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His head is out of frame. Your eyes catch first on the woman, curled on her side as if in the womb, three neat holes in her abdomen leaking punctured intestine and gall. Her mouth, long and thin and stretched grotesquely, is Roxy’s. Logic dictates whom she is and whose arm lies next to hers.
Their blood threatens to flow together, twin rivers of hot, wet carmine.
Your brother’s left arm is well-muscled and freckled. It’s darker than yours. It’s dislocated at the shoulder. You’ve always wondered whether that happened before or after the Witch put the sword through his chest. Eyewitness reports are inconclusive.
Your gaze traces the familiar underside of his chin. The curve of his bottom lip is visible right on the edge of the frame, strawberry-red and lurid with blood. You press your thumb into the center of your own lips, heart fluttering at the back of your throat.
This photograph is easy to find in the decaying remains of the 21st century internet: sewn into the lining of gore forums and planted on true crime fansites by government propagandists hoping to scare the public into permanent submission. You only look at it when you truly can’t sleep, when it’s been three days and the crashing of the waves outside is cracking your skull in half and your vision is swimming.
He bled, therefore he died. He died, therefore you lived. He had a body, therefore you have a body. You shudder, and your eyes close. The light of your monitor paints your eyelids orange. You think about the jagged bloom of blood on the front of your brother’s shirt. Your heartbeat slows.
Sleep never came easily to you the way that it came to the other children, the ones in the insipid cartoons and picture books that you aged out of before age six. You’ve devised your own methods. Your brother, as odd and reclusive as the press considered him, has hundreds of hours of interviews on tape. He was on everything from juggernaut late-night shows to incoherent fifteen-follower YouTube podcasts. You have a meticulously compiled playlist.
You set it to play as you stretch out on salt-stiff sheets, bleary-eyed and dizzy with fatigue. The low, smooth rhythm of your brother’s voice takes some of the stifling humidity out of the room.
“For the ending, I consulted an augur,” he says evenly. “Turns out it’s mostly just creeping on birds, none of that entrails shit or anything.”
“Not even one liver?” asks Conan O’Brien.
“Not even one,” your brother says, “but maybe next time.”
You mouth the words as he says them, automatic and rote. O’Brien laughs dutifully, although your brother did not deliver the statement in anything that resembled a joking tone in the slightest. Their exchange continues, familiar and dim. Your mind swims with crimson organs and blue guts. Blood sacrifice for certainty.
Your brother’s blood means safe and your brother’s voice means rest, and you’ve never needed divination to tell you that.