“Praised are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who makes us holy with mitzvot and instructs us to kindle the lights of Shabbat. Baruch atah Adonai elohaynu melech ha'olam asher kidshanu bemitzvotav vetzivanu l'hadlik ner shel Shabbat.”

Every Friday night before sundown, my grandma, as the eldest and most respected woman of the family, would light three candles on the Menorah and slice her hand through the flame of each one to commemorate the Shabbos and my dead uncle.

The Torah tells us Jews that the Shabbos must be welcomed by two single lit candle wicks. My grandma always lit the third in remembrance to Uncle Gabe.

Uncle Gabe died a month after my birthday. He took a trip to Puglia all the way down south in Italy for his 33rd birthday. He was gunned down in this narrow alleyway. A slender lady in a blazer and chunky black heels with thick ginger hair swept behind her ears had asked him something in Italian. Something he couldn’t understand. She started screaming at him, but my uncle couldn’t make anything out. He mumbled a sincere sorry and turned around to walk away, so she took out a gun – a stainless steel revolver with a rosewood grip – and pulled the trigger with his back to her. The bullet struck him in the middle of his head, and he was slapped down to the gray concrete, twitching and flopping like a fish, wheezing for air and a second chance at life while sprays of blood splotched out of the drilled hole in his skull.

Two candles minimum had to be lit to celebrate the Shabbos. So Grandma always sparked an extra wick for her dead son. My dead uncle.

We don’t live together anymore. My grandparents and parents split up into two distinct sides: the destitute and the well-off. My father moved us to a wealthy urban neighborhood, and my grandparents stayed behind in a dilapidated shack. They felt too old to move so my father would insist on us visiting them every Saturday night to gather around the flaming candles, although they were always nearly out by the time we arrived.

My brother and I never thought the murder was a big deal. But to be fair, I was a month old when Uncle Gabe died, and my brother hadn’t been born for another two years. They named my brother after Uncle Gabe. Whenever my parents ask him what the significance behind his name is, my brother glares at them, furrowing his brows accordingly into one, and makes note that he doesn’t know. “Amorezt,” my parents’ perennial retort, their crinkly eyes spit fire at my brother’s ignorance.

“They asked me why I’m named Gabe again,” said Gabe indifferently. “I stared again.”

I kept my gaze locked on my pixelating Mac screen, toggling my finger along the touchpad, dragging my mouse tip to the yellow dot in the corner. I clapped the notebook shut with a loud smack, like the sound you hear when a broken-hearted girl strikes a cheating boyfriend hard across the face. “I never even think about Uncle Gabe,” I said, answering his unsolicited question. “It happened more than thirteen years ago. Why is it important anymore?”

Gabe’s eleven. I’m thirteen. Despite the age difference, we’re both two inches short of five feet. Gabe tells me that he wants to be a cop – a rugged cop who wipes out the bad guys with his trusted handgun. He mostly just wants to shoot a gun and watch it shred and calibrate as the bullet is launched through the air. He thinks it’s a pretty badass thing to witness. Amorezt.

The next evening was the Shabbos. My mother lit the Menorah and we each recited our Shabbos prayer with our eyelids clapping shut into lashed crescents. My mother opened her eyes and aimlessly swerved, pointing her stride towards the set table, as if instinctually attracted by a covert giant magnet resting on top of the adorned slab of mahogany.

Mother and father sit on the left end, Gabe and I on the right. Father breaks the challah roll, pushes his chair out, gets up fervently, walks to us with a beaming smile, and hands me and Gabe each a rotund, burgeoning chunk. Gabe gnashes on his and rapidly pours himself an unsteady glass of orange juice. I nibble on mine and patiently wait for mother to tell us we may dine.

That following Sunday, Gabe and I were home alone. Mother had always said that even though we had an adequately sized apartment in a safe and active neighborhood, and plenty of food to feed us and the rest of the tenants for a year, we shouldn’t become spoiled. So she and father worked as hard and as often as they could, to ensure that everything we’d ever get was genuine and earned. Gabe, before finishing the last page of math homework, stood from the table and plunged onto the couch, arms and legs sprawled out like creeping tree branches.

“I’m going out,” Gabe announced, sucking on his golden chain. Father passed on an heirloom to him when he was two: the Star of David accompanied by a solid gold chain. Something Gabe always kept with him, and sucked on in times of uncertainty.

I looked up from my Macbook for a second, and my eyebrows simultaneously arched and lifted. “You haven’t even finished your homework yet. You can’t leave. Next time, do it as soon as you get home on Friday evening, and you’ll be able to go out.”

“Crummy weather on Friday. And you know mom and dad don’t let us out before Shabbat. I’m going out now.”

“I’m not going to lie for you. Go, if you want. But I’m not at fault when mom finds out you left the house without finishing your homework,” I retorted.

Gabe slid off the couch and like a blob, collapsed onto the floor and oozed his way through the living room and down the foyer to the hall closet. I watched him slide one arm at a time into his coat. Then he zipped up and adjusted his hood. I watched him, with disbelief, but I still watched him. I was waiting for him to unfasten his zipper and chuck his jacket into the nearby corner and come back to the table, all for me to say, “I knew you wouldn’t do it.” But he just left. “Whatever. It’s his problem. Amorezt,” I said, roiled.

I averted my gaze back to my Macbook. The cursor lay to the left in the midst of my half-finished report. I kept pecking away at the keyboard, my fingers like a hoard of little mice scurrying along a polished floor of a famed restaurant kitchen after having been detected by the head chef. But I felt doozy and the letters on the screen were blurring up. I should rest my eyes for a minute or two. I’ve probably been on this computer for too long, I thought. I reclined my head sluggishly along the contours of the back of the couch, and through no will of my own, it seemed, my eyes shut. I must have drifted because when I woke up, my humped back and craned neck seemed to barely support my wobbling head. My cheek pressed into the keyboard and arbitrary strands of my hair rose and stuck to the screen because of the static between. I lengthened my torso and dragged my head along to look at the screen. It was as if J.R.R. Tolkien raided my laptop while I knocked out, because on the screen, the letters were strung together in such a way that they looked like names of mythical creatures. Maybe I could send this to Tolkien as an unofficial manuscript for a new fantasy novel, I thought. It’d serve him more use than it would my teacher.

I checked the clock. 4:37. Gabe’s been gone since before noon. I pushed down on his designated speed dial number on my cell phone. The line kept ringing, but there was no answer. Mother will be home at five. If I find this kid, I’ll kill him for staying out for so long. I sprung off the couch with the same grace and poise as a ballerina attempting a plie in a production of Swan Lake on Broadway. Puffy jacket in hand, I left mother a note on the marble counter telling her we’d be back before six.

I started wandering around the block, checking the most obscure places for any sight of him. I checked the salon, where the elderly ladies get their nails polished and pointed, and where the edgy teenagers come out with their split ends and tips dripping with bright blue dye. In the firehouse, Rover, the spotless Dalmatian who’s taller than most of the firemen when he stands on his hind legs, looked at me inquisitively as I passed by. Then I checked the park, which was always a kindergarten haven on Sundays. A line of five-year olds stood at the top of the swirly slide, agitated because one of the kids was too scared to go down.

I checked the time on my cell phone and sped up. I called him again, but still no pick up. I went off to the far side of our town, because I figured he’d have gone there to see what kind of criminals he could hunt as a rogue cop when he’s older. “He’s so stupid,” I mumbled, my breath having clearly outlined the gap of cold air in front of me. “Amorezt.”

The far side was nearly void of human activity. Every once in a while, I’d see this man sporting what looked like Sherlock’s gray coat or a dark-skinned woman with bleached hair and the defined curvature of her cleavage revealed in a tight, red v-neck sweater.

I briskly paced by a murky alley, and briefly examined it in passing. Not much activity aside from a few roaches nesting, breeding underneath a slimy dumpster that was oozing a mossy, emerald substance down its sides. I was just about to continue my search, but then I noticed that the alleyway connected to another alley, one in which the view was blocked by a windowless brick building. I hesitated, because I didn’t know where that alley would take me. I caught Sherlock once again sauntering down the next block. His coat reached down to his knees, which were covered with a gray ironed pant. He tipped his hat over his eyes and continued down in my direction. That’s when I took a giant step into the dark alley, and scampered down it until I reached the corner.

Gabe’s body strung over a rusted metal pipe that looked like it was about give out, a rope knotted tightly around his skinny neck. Gabe’s eyes protruded from his eye sockets so far out that you could easily snap them off with your thumb and forefinger if you wanted to. His pupils were locked on mine, immobile. His battered arms had crosshatchings of scars and indents made by a sharpened knife. Gabe’s shirt was tossed across the pipe. An open diagonal carve spewed blood down his bare chest and into his jeans, belt undone, his flat butt barely able to bear support to hold them up. His chain dangled out of his pocket, the Star of David twinkling as it twirled against his hip.

I knew I kept shrieking, crying, banging my back and fists against the brick wall. But I couldn’t avert my gaze. My eyes, despite having been achy and teary and blood-red, still scrutinized very morsel, every centimeter of his body. Suddenly, I was picked up and dragged away by two gloved hands that were placed underneath my armpits.

I had knocked out again, but opened my eyes only to find Sherlock’s staring back at mine. I was on the couch, where I had last seen my brother alive.
“Who are you?” I asked, terrified of his response.
He stared at me for a minute before saying anything.

“Are you feeling faint?”

“Why were you at the far side? Why did you keep walking down the block every ten minutes?” I impatiently inquired.

“I’m an undercover cop. There’s been an accident. Your mother’s in the kitch-”

“Amma! Amma! Please, amma!” I didn’t give it a moment’s pause.

My mother never came in, but I saw a shadow of the outline of her body on the marble kitchen tiles. “Was it all real? Is Gabe here?” I asked, knowing it was Sherlock who brought me back home.

“Honey, unfortunately, um, I don’t know how to tell you this, bu-”

I didn’t let him finish. I sprung up fervently and bolted into the kitchen. My shoes were gone, and I was slipping along the polished wooden floorboards with my thick, white socks as I ran for my mother. I felt as though I were the window through which a reckless teenager threw his football. Shards of me went spiraling.

“Amma,” I said incomprehensibly as tears overwhelmed my eyes. “I saw him. I’m the one who let him go. He’s dead because of me.” And then it hit me. I wasn’t the shattered glass window; I was the reckless teenager. I was the reckless teenager, the killer was the football, and my brother was the shattered window.

But Amma was a rock; she didn’t move an inch. She just kept her hands supporting her chin, and she was hunched over the kitchen countertop on a red swivel chair. Her eyes were swollen, and she kept deeply inhaling. I saw that she had a moist, crumbling tissue balled up in the palm of her hand. Then I noticed that there were used tissues all around her, piling up like the dump at Fresh Kills.

I ran to my room, and suffocated myself under a mound of encased pillows and blankets. My cries and screams were stifled, and the noises reverberated back into my mouth. “How could You let him go? How could You let him go?? What did he do? He was a kid. He was my brother. Where is he? Where is he now??” I screamed up to the sky through the pack of pillows. I kept screaming, kept banging my fists and head against the wooden headboard, kept yelling at Him. Nobody could calm me down. He can’t be gone. He’s not gone.

“Praised are Nothing, Nothing our Nothing, Nothing of the Universe, Nothing makes us holy with mitzvot and instructs us to kindle the lights of Nothing,” I whispered despondently into my pillow. My cheeks felt like craters on the moon, like they had dried up and developed caverns and cracks from all the tears and suffocation. I closed my eyes. Gabe was there, right in my room, sitting on the plush beanbag next to my towering stacks of novels. He picked out a collection of short stories - Hemingway’s Winner Take Nothing – and began to scan it, pretending to read.

“You know, sis, this book looks like it sucks. It makes me want to go finish my math homework.”

“Gabe, what are you doing here?” I stubbornly asked through gritted teeth and shaky breaths. “This isn’t the place for you.”

Amma and Sherlock had been hiding behind the door, listening and watching me. They came in, right in the middle of our conversation.

Of the two, mother was the one who rudely interrupted our conservation. “Honey, he’s not there. Gabe is gone. Gabe is dead,” and she burst into a pool of tears, collapsing down onto the beanbag.

Upon mother’s falling, Gabe disintegrated. His presence dissipated into the atmosphere, and had then occupied the air around us, spreading bits and pieces of his disintegrated self all around the room like a gas expands to fit its container.

I looked at my mother, who was weeping profusely into my plush beanbag. I pitied her. She didn’t see Gabe. I did. “Amma,” I said, “He’s here.”

Mother looked up at me, raising her hand over my head in the process. Her hand quivered midair and she just dropped it and marched out of the room. Sherlock stared at me for a second and went after her. I knew Gabe would come back.

That night, Gabe appeared in my nightmares. I replayed those moments where I saw Gabe’s corpse hanging, eyes bulging and body carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey. I made up whatever I didn’t know. He wanted to explore the far side. When he got there, he roamed around the vacated area, searching for sign of crime. He ended up hearing someone in the alley, and peaked in, when one of the members of an Italian group saw him. He was called in because he looked like a lost, wealthy urban kid, and the Italians duped him. They treated him like a king in the first ten minutes. He fell for it, dropped his guard. Then the rest of the gang pounced. Gabe fought back. But he lost in the end. The gang robbed him, raped him, slit him open. His screams echoed to Him, but He didn’t help. My eyes clasped open and I sat up, drenched in sweat, the back of my shirt moist and cold. I couldn’t breathe. The crisp air was replenished by the jolting wind seeping through the agape window. Wide open air ventilating through the pores of the large room, and I felt suffocated, breathless, as if I had forgotten how to breathe. I fixated my gaze on the beanbag, waiting for Gabe to take his place, all the while unable to breathe. Gabe didn’t come. Nobody came.

I had recurring nightmares. The same nightmare replayed in my head every night after I had gone to sleep. I kept seeing Gabe everywhere. Mother was right; he was never there. But I couldn’t get him out of my head, not then, not now. I’m traumatized, and I can’t keep living this way. That’s why amma checked me into a mental asylum. I’ve tried to recreate Gabe’s death. I’ve tried it on myself countless times. Somebody had always caught and stopped me before I could kick the chair out and hang as lifeless as Gabe did on a cold, metal pipe.

I feel as if I am a patched balloon. A balloon is meant to be filled with air molecules, but there’s always a limit. If you blow up a balloon to its utmost capability, the surface of the balloon will be tender and fragile, and eventually the balloon will pop. I am a deflated balloon. I had been given an abundance of air, but quantity doesn’t make a life. The air was overwhelming me; it contained memories and sounds and sights that I couldn’t handle, things that I couldn’t intake. The air inside me was so overwhelming that I had a hard time feeling like I got enough air – the regular, fluffy kind that sustains life. So now I’m here. My shell hasn’t torn yet. It’s gotten close to tearing, but I was always patched up. I’m just a deflated balloon; you can only fix it so much before it breaks forever.