When winter break came around, Noah and Jeffrey flew back to find their childhood home completely torn up. Boxes of kibble were scattered around the rooms, family photos were flipped over and strategic shits from Pernille, the pug, were everywhere. Jeffrey trudged through the mess while Noah checked the carpet, wondering how much it was going to cost to repair. The biggest change was Mama Z’s half-finished project of turning their old bedroom into her new office. Financial documents intermingled with signed sports star posters; a cherrywood desk was pressed against the old steel bunkbed. Their first warning of these changes was the verbal flurry they received on the drive back from the airport. The passenger seat had been off limits and empty for years, so Mama Z glanced over her shoulder at her now-grown boys squished in the backseat and tried to compress all the parenting she’d missed into rapid-fire life updates: “Never start a business, this ad campaign is going to be a total nightmare,” she said. “But at least the dog treats are deductible.”
Nearing the house, she slowed at an intersection where a few people circled the car with signs.
“Ugh, they’ve been out protesting for weeks,” she said in disgust, “Don’t ever be like that. Disappearances happen, eventually you just have to move on. Sorry, Noah,” she whispered in consolation.
Ten years ago, Noah’s best friend Mikey Newell—who Mama Z never approved of—was disappeared while leaving the town’s Walmart. At first the papers said he vandalized something, but they never showed any proof; later, the official statement brushed it off as a mistake, an unfortunate case of human misplacement. All that noise just amounted to rumors and gossip. No words could’ve changed the dread Mikey felt when he was plucked out of space, or the emptiness that followed.
Back in the house, Noah bent to check beneath his old bunkbed for the cigarettes he used to hide. There had been a lot more Mikeys recently: people jammed up or vanished completely; the pace was quickening, and fear and menace rippled through the air.
But the anxiety inside the house felt more ominous—something Mama Z had done her best to keep hidden until Jeffrey was out of high school, long after dad left and it became just the three of them. Unfortunately, the coddling didn’t do him much good. He had his own fixations, always aware of people’s sensitivities and delighted by the sections of thin skin he could find and prick with words he wasn’t supposed to say. In the aftermath of those moments, Noah felt sick—like his little brother had turned out all wrong, but Mama Z always reminded him that when she died and his friends let him down, Jeffrey would be all he had. So, Noah held onto him as tightly as he could, thinking, one day his little brother would go out into the world and life experience would mellow him out. But, he couldn’t help noticing the way Jefferey nodded intensely to Mama’s manic rants, sneering through the balcony window when she pointed out the man sleeping on their street corner.
While Jeffrey was as spiteful as ever, Noah seemed to have shrunk even more into himself. As the world panicked, he let it all move past him, like a big, dark—but distant—cloud. He picked this up in college: the idea that suffering only deepened as much as you let it so the cleanest response was detachment, and that people left whether you were ready or not. So, when dinner rolled around and Mama Z sweetly tried to get him to cook the side dishes like when he was little, he just quietly refused and slunk back to the office-bedroom, avoiding the dog shit along the way. He caught a look in Mama’s eyes—unblinking, watery, the corners pulled tight as if she were bracing herself. She was too expectant, too sad for him to be around.
Jeffrey pulled his chair out and sat down. The fourth chair at the table stayed pushed in. Over roast chicken, carrots, and mashed potatoes, Jeffrey claimed the disappearances were intentional. He said he heard things about the CIA clearing people out before they did real crimes. Or that it was divine intervention that scared the press into covering it all up. The explanations came quickly—overlapping into a crazed Venn diagram, as if truth might be found somewhere in the middle. His ideas seemed like they would never stop, until he noticed Noah’s disapproval.
“What,” Jeffrey bristled. “We’re still here, so what’s wrong with a little theorizing?”
Jeffrey had known Mikey, though he was probably too young to remember when they played hide-and-seek in the same room where the family now ate dinner. Looking at his brother, Noah felt the same sickness rise again and, against his better instincts, spoke up, “If no one explained anything, if the rules and conspiracies of annihilation keep changing, how could anybody be happy with that or talk about fairness? It’s fear pretending to be logic.” Jeffrey just shrugged, quipping back, “Don’t get butthurt.” He leaned back in his chair. “And honestly, are you saying the world wouldn’t be better off if that guy out on the corner was gone?”
Noah studied Jeffrey’s face then and saw it—the same wide, fixed look as their Mama’s, the same tightness around the eyes. Maybe there really was pain in Jeffrey—something like her loneliness—that caused him to be so angry. Maybe he did remember Mikey, maybe he remembered their dad.
Elijah A. L. is a writer and former engineer currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at The New School. He serves as a fiction reader for LIT Magazine, a fiction editor and digital designer at Inquisitive Eater, and digital designer for Back Matter. His writing explores strained connections, race, selfhood, and the pressures of secrets withheld within a twisted modern world. His work balances grounded mundanity with moments of surreal absurdism. He publishes short stories, poetry, and excerpts at Wordblend on Substack.