True South – Chris Benton

April 2, 2025

Both in my arms under bare bulb light, my brother Donnie bellowing blood into the toilet and his death dancing through my brain my heart my balls, Donnie, 38 years old, 5 years older than me, Donnie, the face of a fallen angel while mine is bone-visible by a decade of booze and meth, Donnie, who walks like a deer down the isles of the Walmart searching for his high school sweetheart, Donnie, who shoots deer deep in the Green Swamp with a bow and arrow and fishes the Fort Fisher shores storing year-round feasts in his freezers behind his double-wide, Donnie, his tanned backside beaded with sweat tumbling down and around the crisscross scars from the mower blade that killed him before I was born, Donnie, former captain of his high school wrestling team and now my captain as we roll around on the cracked linoleum floor of his bathroom wrestling with the evolutionary leap of his second ending, Donnie, my brother, my usurper father, my beloved friend, who seems to be chasing after our sister who eloped with a temporal lobe lesion last summer. 
        “Dying,” Donnie gurgles and gasps and feebly claps “fucking dying.” 
        He’s smiling, red joyous teeth, seeing the grand evil miracle, my brother is as fit as an athlete, rarely drinks, maybe a six-pack during the Superbowl, and here he’s dying from a rare liver disease, one in a million rare and once he’s gone I’ll be the last limb of our tree reaching into dead geographies. 
        I roll a towel into a makeshift pillow and gently slide it under the base of his skull saying something like “I’ll be right back big bro, let me get some real water.” I notice the toilet is sinking into the floor, as well as the tub, the vanity cabinet, the whole bathroom is sinking, sliding out of the illusion.   
        The fridge, the great fortress of memory stands, polaroids, moments of my sister and Donnie and me and nobody else, and our smiles look slight for they are newborn and everlasting. We are a perfected family in our steady descent, we endure, we die, we haunt. 
        There’s no bottled water, and perhaps it’s our water that’s killing him, the controversy of Chemours dumping deadly toxins into the Cape Fear river but who can kidnap and murder a corporation? 
        Donnie has made it into the bedroom, on the foot of the mattress, staring out the window. The day is breezy, trembling, clouds are racing low to the sea, Donnie is hunched, eyes closed, gently heaving, clasping his hands, politely nodding at memories. 
        “I ripped dad’s face clean outta your head but I guess that wasn’t enough because you look more fucked than me baby bro,” he says and this is the total, telepathic truth. 
        “No man, you’re good, beyond good, you saved us. I’ve just got too much of mom in me, the sadness, the weakness of faith,” say I.
        “Faith’s no weakness, it takes courage to believe in the immensities, the way you hung on to the worthless weight of our father for ten fathoms like a little god in the depths, you’re beyond badass, just promise me dude, you didn’t call the ambulance, I see a paramedic and I’m drinking his blood, her blood, their blood, the age of ambulances is over in our movie, bro.”
        “Dude, why did you call me then? You’re dying.”
        “I called you because that’s what Big Sis told me to do when I felt the time.”
        “Show me.”
        Donnie smiles and looks at the bedroom ceiling, which is lowering, sliding, slipping away from the illusion as well, I don’t follow his gaze but pray, pray during the destruction of the illusion, pray not to the false father whom my brother plucked from my brain but to the son, the abandoned son, to the murdered son, I pray and I remember his 27th birthday, a seemingly normal barbecue save that Donnie forsook the burgers and wings and I found him out front at the entrance of the driveway, talking to a giant pelican perched on the skeleton scrub oak our mother slowly killed with prayers two years before, yes, with my very eyes I saw my brother speak with this great water bird who could have split his skull with its beak but did not, beheld this exchange for a few seconds before flapping its wings at my vile presence and lighting away with my brother turning toward me with a smile, the beginning of a million smiles. Later on that evening I’m dreaming of our Big Sis slowly separating my head from my body on the couch and and I suddenly feel fingers wrapping around my neck, Donnie was always a master of sinister theater throughout the insomnia of our childhood, but his grip feels different tonight and I open my eyes and by the mute monstrous light of the television his smile belongs to another brother. He puts his index to his lips and gestures with his eyes to follow him out the door, to his truck out on River Road, a straight shot to the Cape Fear Ports, pulling behind the abandoned lot of our uncle Melton’s Auto Repair and we get out and run low under the cathedral lights into the cattails and he whispers and hisses, whisper and hisses, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, until he sees the small tugboat making port, and he takes my head in his palms and declaims unto me “the captain of this boat is our father”
      So much death, so much sadness, so much madness, the origin of madness is relentless sadness, I did indeed call an ambulance, and said unto the dispatcher to keep the truck silent as they are pulling into the driveway beside the skeleton scrub oak our mother prayed to death and my big brother, my false-father usurper, rises from his bed once more as they open the door shouting his name and I join him, still praying to the god of abandoned, murdered sons I have the faith to keep their blood in my belly.