“Nest” by Mia Avramut, wax on clayboard, 6 x 6 in.

It was right around my college graduation day that the snake came. I wasn’t home to witness any of what happened. I was in Chicago, selling everything in my college apartment and using the cash to go out drinking. It was hot, and my days of packing produced a sticky feeling of discomfort that would come back like bile minutes after stepping out of a cold shower.

I had been following what was happening at home because my dad liked to write me about it most days. I imagined him typing out his emails to me in his study, around 8:00, right after the sun had gone down and his beer had leaked language into the happy peacefulness of his mind. He was elated, these days, to spend each evening after dinner out on the porch. He and my mom had recently renovated it. They bought new, comfy furniture– the familiar rusted chairs with mildewed cushions were gone. My mom hung potted flowers all around the porch ceiling, and somehow convinced ivy to grow along the beams. At the edge of the porch, as if to mark off this magical space, they strung white Christmas lights and windchimes.

Because of all this beauty, a California wren had ventured into our backyard to nest in one of the hanging porch baskets. Among my mom’s peonies, she laid her eggs. California wrens are small and fat. Their color is a humble light brown, and when they look at you with their inscrutable bird eyes you see dignity in the streak of white, eyebrow-like, on the sides of their heads. In the summers, you hear them everywhere. They sing often, and with impressive range.

June in Chicago, the sounds outside were of cars pulling up outside of soon-to-be-abandoned college homes, the growl of suitcases along sidewalks, and the smugly triumphant shrieks of day-drunk seniors. I was impatient and sloppy in packing all my stuff into boxes. I threw wine glasses in with leftover boxes of pasta and didn’t fold my clothes or even turn them right-side-out before stuffing them into duffel bags. It was hugely satisfying to see my cluttered room turn clean and empty. A guy bought my desk for $50, and I used half the money for a cheeseburger and beers at the campus pub with my friends. We talked about our plans for the summer and what we thought we might do after that, and didn’t think of how easy it was to take for granted that we would always get drunk together.

The next morning, while I dozed sweaty and headachy, my dad sent me an email about how the wren’s eggs had finally hatched. When he went out on the porch with his coffee, he heard a chorus of little squawks in brand new voices. He wanted to look at the eggshells, now empty and useless, but he didn’t want to disturb the babies. The mother wren was so excited, he wrote. She flitted back and forth, chirping at her babies with a new, joyful song he hadn’t heard before. He was proud that she had gotten so used to him that she let him listen in on their celebration.

Goodbyes came in stages: I can’t believe this is the last time we’ll eat here, the last time we’ll drink together on campus, the last week we’ll be living in Chicago, etc. They did not seem real except for one. I’d had a falling out with my oldest friend. First year, we used to laugh so hard on the floor of her dorm room that beer dribbled out the corners of our mouths. Now, we stood braced against separate walls and I told her I hoped she enjoyed Oxford. “Thanks,” she said. “Maybe next year when I come back, we can…start over, and see how it goes.” The cause of the falling out was a mutual feeling of abandonment, not worth describing, which day to day seems irrelevant but builds and builds.

The next day there was no email. My dad called me instead, while I was lying on my bed doing nothing, with the fan on. He said that when he had come outside for his beer, he had found the California wren jumping from spot to spot but never landing in her potted plant. She was calling out sharply. He could hear a commotion from the unseen baby birds, and it was a sound he had not heard from them before. When he looked in the basket, seeing the chicks’ soft brown feathers for the first time, he also saw a snake. It was curled lazily around two of the baby birds, the third a lump in its stomach. He picked up the snake and flung it by its tail into the yard. It hit the ground with the thump of a thing already in motion. Then my dad went to the shed and got the hatchet that he used to weed kudzu out of the garden. As the snake slithered away he brought the blade down hard. At the age of 62, he killed his first living being. While he stared at the two pieces at his feet, the wrens cried.

But–two babies still remaining under the safe white lights.

My bed was the only piece of furniture remaining in my room at that point. I couldn’t sell it, because a couple of the slats were broken from a drunken and overly aggressive hookup with someone I did not know well or much like. I was just going to throw the bed in the alley, after my last night in the blank white room. Graduation was a day away. When I hung up the phone with my dad, picturing the events that had led up to him standing there over the dead snake and baby bird, I felt fear swallow me. Cliches ring true because we seek them out, match them up to the experiences that would otherwise bewilder us. They become signs, omens as bright as Easter eggs.

 Heidi Siegrist is currently trying to make it/fake it in Chicago. She is also an MFA student at the University of the South, and is working on a collection of essays about entanglement (whatever that is).

“Dusk” by Mia Avramut, wax on paper, 5.8 x 8.2 in.

Jon’s apartment is the top floor of a four-level brownstone in an aging beauty queen of a neighborhood in the heart of Washington DC. The kitchen, living room, and the small glass table in the bay window that makes up the dining area are all one space, filled with odds and ends that mostly only make sense to Jon: photos in mismatched picture frames, Argentinian love masks, decorative candlesticks, an oversized poster of a 1950s Spanish motorcycle festival, and a small flock of tourist-shop Buddhas sitting happily in scattered locations. The tiny coffee table is littered with the wanderings of a mind that can’t make itself up: a biography of Bill Belichick, Gibran’s The Prophet, Shape magazine (“for the exercises”), a reference manual on management techniques, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, and endless notes to self. And in the middle of it all is a small L-shaped sofa.

The sofa is actually the Blake combination love seat and chaise from West Elm, a swanky furniture store for yuppies who’ve outgrown IKEA. The love seat can sit no more than two side by side without getting intimate—it is after all a love seat—but there’s room for another on the chaise next to it. Technically the chaise is a “fainting couch,” because it has a back and an arm, but West Elm’s customers are would-be-metrosexuals like Jon, not the heavily corseted ladies of Victorian times, so it’s a chaise. It’s hard not to want to faint into it, however. The flow of the room, the giant welcoming down-filled pillow behind you and the long expanse of the chaise coaxes even the most excited of guests to lie down and take a moment.

This particular West Elm combination is putty gray in color, with chocolate-colored legs, and a slightly rough, though not uncomfortable “basketweave” finish. In all honesty, it seems a pretty ordinary sofa, until you sit on it. Only then do you realize how ridiculously comfortable it is. Not in that cheap Swedish way that feels right only in one position and only in the showroom, nor in the overgenerous softness of a reclining, swiveling, drink-holding, faux suede All-American sofa. The Blake is firm, yet giving, and feels snug whether you sit upright or lounge haphazardly. It’s nothing less than a favorite lover wrapping arms around you and whispering stay awhile.

More often than not the love seat becomes the guest’s, while Jon and his partner JJ stretch out on the chaise together, her head falling to his chest, sometimes in sleep. Conversations between friends will continue on in to the night, and become increasingly dream-like. When eventually the stories and half-awake debates have ended and sleep is taking everyone together, the couple departs wordlessly, and the guest is left with the whole sofa to stretch out on.

As comfortable as the West Elm is to sit on, it is literally a dream to sleep on. It’s wide enough to roll from side to side without the gymnastics of most sofas, and it’s thick, firm padding would shut any princess up about a pea. This is the city, so there’s no true dark and no true silence. But the street light, which stands mercifully below the window, scans patterns through the treetop onto the old plaster ceiling above that are the envy of any child’s mobile, and with the window open, the distant sirens, car horns, and shouts are as reassuring as any summer’s breeze. To sleep here is to sleep like you’ve never slept before.

The record for residence on the West Elm is nine months, held by my friend Zach. After wandering around the world—fighting wildfires, acting in a “ghost town,” working as a carpenter—Zach came out of the blue to stay with Jon. He had no job, no money, and nowhere to go, though that did not seem to be a huge point of concern for either man. At one point, Jon found Zach a job painting the walls of a nearby dive pizza joint. The owner told him he could paint what he wanted. He meant white or cream. Zach instead painted a mural that took three months to complete. When he was done he refused any payment except the original fifty bucks he’d been promised. Later he was asked to fix a shelf by one of Jon’s friends who’d heard Zach was a carpenter. Zach created a small library of built-in bookshelves, and this time refused payment of any kind because it was for a friend of Jon’s.

When Zach finally moved on, his record remained. Despite many guests—family visits, travelers passing through, friends in need—his record stood for years until Sherpa arrived for “two or three days, a week at most.” Sherpa is Taiwanese not Tibetan and has never climbed any mountain, but he’d been given the name the first time we met him, the way boys do, and kept it forever. He followed a stellar college career with a high-paying Capitol Hill job, which he parlayed into entrepreneurial success, buying three townhouses in a rundown DC neighborhood that gentrified overnight and quintupled in value. For years he was the successful one while the rest of us were still finding our way. Then he fell in love with the wrong girl and his life imploded. Within a year he was heartbroken, bankrupt, and homeless, his properties having been signed over to her in a final futile act of defiant love.

At first Sherpa was concerned with being the perfect guest. He’d lost his high-paying job, but found work stocking shelves, and he’d steal steak and bottles of wine and cook dinner for his hosts as a way to thank them. He’d make sure to regularly go out for long walks to give the couple some time to themselves. But as the weeks wore on, formality gave way to familiarity. By month two, anyone walking into the apartment was less likely to find him cooking and more likely to find him in his underwear studiously working his way through a 24-pack of PBR. He stopped going out for walks and told Jon to “fuck whenever you want, it doesn’t bother me.”

By the time nine months had passed, Sherpa had gotten his life back to a semblance of together and was ready to move on. But he stayed anyway, joking that he needed to break Zach’s record. Every evening Jon would come home from work and yell, “Still here?” in mock outrage, but, in truth, Sherpa had become both sidekick and mission, and he was happy for him to stay. It was ten months before Sherpa went on his way.

When it was I who was lost, and my turn to take the West Elm sofa came, I thought of its previous occupants and where they had gone after their respite with Jon. Zach wandered for years until finally he fell in love, married, joined the Rangers, traveled to Afghanistan—where he said he’d never felt more alive or satisfied with his life—and died in a firefight at age 31. Sherpa wandered too. He packed everything he owned in a tarpaulin sheet and traveled to Argentina, studying for a month in Buenos Aries before setting off on foot across the Patagonian Mountains. I heard from him next in Paris, living in a room as big as a closet in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, and sharing a corridor bathroom with a continually passed-out drunk. From Paris he walked for months on El Camino de Santiago—the old pilgrimage route to Galicia, Spain, to visit the remains of the apostle James in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. He’d Facebook from the churches he stayed in along the way, surrounded by other glorious lost souls, as happy as I’d ever seen him.

I stayed three weeks with Jon, receiving his blunt, good-natured counsel every evening, and soaking up the West Elm’s restorative powers every night. Then I followed Zach and Sherpa back into the world. Both had come back to Jon’s sofa for far shorter stays at various moments over the years, as have I. It is the haven we have all shared. Other sofas are a place to crash. The West Elm is for those uncertain times when you don’t know where the next step will take you. Watching the lives of my friends spin off from here, even if tragically as in Zach’s case, is always heartening, because I know a similar road lies open for me.

When Zach died, Sherpa and I returned to travel with Jon to the funeral in Cape Cod. That night, we drank heavily and happily, and told endless stories of Zach. When Jon finally took his leave, Sherpa and I were left alone on the West Elm in the awkward silence of an unspoken question. Who sleeps where? After a few moments, I took the guest’s love seat, and left him the chaise. He was the record-holder after all.

David Alasdair earned an MFA from Eastern Washington University in Spokane, WA, has seen the Loch Ness Monster, been in the world’s longest chorus line, and occasionally makes Shrek-like noises with his right ear.

Read an interview with David here.

“Rainfall” by Mia Avramut, wax on paper, 5.8 x 8.2 in.

I.

Bobby

I made my brother’s list. That’s what I was hearing. Billy wrote a list and included me on it—not at the top of the list but near. I smiled. He frowned. He readjusted his position on our mother’s couch, the leather squeaking. “Bobby,” he said, “that’s not a good thing.”

But I loved succeeding in the eyes of others, and Billy understood this: Second Place ribbon in backstroke at Maplebrook Elementary, lead in the high school musical, vice-president of my college fraternity. Billy knew I lined up these facts in my head like a trophy case. We shared a bedroom for 10 years, and he’d stand back as a kid and marvel at my wall of accomplishments. He never could catch me, first because he was four years younger and then because he seemed to “live a bit less.” That’s how he put it. My eyes drifted across our family room as my brother tried to speak.

I looked at Billy. He usually smiled right through you, like a homeless man might smile into the glare of a storefront window. But, here, my brother’s face reflected calmness, presence. His nose hooked to the left. The “Fieseler Schnoz” had always been our defining feature, and, though he’d broken his so many times, we still looked alike. Billy slid his cap backwards, which revealed the golden letters “W.F.”—honoring both Wake Forest University and, as a joke, his initials (William Fieseler). Not your school, I thought. You never went.

I knew from our sister, Annie, that November 2012 marked Billy’s first month of sobriety. We were nearing two months from that milestone. Three months, and he got a pin , maybe. “What I have to do as part of my program,” he began, and I felt trapped on the couch beside him. He talked some more, and my eyes floated to my mother’s Christmas Village by the window. Starting in 2009, when Billy fell apart, my mother would set up a miniature world on the triangle coffee table. Her fantasy became like a three-tiered cake. On the topmost pane of glass were the largest porcelain mansions, which included a Santa’s Workshop. On the second pane, a layer beneath, sat a smaller subdivision of homes and streetlamps. On the final pane, furthest below, dwelt a town ringed by a railroad.

“Part of these steps is I have to make amends,” I heard him say.

My mother took days assembling this village. She’d crack open bottles of white wine, sip and examine and reexamine. Each house lit up from within. When the arrangement pleased her, she’d lie on the couch and watch home remodeling shows and polish the bottle. Simultaneously, she’d project herself into the miniatures. Who knows what she found inside there. Her village was something children would adore, only there were no grandkids. My eyes sank to the lowest layer.

Two trains circled the same track, sometimes bumping each other like butt-sex. We’d be gods, I thought, to those people. Past the Christmas Village was a different universe entirely: our own. A tall bookshelf connected to the mantle where a boxy TV once sat. Beneath it was an air duct that blew heat on your feet straight up from the basement furnace. Billy and I used to fight for that spot. Winters, when we scooted up to the Super Nintendo, the winner got the heat.

We’d duel in a futuristic racing game called F-Zero. The fastest ride was a pink space pod, which sputtered from the gates but accelerated to the highest speed, so long as you drove her perfectly. She was my “pink gorgeous.” With her, I secured the record time on every track, writ with my initials: RWF. Then one day I caught Billy with my gorgeous about to shatter my time on the fastest track, and I kicked him to the window blinds, and she crashed. Instead of crying, he laughed as he pulled himself up, his shoulder bleeding. He laughed because he got me, found the thing that cracked the mask.

“Where the fuck are you, Bobby?” my brother asked.

“Jesus, man, I’m sorry.”

II.

Billy

Pulled into Mom and Dad’s driveway and sat there for a second. The engine cut out, and the car settled into the purr of the electric battery. This was a rich man’s vehicle: Dad’s Toyota Hybrid. He’d lent it in June, when I started back at work. That was nice of him. Seven months later, he still hadn’t asked for the keys back.

Grey, cloudy, Sunday. Neighbors’ houses loomed around me, some of them taller than three stories. I pictured the old wives inside with their phones and pictures of pathetic kids: Mrs. A., Mrs. Green. They’d watched me grow up into what? Their sons left Chicago, not me. 27 years old, and here I was still borrowing Dad’s things. I saw the shadow of Bobby waiting in the kitchen, the overhead light catching his head. His shape stretched towards me. 20 minutes ago, he’d sent a text saying, “Getting some food.” The garage stood open. Outside, wind blew cold.

I’d meant to do this sooner. But Bobby said he didn’t want to talk about anything serious. I let six weeks pass, and now I had to pounce before he hit the escape hatch. Tomorrow, he headed back to Columbia University and New York City, where he lived. He’d been out of town for three years, and I hadn’t even paid him a visit.

My hang-up had been the “spiritual affliction” thing. A long road to respect the concept, bouncing in and out of centers, learning not so much to stop drinking as to live spiritually—the alcohol a symptom of deeper stuff. It’s a hard realization to grab with both hands: we are not just our own person. Growing up, Christianity was a thing I did on Sundays. To say I never felt the touch of God doesn’t quite capture the sham. I looked for God at my first communion, ate the bread and nothing happened. When I kneeled before that Catholic pervert bishop at confirmation, Grandma cried, and I waited for my imaginary friend. “He’s pretend,” I told Dad when we finally had the fight about Jesus. Now, I studied Chapter 4 in the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous. Titled “We Agonistics,” it made the argument that only a spiritual life conquers alcoholism. Dogs started barking inside. Two white bichons appeared in the front window. They dove at the glass repeatedly, though never – in their combined years of living – breaking through to freedom.

Bobby prolly guessed I was here. Those fucking animals. My favorite reference manual from last year had been: “Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure?” That one did a fuck ton of good. I’d pop yellow Adderalls and tear through the pages. Few studies could explain how A.A. worked, and this book manipulated the fuzziness. It bought me time to drink. That book was my best defense. A.A. boasted more than a million people going to meetings, and I fended it away. Bill W., the former Wall Street trader and founder of A.A., had invented the idea of a “12-step program” based on the 12 Apostles. I knew this. My mind jumped to every 12-step program built on this happenstance: Gambler’s Anonymous (G.A.), Overeaters Anonymous (O.A.), Workaholics Anonymous (W.A), D.A., P.A., M.A., all based on what? Faith? Why not 10 steps or six? But I’d learned to stop calling bullshit.

Step 1 meant admitting I was powerless. Step 4 was my personal and “fearless moral inventory.” I kept my journal in the trunk. Across its pages, I catalogued every busted relationship in my life—past and present. I could recite it by heart. In the subsection marked October 9, 2013, which represented my Sobriety Day, I’d laid out three columns. The first column read “Resentful At” and beneath it “Bobby (Brother).” In the second column, I listed “Causes” of resentment in our relationship: “More successful,” “Judges me,” “Takes vacations,” and “Doesn’t want to talk about my life.” In column three, I tallied where each “Cause” cut into me: “Self-esteem,” “Relationship with others,” and “Relationship with self.” Then, if you flipped the page, you’d see three more columns. Here began my analysis of how I treated him. In the first column, titled “Selfish,” I’d written, “Blamed for starting my drug use,” “Made him buy me booze,” “Constantly drunk dialing,” and “Called him a fag.” These pages were why I was sitting in the driveway—to finish my Step 9, where I attempted to make amends for everything I wrote in Step 4. Hell, I’d made the list and one hell of a promise to my sponsor, and Bobby meant finishing it. Each step worked like an ego trap, grinding your face into the psychic crap of your past.

If I didn’t move ahead, I’d drink again. Progress meant embarrassment.

“No credibility,” I muttered. The time between January, this month, and October wasn’t much. But my sponsor and I decided, after my last slipup, that I needed to try something else. Family dogged me, we agreed, especially the thing with Bobby. My knuckles throbbed. I forgot I did his inventory on my first day back at meetings. Facing Bobby made my Step 9 with Dad and Mom feel easy. I took the keys from the ignition, stashed them in my hoodie. “God?” I asked, having taught myself to pray again and somewhat believing. “Give me help on what to say or how this should go.”

III.

Bobby

His voice shook me out of the village. “I was in there,” I wanted to tell him, but I wasn’t sure if he’d get the joke. Why drag up old shit? “Mom drinks because you did,” I almost said but stopped myself short. “I’m here to say that I was wrong in my behavior for a long time,” he said, his eyes unblinking. He locked onto me, drilling in sincerely.

I gazed at the Nutcrackers above the mantle and examined the iron tree, the one with the Hallmark ornaments my mother bought in June. On the bay window hovered a life-size sticker of a robin to keep birds from battering into the glass. “It wasn’t ok,” he said. The force of impact on double-paned glass was enough to kill finches from internal injuries. For some reason, the sticker (an image of a flattened bird) served as adequate warning. “I want you to know that I know that the wrong I did to you can never be undone and that I wasn’t a good brother.”

Some creatures ignored the warnings. I noticed how he avoided “sorry,” maybe on the advice of his sponsor. I’d seen him posting and seeking advice on online message boards like SoberRecovery.com. I’d done my research. Social media had sucked the mysteries out of A.A. Maybe all the addicts had held a symposium and agreed that they’d said “sorry” enough to strip the meaning. Maybe I could save that one to sting him, I debated, for saying it or for not saying it. But Billy knew I diagnosed situations to gain advantages. “And want to know how you felt about it,” he said.

And I couldn’t hurt him. This was my chance to tear open his brain and take out the broken pieces. Start with his childhood security blanket, pivot to his night terrors, crescendo with that crack-hole of a woman he met in Rehab Round 2. I could string events into a chain and use it to hang him from the ceiling. And I just couldn’t. I remembered my bedtime prayer as a kid, the one I’d say in front of him. “God bless Mommy and Daddy and me and Lauren and me.” I said me twice. I forced our eyes to meet.

He said, “This is me acknowledging the wrong that I did.” In his place, I wouldn’t say the same. His goatee looked trimmed. His arms bulged; he’d clearly been lifting for the past few months. Ever the competitor, I stifled my tendency to get jealous when Billy got buff.

“You remember the text?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “That summer.”

“I’m sorry I meant it.”

He’d called me late, when the light at my desk was the only light in the office. The Chicago Brown Line, which curled around my building, sat dark—done with all the commuters. My phone buzzed to life, emitting a glow that scared me because I was alone, and empty offices are creepy. It flashed “Billy” “Billy.” I guessed, by the hour, that he was smashed, and I felt stranded with his dilemmas. I couldn’t be distracted. The London office needed files by start of business, and I needed a job transfer to London. The need to keep working, keep working. I let him go to voicemail, deleted the message without listening and texted: “Billy, I’m really busy right now, and I don’t want to talk about your life with you.”

IV.

Billy

Why stare in the corner? Could he guess this was hard? I was saying what I was saying, and I’d practiced saying it with my sponsor, in front of the dogs, with my fiancée. Get your words right. Don’t say sorry, say apologize. Don’t make excuses if he throws it back at you.

He sat looking off and not wanting a drink, and I sat wanting a drink like always. Thoughts ran ahead of me. It was work to sit, work to talk. Work to rearrange myself on the couch instead of getting up and walking to Mom’s cabinet with the lock undone.

My voice droned. There went the part about being wrong. He mentioned the text message. Ok, he meant it, enough. I was working my way through the minute to talk and not get up. People worked for it, the ones I knew. Some worked forever and never saw the fruits. Can’t last the minute. That’s the bitch of things, and I’ve never been okay with it for one day in my life.

V.

Bobby

We went 21 months without speaking, during which he attempted suicide by overdosing on phenobarbital, an anti-seizure medication. I’d pass addicts begging for change on the way to the train and wonder if it was my brother. He changed his cell number, and I didn’t notice until I tried texting him six months later. I avoided mom and dad’s house for three Christmases to escape the situation that made me saddest: that Billy lost at everything, including his addiction. I want to say that I thought he would manipulate me if I tried to help, that he’d try to sink me. But the truth was I purged him easily. I couldn’t be bothered because I was too busy grasping for promotions, which I received. I wanted to tell him that he was always better than me, that, even as a kid, he saw through the playacting we do to manufacture worth. How a human was not singular in this world but the product of a family. And how that was unfair, because we don’t choose our families, but that was the truth of it, and in the truth we all become losers.

It sounded flat. It felt flat. I decided it was flat. Instead I said, “I lost my best friend,” hoping it meant something.

His head jolted back, registering surprise. He took time nodding and then replied, “It’s tough for me to even, kind of, recall what you mean by that. I’ve been so far gone that I can’t remember it, Bobby, and that makes me sad.”

I closed the garage after he ducked past the outside light. The metal door trimmed him away until he vanished. I heard the purr of the battery and the groan of my father’s engine as he sped away. I wasn’t sure where he lived, and I started crying, realizing I should have let him win something. I turned back to the family room and saw the furniture rearrange itself in my brain. I was alone, and I remembered when I used to babysit all of them: Billy, Annie and Lauren, my other sister. The couch sat in front of the bay window back then. My parents kept a stereo in a cabinet opposite the sofa. We’d listen for the sound of the van receding and then blast our ‘90s grunge rock. Billy and I reveled in those songs.

My favorite word as an 11-year-old, and thus my brother’s favorite word, was “rebel.” We planned to tear down society by buying the right CDs. In the fall of 1992, Mom wouldn’t let us buy Nirvana “Nevermind” because she hated the baby’s penis on the album cover. So we settled for the Gin Blossoms’ “New Miserable Experience,” not for the music but because the title summed up everything we believed in. Plus, their lead singer died of an overdose and that seemed to lend the band credibility.

The song “Found Out About You” commenced with airy, strumming guitars. “All last summer, in case you don’t recall…” I grooved beneath the ceiling lights on my parents’ coffee table. “I was yours, and you were mine… ” The girls pounded down the staircase in time to sing, “Forget it all!” I leapt onto the sofa. “The things you said and did to me…” Billy took my place in lights. “The love I thought I’d won, you give for freeeeee…”

He mimed a solo. “Whispers at the bus stop…” We clapped. He kicked and sneered. “Nights out in the school yard…” We clapped together. “I found out about you…” This is reverie. “I found out about you…” I stole his voice. I’m stealing it. He did it with booze, I did it with winning. We didn’t know about siblings competing or anyone losing big, but he was seven years old, and that was the last time I could picture all of us clapping for him.

Robert Fieseler grew up in Chicago and graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia Journalism School. He is the proud older brother of William (Billy) Fieseler, who also appears in this essay. Robert’s journalism has appeared in Narratively and The Big Roundtable; W.W. Norton will be publishing his debut book of nonfiction. Tweet him @wordbobby

Read an interview with Robert here.