Even though the atmosphere is made to fail your feelings, I expected weather on the day we buried my brother, the pine box light, too large for what was left of him. Before the burial, I joined my mother and the body in the room that used to be mine, all the clocks wrong from an outage in the night. Wires bedevilled by rain, too late to get to my brother through the machines he used to breathe.
He was already gone, already weather, already language my mother needed for the coroner. Sister, brother, mother, no father, 1970, surprise in her voice as she recalled his birth. We all felt fatherless, or rather the fatherlessness of our heavenly father and the debts that makes due, what follows when the son must die and become atmosphere, though on the day we buried him it was all wrong.
Sunny, cloudless, everyone sweating and shedding their coats, in awe of how such a day could be beautiful..
