On the day I made my dead brother's bird disappear, I'd been sitting at my desk when I crumpled my unfinished school essay on freedom and flung it into the trash. Next to my stack of poetry books, imprisoned in its small, wrought iron cage, stood the amethyst starling my twin Aaron had bought three years before. I observed the bird's nearly metallic purple plumage, watching as it spun its head around its body and opened its beak to beseech me to set it loose, letting out a note knotted with sorrow.

It couldn't fly.

The cage had been kept closed since Aaron's passing, and so by then it'd been almost a year since the poor creature had felt the wind's rush on its wings. I would feed it just enough for it not to starve-- taking care of it was my brother's job, not mine. Not to mention that, by then, I'd forgotten all the ins-and-outs of his bird-keeping routine. Those mundane details had begun to fade away, along with the other details that seemed so quotidian back then: what we'd do together, the names of the film directors he'd so passionately talk about, the trivial but distinct features of his face that distinguished it from mine.

I'd turned my mind's eye back to the bird. Whether it would be set free to finally fly and spread wide its wings across the sky, letting its already shiny feathers turn so bright due to the beams of sunlight that it would sparkle like a sapphire stone; or, be kept ensnared by its cage, and, dazed, shift its eyes, along with its beak, from metal bar to metal bar to metal bar until it came to a dreadful realization of its captivity that, like a hellish cycle, would continue to occur in perpetuity until the bird accepted that it would never see the sun again, was up to me. 

"Matthew!" I'd heard my mom call out from downstairs. "Dinner'll be ready soon!" I'd taken a long time before going down, as I always do. At the dinner table there is always an empty chair, and I can never help but ask myself: why can't my chair be the empty one? And when I think that, my whole body starts to shake, and I look at the metal cross that hangs from my wall, which is always looking, always staring.

I wish that I, like all good Christian grief-stricken, could believe that my brother is waiting to meet me in a better place. All they tell me, however, is that those flames engulf him in Satan's inferno. I am the only one that knows that that is not true, that those flames still starve, and that they wait not to wrap their wicked fingers around his flesh, but around mine.

It needs to fly, I'd thought before going down. I am the only one who can make that happen. So I'd put my hand on the latch, ready to pull it open, when the bird disappeared. 

There'd been no smoke, no dust, not even a feather left behind. Without warning, it'd just vanished from one split second to the next. It'd been as if the whole cage were a motion picture projected on film, and while in one frame the starling was there, in the next, it was gone.

                                                              . . .

The bell's ringing reverberates through the halls of the high school. As I walk along the maze of corridors, I fix my eyes on the floor and pick up my pace to avoid any trouble. Above me, the long fluorescent lights flicker with a buzz like those of bug zappers when wasps are trapped inside them, and dried paint falls down like snow from the ceiling's cracks. 

The school hasn't always been in this constant state of falling apart, but since the cuts in public education were announced, it seemed like there was something rotten in Stonewall Jackson High. Now, the once clean classroom carpets are covered in mold, the once shiny gunmetal gray lockers have grown rusted, and the once plentiful library collection has been reduced tenfold.

I see a group of five boys wandering along the halls. Trouble. I turn the other way and decide to take the shortcut down the stairs, whose entrance is marked by the American and the Confederate flags. The latter, placed there only a couple of months ago, has its tip just slightly higher than the former. This is where Aaron and I used to split paths. 

I push the crash bar open, listening as it closes behind me with a loud thud. As I descend the spiral staircase, I overhear a student say to another, who gives a shit? She was such a slut anyway. He was referring, of course, to Melanie Miller, who only two days ago had been found in one of the bathroom stalls with a pair of blood-stained scissors jammed in her throat.

Incidents like that have become commonplace in the past months, along with disappearances. There've been so many of those that the number of missing kids posters now exceeds the one of missing dogs and cats combined. The one kid who actually was found hadn't even disappeared-- he'd only become invisible. But since no one in school talked to him and his parents had been so busy hurling names at each other that they'd forgotten about their son's existence, it took days for anyone to notice. There was also another case where this girl named Luna grew bat ears, became blind, and begun to emit ultrasonic sounds from her larynx so as to be able to move around through echolocation. We never saw her again.

I push the crash bar open and hear it close behind me with another loud thud. As I head down the sea of rusted lockers, I see the same group of five guys from before, and, as a glare of recognition flashes through their eyes, I know that this is open water, that I'm the fish and they're the shark, and that it's too late to run in the other direction.

They knock me down, making my spine slam against cold ground with the blow of a derailed train and my head snap back into the wall like a whip. My whole body, frozen-stiff, is a glacier, and my guts are being carved through with ice axes. My mouth gnaws on glass and my nose shatters like it. They're kicking me in my stomach, my chest, my face, and each time they stab-in their blows, they draw their feet just a bit more back to maximize the impact. As I hear the cling of a flown out tooth connect to the locker next to me, the metallic-tasting blood trickles through my teeth and spouts from my lips.

As they kick, they call me a faggot, and I don't know what hurts more. You're a faggot Matthew! You'll always be a queer! You're gonna burn in hell like your brother!

No matter how hard I try to numb myself, in the end, pain and truth, one and the same like flames and fire, as they melt the ice, always find their way back up.

Through my blurred vision, my body still stinging, I see their feet moving away from me like predators satisfied with their carcass, and start to sob, not because they kicked me, but because they stopped.

                                                              . . .

As I trudge back home along the snow, I hear the whistle of the wind and feel its bite through my scarf. As I look up, expecting to see the pond I usually pass by, I instead see a sight so grisly it makes my stomach churn and my heart shudder: an ocean of dead pekin ducks, their severed bodies contorted into the glass-like frozen water. Red blood radiates against white snow. It's as if Hades had slit Zeus's neck from ear to ear for blood to spurt all over the thunder god's white beard. The ice is thick as a tree, and the butchered ducks are bashed and thrusted into it like treasonous sinners in the Ninth Circle of Hell.

One duck is so crooked in the ice, that while the wind sways its tail in mockery, its entire body is shoved below the frozen water, only for its twisted neck to come out from the ice again, and then for its beak to be buried once more in the shattered crystal. Another duck has been decapitated by a shard of ice, so that while its severed head lays on its side above the pond, the rest of its strayed corpse waits whole beneath the water. Yet another pekin, half above the pond, half buried beneath it, has the head of another duck stuffed into its mouth, its beak opened nearly as wide in terror as the pearls that are now its eyes.

The vicious red stripes of blood go down the peaceful white snow to lead to a circular crack in the pond from which it is possible to see the water, whose color is a blue so dark it is nearly black, like the night sky. As I pass the pond, I don't look back, my scarf and gloves disappear, and I'm left even colder than before. 

I think back to this book I once read, right before it was banned from the school's library. The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield didn't know where the ducks went in the winter. Now, I do.

                                                              . . .

The next day, as soon as I swing open the cold glass doors of the school, I start to look for Clay, my only friend, as well as the one person in Stonewall Jackson High who everyone is unanimously terrified of. I met him nine days ago, when I saw a crowd of a dozen students surrounding what I thought was a dead animal. Then I got a closer look, and realized it was just another junior, like me. He was crouched down on the floor crying, emitting sounds similar to those of squealing pigs in slaughterhouses. 

Everyone laughed at him till they saw what he held in his right hand. At first it seemed as though he'd grown a third hand, until we noticed the supposed "extra hand" was actually part of some severed body.

Some people ran. Others threw up. In less than ten seconds, I was the only one left with the freak.

"Help." He shrieked.

I sat down next to him.

"Hi. My name's Matthew." I said, as calm and careful as a crane. "What's yours?"

"I'm Clay." He said as he gulped down tears.

Clay proceeded to tell me the story of how he'd ended up crouched down on the school floor holding a severed hand.

It all started about a week ago, on the day of the SJHS dance. He'd gotten a note in his locker from Will saying that he liked Clay and wanted to meet him in the music room while everyone else danced at the gym.

The night of the dance, Clay said, he got to the music room and sat down next to Will. He told me how, with all the violins and violas, double basses and bassoons lining the room like ancient Roman columns, he got this magic feeling in the pit of his stomach. He said, though, that as soon as he clasped Will's hand, Will had some sort of nervous breakdown, started laughing like a maniac, and ran out of the room. The next morning everyone who knew Clay, including his parents, knew he was gay.

By this point he'd begun to bawl, and I had to focus my attention on the movement of his lips to try and understand what he was saying. When Clay woke up the morning after the dance, his parents told him they'd decided to send him to conversion camp. They also told him that, since universities had been infested by liberal delusions, they wouldn't be paying his college tuition.

The next day, Clay received a large package in his mailbox. It was from the future and contained his own severed corpse. 

He said as soon as he opened it, vomit spewed from his throat and he held in his hands his own decapitated head like Hamlet holding Yorick's skull.

I began to think about, as Dickinson called it, the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and said to Clay:

"So you really don't think there's a light at the end of the tunnel, huh?"

"For me there was never no light at no end of no tunnel." He said. "For me the tunnel was always lit the whole way through, hundreds of tiny white lights on either side and all. And the end was clear too: just an old, big gray wall of concrete. A dead end."

As we left the school, we realized the sun had already set, and looked up. In recent years, so much man made pollution has settled in the atmosphere, that we could see no stars in the night sky.

                                                              . . .

I pant and feel my heart's beat quicken as I scour the maze the rusted lockers, ferreting to find my friend. I check classrooms twice, check classrooms twice, check the gym the auditorium the cafeteria the nurse the principal's office the music room the library the janitor's broom closet, before I collapse on my knees. Desperation is a hand clutching my heart, and it squeezes each time harder. Where's Clay?

When the bell's ringing reverberates through the hall announcing the end of the first period, which I've skipped, I hear someone say something that makes the hand clutching my heart squeeze so hard it makes disintegrate into, as Eliot would say, a handful of dust. Clay's dead, someone says, his parents reported him as missing, but then the cops found his body floating in Falls Rivers.

Rumors say it must've been the illegals, or maybe the Muslims, but only I know that that is not the truth: like Aaron's bird, I made Clay disappear, and now I've made him reappear in the wrong place. The truth is that I am the reason Aaron and now Clay are dead, that the flames of hell grow ravenous for me still, and that the future is nothing but a big gray wall of concrete. But what if it goes further than that? What if I also made Melanie Miller disappear at the same time as a pair of scissors, and then reappear together? And those dead ducks in the pond...in the end it was me, not Lucifer, who'd been at the center of the Ninth Circle of Hell.

                                                              . . .

I make the rusted lockers disappear, the long fluorescent lights, the flags that overlook the staircase, the people in my way, the staircase. One by one they're gone, vanished, disappeared. The floor, the walls, the ceiling. Disappeared, vanished, gone. Gone not like dead, gone like they were never born, never made, never loved. Evanesce from existence like my brother's face from my memory.

                                                              . . .

                        Everything has vanished except me and a void of nothingness. 

                                                              . . .

But then I feel as a feather grows from deep within my soul, and catch something through the corner of my eye. Something I couldn't see before. Something I could only make evanesce by setting ablaze all the human parts of myself. It's a film strip, one of Aaron's. I pick up the wobbly spiral of memory.

Much like I seek refuge in literature, Aaron sought refuge in cinema. He'd started to make short films since he was nine, when he got an old video camera for Christmas. I can see one of the frail frames like a painting: Christmas day, seven years ago. Aaron stands in the center unwrapping a present as he beams with laughter, the tall tree jam-packed with ornaments to his left, and the fireplace, whose flames emitted a warm heat, to his right. Ever since then, he'd spend days working on his short films. I remember him sprawled out on the sofa as he edited his small masterworks. 

Now the sofa remains empty, the fireplace is cold and dark, the video camera sits still in the basement with a thick layer of dust on its top, and Aaron--

has no pulse.

It's been twelve months since it happened. And it was my fault. Not because of what I did, but because of what I am. 

Twelve months ago, me and my friend Brandon were in gardenia park. The warmth of his hands flooded through mine, and our lips hovered over one another, not quite touching, with the gravitational tugging of celestial bodies that orbit one another. I'm--

not straight.

Brandon leaned into me and, like stars colliding, we kissed. We though we'd be safe there. It felt so safe, anyways. But then we heard the hum of an engine, and smelled the stench of gasoline, and were jolted out of the little galaxy we'd created for ourselves. When we looked up, we saw five men in a van, staring straight at us like snakes ready to strike. They carried a baseball bat and a look in their eyes of a deep-seeded hatred that scorched their souls. We ran. That was the last time I ever saw Brandon.

Even when I made it back home, locked in my own room, I hand't stopped panting, my hands hadn't stopped shaking, and my heart still felt like a bomb, because when we ran, they didn't follow, they just stood there like hawks: all they'd needed was a good look at us, and that they'd gotten. I thought about telling Aaron what had happened, but decided not to, since if I told him, I'd also have to mention...

The next day, Aaron didn't come back from school. Mistaking him for me, those same men kidnapped him in a van, took him to some remote location, and bashed his skull in with a baseball bat. They then tied him to a wooden fence, leaving him there to bleed in the cold with a snow that was anything but forgetful. 

I feel him there at every second of every day. I see how his gentle blonde hair dripped with blood and how his eyes were delicately closed to appear as though he were in a deep sleep. I feel, in my own chest, the small stone that was his heart speeding up like a futile savior. They say his face was fully coated in blood, except for the slivers of it where snowflakes, like soothers sent from Nature herself, had softly landed and melted. But Nature wasn't enough, and she'd been stabbed in the back by erratic Culture, so that when two police officers found Aaron twelve hours later, he--

had no pulse.

My eyes water and blur my vision as I hear the soft splash of a fallen teardrop on a frame. I clean my eyes and look at the frail film strip, which starts to play in my head as if my mind were a projector.

                                                              . . .

The swimming pool glistens with sunlight. It's the first time we've ever gotten into one. My dad waits in the water with two pool noodles, one red and one blue. I put my hand in the shimmering transparent liquid and tell Aaron it's not cold. We count to three and let the water enwrap us. The next shot is filmed with a waterproof camera. In it, me and Aaron try to talk underwater, and bubbles float up from his smile.

                                                              . . .

All of a sudden it's Christmas morning, and me and Aaron are flying down the stairs shouting about how Santa had come last night. We would later have found out the truth about Santa, the tooth fairy, and the easter bunny together.

                                                              . . .

We're in middle school now. We play soccer on a Saturday morning. The sun is out and the freshly cut grass glows green. Aaron passes me the ball and runs forward. I dribble some players and pass the ball back to Aaron, who in turn dribbles some other players and passes the ball to me again. I'm close enough to make the goal, so I pass it back to Aaron who kicks it smack into the net. We run toward each other and collide in a hug. Our teammates soon join in, and we all jump with joy.

                                                              . . .

Aaron is dead. 

I stare at the first frame of the infinite film strip. It says: To Matthew, From Aaron, and I allow myself to realize that what I hold in my hands was the present Aaron would've given me for Christmas last year.

I feel the hairs stand on my skin and start to sob like I never have before, letting tears cascade from my eyes and stream down my cheeks.

The truth is that he loved me, and would've accepted me for who I am. It's not your fault, I can hear his voice say. It's not your fault.

The second thing I see in this void of nothingness is, buried as far down beneath me as my brother, a sprouting lilac.

The third thing, however, I have to squint my eyes to see, and has just come into sight. When I do see it, I can't believe my eyes. It's Brandon. He's being badly beaten and I can see blood spouting from his face.

In that moment, I realize that we are not trapped in cages by some unchangeable fate or some superior being's designs. That, unlike the rest of nature, we are trapped in cages by our own choices. I had been the one to close the latch on my future, and only I could be the one to set myself free. I will not look the other way.

I feel something tremble in my back like an earthquake, and I think to myself, this will be painful. My whole body shudders and I let out a strangled scream. My veins bulge and I gnaw my teeth. Between shrieks of pain and thoughts of hesitation, it rips through flesh and blood and bone like lightning tears through the sky, to then from skin finally come out: a pair of purple wings, like those of amethyst starlings. The purple plumage surges high in the sky, and I can feel my feet levitate from land, where a lilac grows through a green patch of melted snow, and let the air breeze past me, because now I can fly.