A girl had a little brother. A little girl had a little brother. A littler little brother. When she was two she had a little brother and he had a tail. "Look Mom," she says, "Brother has a tail," and her mother laughed and explained it to her, what did the mother explain exactly? That little boy babies have tails? Probably because the mother does not say words like penis, and she certainly never did and never would say any other words for the right words. If she didn't say the right words, she would certainly not say the other words.
So, a little girl had a little brother and then she didn't, and this is the the story of that.
The little girl and her brother were best friends. You never have a friend like that again. Not ever, not even if the brother grows up, he is not a friend like that. I swear it. When you are small, you can do amazing things with your brother; you can climb into the front window of the butcher shop next door and eat baloney sliced by Mr. Shoudy's own hand, ad Mrs. Shoudy won't even get mad at you. You can pet the Shoudy's cat. That's before the health department shuts down the Shoudy's butcher shop for cats and so forth.
You can ride the arm of the fat green sofa and it is a horse, and you can say things in front of your mother's friends that otherwise, even a moment after they ar eout of your mouth, your mother scowls and chases you out of the room, so you know, you know, without anyone saying anything, that you have said something you can never say again, and your borther and you look at each other in waning innocence.
"Mom, boys have weiners (not tails, you know that now) and girls have buns (where did you hear about that?) and boys can put their weiners in the girls' buns" and you know that what makes so much 5 year old sense is wrong and you run out of the room and forget about it, but feel shame for the first time, shame, a word you do not know, you feel it.
Then you are 5 and a half or maybe 6 by now, it is very hot and you walk out the front door all by yourself, your brother is sick, he is very sick and cannot walk out the front door at all, but you can and it is the first act of betrayal of your life. Your mother gets very angry at you after you have a long walk, past the cemetery, past the purple Jewel truck in the last driveway before there aren't any more driveways and you have no landmark to turn around at, so you just do, you just turn and walk back the way you came, your mother angry and dark in the driveway, "Now I have to call the police back and tell them the naughty girl is home."
There were drives in the big car, there were drives past pass with care and do not pass and that's how the girl lerned to read, and her brother couldn't read, but she read the sings to him, pass with care, do not pass. They passed the time to the hospital, where the brother got new blood.
New blood for old, for young blood, bad blood, long drives, the father driving, the mother riding, the brother, the best friend, sitting beside you, laughing, tripping, going for new blood.
Sometimes the girl has to stay with the grandmother, the great-grandmother, who is very old and not nice, not at all, not one bit, though the girl can't say why. Then the mother and father and brother go alone in the car passing with care and not passing for more than a day and a night.
And so one night the mother comes for the girl and the brother does not. There is no brother. There is a mother and a father and no brother. The girl has a toy with suction cups on its feet and she is walking it up the window. Up and up, and does not look at the mother. The mother has left the brother and the mother is no longer the mother. She is the other. Only the other. The mother would never leave the brother. She is not the mother, this other. The girl has only her suction cup toy and the empty window; only climbing up and up. The mother, the other, the not-mother stands alone.
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