The thing about children was that they were like packages. Right up until the moment when you took that butter knife and cut through the packing tape, it had the potential to be anything. While the general make of the box was almost always predictable, two arms, two legs, a nose, there was always the possibility of some unknown addition, a recessive gene passed down from grandma’s illusive side of the family tossed in as a last-minute add-on that fused five toes into three. Sometimes it wasn’t as obvious as that. Sometimes, it was so that the packaging was so immaculately constructed that you were unable to see past the tiny gripping fingers, the smooth, pale skin that darkened with each day, the custom touch that was your mother’s nose reprinted right into the middle of the child’s face. It was only later that you realize that your model, somewhere between the delivery room, the chaos that was kindergarten, the family reunion barbeque where you lost sight of it for at least two hours while you lost to Unc at a game of spades, was defective. But by then it was impossible to discern whether they’d arrived that way or if it was somehow your doing. What if someone else had touched your package whilst you had your back turned to accuse cousin Leo of card holding, had shaken and cracked it so badly that no amount of duct tape, gorilla glue, or even spackle could fix it? There was hardly a good way to find out.

When her brother arrived, you could hear the almost musical jingle of the loose parts inside of him rattle about.

His anger, in addition to the third and final bad thing, arrived with the same kind of warning as the Midwestern winters that they endured every year, and that was to say that there was no warning at all. By then, she was so used to the cool silence that accompanied him that she no longer acknowledged it at all.

When he slid into his seat that morning, Patience peeked at him over the screen of her new phone for only a second before returning to her task of transferring all of her music from her MP3 player; had she studied him closer, she would’ve noticed the tightness in his face, that the skin around his eyes was puffy and irritated. It wasn’t uncommon for him to drift into the kitchen for his breakfast like a slow-moving fog, but that day, he was fixing to pick a fight. He hadn’t said a word but had already drawn the attention of even her father within minutes. The blender bottle in his hand halted it’s quaking when Isaiah slammed a cabinet door, the cookies and cream protein shake inside visibly chunky and uneven.

“Don’t come up in here slamming cabinets, Isaiah,” Their mother said from her position in front of the stove, but there was no aggression behind it yet.

He didn’t respond, and the infraction was already forgotten. That was, until he all but dropped his bowl onto the counter, putting his weight into his steps as he moved about the kitchen to retrieve the items he needed for his cereal. Their mother finally pulled away from her eggs that weren’t yet scrambled and turned around, the hand gripping the spatula poised to strike if he got close enough.

“Isaiah, did you just hear what I said?”

He ignored the warning in her voice. “Yeah, I did, and I ain’t slam a cabinet that time.” He slipped back into his seat and Patience stared at him, trying to catch his eye. He refused, pouring a small mountain of sugar onto his cereal before dousing it with milk. When he dropped the half full jug onto the table, her father’s hand fell onto the table so heavily that she felt the vibration in her elbows.

“What the hell wrong with you? You ain’t hear yo’ Mama? Slam something else little nigga, I dare you.”

Her brother stared her father right in his face. His gaze swept the table, locking onto the cereal box itself. He paused, seemingly taking a moment to gather all of the courage in his twelve-year-old body before using the tips of his fingers to knock it over. There was no moment of silence as the movies often hinted at; perhaps if there had been, he would’ve had a chance to reach out with his tongue and snatch whatever words he’d spoken that morning back inside, to heed the command that her mother had given him the first time, or to at the very least make an attempt to run as far from that house as humanly possible. But there wasn’t, and the speed at which her father stood and reached his long arms across the table nearly toppled it, spilling orange juice all over the surface.

Somewhere in the background, his glass shattered against the floor, but she only took in this detail in the after, when all the heat had slipped out of the room and her mother instructed her to clean up the shards.

James’ sausage-like fingers gripped the neckline of Isaiah’s shirt as both her mother and Patience watched on, heart pounding in her ears. He bucked like a prize bull, and for the first time that morning, she watched the terror bloom within his dark eyes, so pure that it was nearly obscene.

“Let me go! I’ll call the police!”

Sometimes, if you were attuned to those kinds of things, it was possible to feel when your sibling said the wrong thing; it was as if someone has poked a hole in the atmosphere and all the air was squeezing out, and you panicked because that’s what you did when you couldn’t breathe, but really that’s only using up more oxygen, and then you were asphyxiating faster. Patience wanted to tell him to take it back, to never say it. She didn’t know where he had even picked up such a threat from, but by then James was already dragging her brother across the table, looking as if he was ready to crack his skull open to see if there was anything working inside.

“Boy, you think I care about the police?” Spittle flew from his wide lips, landing on Isaiah’s cheek. “Gon’ head, call ‘em so I can give ‘em a play by play of how I beat ‘cho ass. Finally knock some sense into that thick ass skull of yours.” Thick, ropey veins jutted out underneath the skin of his neck.

Her father had a voice that sunk into your bones and coated them in a viscous, honey like substance; when it rose, suddenly they shook like the branches on a tree stuck in the middle of a storm, always under the constant danger that a bolt would strike and sever a limb. She’d heard him raise it only from a distance, through walls where it came through in muffled and broken bursts. Like that, she could pretend that it wasn’t coming from him, that some third party was simply imitating his voice. This was an entirely different man than the one who rubbed coconut oil onto her cheeks before school when she was younger to alleviate the way the fall air dried out her skin; she shrank back into her seat, surprised at the tears that pushed for release.

“You think you know anything about pain, boy? You think you done been through it enough to act like this? You don’t know shit. Sit down and finish that fuckin’ cereal before I put yo’ fuckin’ head through that wall, how ‘bout that.” To focus on what he said rather than how he said it was impossible, though the words would float back to Patience in the hours after when she realized that there was something that she had missed, something that she wasn’t understanding about the interaction.

All she could do right then and there was watch as he shoved Isaiah back into his seat, nostrils flaring as he resumed mixing his shake. Under his penetrating gaze, her brother lifted the spoon to his trembling lips over and over until the bowl was empty, the fight extracted from his body just like that. Once he was done, he took the bowl to the sink, rinsed it out, and disappeared from the kitchen as if he had never been there to begin with.

Patience knew better than to go looking for him; in the days before her father had decided that she was too old to share a room with a brother who was also growing into a man, she learned that immediately following any run in with him, her brother spent the next few hours screaming into his pillow until his throat was raw and hurt. Afterwards, he would lie on his back and allow his tears to stream from his nose down into his ears, his eyes closed as he rode out the impending headache. She’d never cared to know what they argued about before, and if he came to her to speak about it, he was as easy to brush off as a beetle.

He didn’t knock on her door when he came for her that evening, but her curiosity burned so ferociously that she refrained from scolding him for it. She was almost afraid that such an action would scare him away.

In order to create a space for him, she turned off the television adjacent to her bed, shoved the remote under the blankets where she could find it later, and acted like he wasn’t there. His eyes burned holes into the side of her head as she pretended to read something on her phone, his chin raised high even as it quivered with the weight of whatever it was that he was trying to say. Again, her scalp tingled with the feeling that she was missing something important, and it was all she could do not to force it out of him.

His hands balled into fists before he finally came out with it. “Did you know?”

She scowled. “Know what?”

“Did you know?” His voice elevated to a near shout, and her heart gave a single, forceful thud within her chest that bordered on painful. She crossed the room, pulling him further inside before shutting the door as carefully as she could. Patience stood next to the door, her ear pressed against the wood for a total of fifty Mississippis before she turned to glare at him.

“What the hell is wrong with you? You think just ‘cause Daddy ain’t here, Mama won’t tell him you still actin’ up when he get back? Now tell me what you talkin’ about, Isaiah, because I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

It shouldn’t have been so easy. Prior to that moment, she hadn’t even given him any indication that she cared about his existence at all. She figured that it was because she might have been the only one that he could tell. Regardless of the reason, that was all it took for her little brother to unravel, his face pressed into her stomach as he choked out between heaving sobs that shook his entire frame that his father wasn’t hers.

Next Chapter: 29