Three Stories

(i)

We sit in the yard beside the wrought iron tree with burnt-out bulbs, with bird shit on its limbs, and wait for the coroner. It’s the week after Christmas, before the New Year, and the cops can’t reach the man on his phone. He is probably with his family, we are told, like they should be. We can see it on their faces. It could be a while. We apologize. We are told we should not go in the house. It’s been six hours, but we can’t leave, either. We don’t want to. We piss in the rocks. Where else could we go, in this state? The gas station, where he used to buy beer? They might recognize him in our faces, ask how he is. His cellphone is ringing through the open window, has been for as long as we’ve been here. Whoever’s calling doesn’t know. We envy and pity them. The dogs are crying, clawing at the back door. They can smell him, we think but don’t say. We apologize again. Neighbors stop, ask us, ask the police, Is someone dead? What do you think? we want to say. Fuck you and your families, we want to say, Keep walking. We hide in the back. His ex-wife comes by, brings coffee. It gets cold in our hands. We haven’t seen her in a decade, more. She asks how she can help. We tell her to make the ringing stop. She leaves to talk to the cops. It gets quiet except for the dogs, except for the neighbors who keep coming. The ex comes back to find us with our heads in our hands, our fingers in our ears and asks, Is it too early to start telling stories?

(ii)

We pull up to the house with the truck’s windows down, with the cab already full.
            I hate it, my brother says, I hate all this goddamn air.
            The house is smaller than before, the rocks on its gravel path sharper. The flag and the worn truck are gone. We enter with shoes on, and the sun comes in sideways.
            Jesus, I say, Will you hit that fan?
            We didn’t pay the bill that makes the fan move, my brother says, And my name isn’t Jesus.
            He is so much of our father: square jaw, eyes like soil, can’t see straight when told to and only does what needs doing when it needs done or after. He comes on his own—to work, he says—but leaves once he hides the booze, once he cleans the blood. Always before dark, never what I ask. I catch him sitting on the couch, staring at the wall, at the holes we still need to patch. I catch him on his phone, scrolling, scrolling.
            We work without the fan. My brother picks up the gun by the bed, clears it and puts it with the gun from the closet, the gun from the kitchen under the sink, the guns from the car, the desk, the dresser. He has no need for these, needs less heat and recoil.
            What are you going to do with those? I ask.
            I don’t know, my brother says, Why do I have to know what to do all the time?
            We work in silence in the heat with no fan. We find the safe, a wooden box without a lock, full of two-dollar bills and no will. We search the light fixture, come back with a few silver coins. I look behind the painting of the Superstitions. My brother watches the hawk on the telephone pole and smokes a joint. We take apart the iron Christmas tree in the yard, burn our hands on the metal, find some gloves for the rest of the job. We empty the garage, dust the blinds until it’s the right time of day.
            On the table by the guns the mail sits in a high pile. The pile is so high it could be the mountain we were meant to climb that morning we found him, that mountain of perlite we meant to smash and crumble until we found them, the Apache Tears, that clear obsidian. We can toss it all—the mail, the rodeo posters, the Hillermans and their cracked spines—throw it all in the landfill with the dog shit. It would be easier that way, I think. There is so much, and we are only two. There is so much and still somehow not enough.
            Grab me a water? I say, but there is none. There is only a Modelo and condiments in the fridge, and the desert tap tastes of dirt. I could go to the store, buy us a gallon, but instead count the times my brother begged me not to leave him with our father, with all that responsibility, and I ran off anyway—to the creek bed all dried up, to the deep scar carved by water and time to make a canyon, to the shallow cave where I imagined I could live if no one looked for me. More than a handful.
            I stay. There is too much to do. We share the warm Modelo and work. My brother pulls weeds while I sift through the mail.
            We need the tax forms, I say, The bills. Have you seen them?
            My brother shrugs, says he wants to live in the house like our father wanted. There is not enough money for more than a week or two of living. A month if the sale takes a while. There’s no way to know, our realtor says, No one wants to buy in the heat. He works for cheap, the orphans’ commission.
            I fold the shirts I’ll have made into quilts for us. My brother digs through the boots, finds a pair that fits. I pick a hat to hang on my wall, pull up clay from the yard for an ashtray. Outside the sun sets the deep orange of dust and pollution. I flip a switch and remember the bills. I put the Apache Tears in my pocket, they clack together, and my brother dons an old cap. We leave when the light is gone.

(iii)

I hate your guts sometimes. That’s the evil in me.
            My brother says it. He pulls out of the gas station, and I pull from my bag a Red Bull, a vape cartridge, a bag of sour worms to share. I hold it all in my lap, wait for him to ask for something.
            I don’t say that to hurt your feelings, he says, But it’s the truth. 
            Then he adds, Only sometimes.
            We drive to see family who didn’t call when it happened, called instead about their new basement bar. We can’t wait for you to see it, they said across radio waves I couldn’t see, no evidence—We think of your dad sometimes.
            We should go, I tell my brother anyway, explaining that they didn’t get it, had never lost someone. We couldn’t hold that against them.
            The drive is an hour through the mountains. A piss break, a smoke break. My brother talks about quitting, wants to quit it all—the nicotine, the weed, the booze, his job, feeling sorry. It’s between Dad and me, he says, It’s between good and evil. I try to say that there is more than that, that there is a frustrating in-between and nothing is so black and white, and he tells me to shut up.
            You don’t know everything, he says. It’s life or death, he says, and it is. We have seen what not quitting can do. I nod because my softening of the truth comes out as condescension, I know. It has for all my life.
            Has the car always made this sound? I ask. It has for as long as I’ve had it.
            Fuck a basement bar, my brother says. Fuck people who have bars in their basements.

∩

Alexandra Salata is from Tempe, Arizona. Her stories appear in Black Warrior Review, Puerto del Sol, and Bellingham Review, among other journals, and she was named a finalist for the 2024 Salamander Fiction Prize. She holds degrees from John Carroll University and the Northeast Ohio MFA program.