prompt: meek, title: forever in a day in misc. flash fiction

It was all over but the crying, that’s what they say. It usually isn’t literally true, though. That day, that time, that place, it was literally true. He was only kept alive by a respirator, brain dead, mind gone, just doctors buying time to harvest healthy young organs for donation. Alan’s body, my childhood, our family, hanging on life-support but terminally fated.

He was my eldest cousin, childhood hero, older brother figure. He helped Dad teach me how to build antennas, he called into all the morning radio shows. Alan was charming, was going to be a famous disk jockey, was going places far more important than the wide spot in the road where we were born. Except he was brain-dead, shot through the head with a shotgun by his best friend during said friend’s schizophrenic break. It was all over but the decades of crying.

I sat, meek as I could manage, on my grandparents’ couch. Yesterday had been the last day of junior high. My folks woke me up at two A.M., said something awful had happened, told me to watch my brother, wait for calls, to stay awake as long as I could. This was back when stations still signed off for the night. The Weather Channel stayed on, though, and a hurricane brewed over Orlando. I remember that rainbow of colors on the satellite map, clear as a bell, decades later. I keep notes in my wallet to remember my ATM password but that burst over central Florida burnt behind my eyes forever.

I’d brought comics to try and help soothe his brother, my cousin, but of course it wasn’t much help. I was barely twelve, what did I know for grief, for anything? Alan dying in Cooperstown hospital, my elders fainting in hysterics, I made myself as tiny as I could, I didn’t want to make things worse. I just read Spider-Man and went numb. Eventually the call came, the dam burst, the family burst, my childhood burst, washed away in those tears.

I remember a priest coming through, asking if I needed consolation and was told I was his cousin. The priest said “oh, just a cousin” which was the moment I was no longer Catholic, no longer had faith in anything again. Years later, it was discovered he’d been hidden here after being caught molesting kids in a bigger city and was run out of town on a rail. Smalltown justice.

I remember Dad breaking down sobbing, all he could think was at least it wasn’t a gun made in the factory he hated working for so much. At least he didn’t polish the barrels that murdered his nephew himself. It was all over but the crying but what they don’t say is if the crying itself ever stops. Even in middle ages, sometimes I’ll come screaming out of a nightmare with the truth of the matter: they slow over time but they never fully stop. A part of me remains there forever.

Last updated February 17, 2021