders with all the grease of five day old wax; reapplied everyday like a ritual except for the holiness still intact inside it like a pandora’s box of all the things they forgot to say. he watches a lance baker tutorial on youtube even though buzzing his hair should be simple just like this; like chopping off everything you could see in sight but he is there to tell him that there is a sort of love in what is left behind.
brother
forty second time he has to be reminded of the milky opal of his eyes like the emptiness is not all that exists when he looks at the picture of Sam Sulek and lets himself dream of being that wide and he is there to remind him that this is fine. He grabs the ends of his body and realises there is not enough to grab when you are falling so he grows into his pump cover and grabs him by the arms only to look at his shadow and realise it is still the dark enveloped by the light. he feeds himself all the macros by the right times and fasts intermittently only to time his ketosis and listen to the joe rogan podcasts and he just looks at him and loves; like this. like he’s running out of time and the end is in sight.
Fatima Zahra is currently thinking about posthumous art; airpods and steel bottles.
