To love me is to suffer me: cain, Abel, and Pee wee football

i 

“This was all for you” 

We are all existing on a bowing bridge whose nexus is both magical and literal and we cannot rectify that—so what I’m saying is the moment you have forgiven your brother is the same moment you have murdered him and you cannot rectify that. Cain doesn’t go to college. Abel doesn’t go to rehab. The rules of order and disorder—the bowing bridge—are distinctly human in their capacity for and suffering of cruelty. 

Shame, nuclear, bears its own rules, transuniversal and contradictory. Moreover, fraternal shame, identically nuclear, demands which we cannot provide—paralleled dis- and accordances. It returns to the center of our collective heart rot: humans reach for impossible extremes and our consciousnesses become dependent on such poles. But, of course, such poles are fiction—so nothing goes where it should, and we are suspended in a limbo of our own creation, and suspension becomes stagnation forevermore. 

All of this to say: you are my brother and we are human beings and the reality of human life is that we are panoptically and fundamentally discordant. 

ii 

“We were in a race to grow up 

Yesterday through today 'til tomorrow 

But when the plant blew up 

A piece of shrapnel flew and slowed that part of you” 

When you suffered your concussion it felt as though something slotted into place—a brief dulling of the entropic blade. The world was calm, silent, watching the medics load you into the ambulance. You looked natural on the stretcher, skull rattled till it sang a song your body might’ve been embarrassed of, had it been working. 

It was pee-wee football. You were a Wee-Bolt, prelude to the mighty Thunderbolt. Lichtenbergs were minimal—pale white, invisible until they glowed in our dark bedroom—but indelible.

That first night I stayed up awhile and watched you sleep. Mostly I was mourning the loss of you at my side for Nick at Night reruns, but, just a bit, I was considering intently the stillness that came with your mind traumatically separating from your body. Even then I knew keenly the ills of the storm’s central axis regardless of my ability to control, survive, or vocalize them. 

We were so loud, you and I. Do you remember when you put me into the TV stand and blood bubbled from my gums down my neck? We were laughing wild and manic—we were both pissed I didn’t need stitches, lamenting gnarly scars nigh. For those concussed three days I missed the noise greatly. I ran my tongue over gum sores till they bled. 

For a few years I had a phobia of silence. I’d cry if instrumental music was played during independent work time at school. Say something, say something. Anything. I know precisely where it came from. I know you do too. 

You weren’t much for sports after the concussion. Some basketball, a rec-league or two throughout high school, but nothing permanent. You never went back to four seasons a year. Blunt-force trauma changes you tectonically; shocks your center just so—enough part of your soul atrophies. 

Oftentimes I find myself wondering: why that head injury? If I attempted to tally up all the trauma done unto and into your body I’d quickly lose count. You’d never been shaken by violence before. Your little body had, by then, grown an exoskeleton. So what was it about that time? Was it the turf, the sound of your skull cracking against the helmet, the days of silence following? 

Perhaps there’s nothing significant about your concussion. Perhaps I only want there to be so it makes more sense why everything was different after that. Perhaps sometimes things are just different. There are no absolutes when it comes to you and I and the way things happened to us. I know better. 

iii 

“To love me is to suffer me, and I believe that 

When I lay with you in that auld lang room” 

So you didn’t play anymore but your first job was umpiring little league baseball games. I suppose the part of you that was still moving couldn’t stay away. I liked to sit in the dugout with one of the teams and watch you play microcosmic God. I would lean into the shortstop and say

That’s my brother—the ump. This is his job, to decide things like who’s safe and who’s not, who wins and who loses. He is king of Centennial Park and they pay him twelve bucks a game. 

Perhaps you gravitated towards this role because you already existed within it unsalaried. Our womb was a violent one—a city emblematic of fascistic ruin; a ranch on a street named for gunsmiths; a man and woman with ten trigger fingers each—and it is your namesake: from maçon. Builder in stone. To knead, fashion, or fit; from Cathain. Slender, enduring. Little battler. So you built me and you endured building me—so you were, in many respects, my God. 

And such is my namesake: from Maria, Miryam. Little, small, mine. From Raghallach. Courageous, valiant. Small and strong—your subject, your successor. 

My entire worldview was, is, modeled after your own. I watched the TV you watched, beat the video games you beat, took the drugs you took, played the sports you played. Yes, I am your absent father as you are mine, but I am unequivocally, firstly, your little brother. 

iv 

“You'll go fight a war, I'll go missin' 

I've warned you, for me, it's not that hard” 

In my case, athletics reached for impossibles—toned muscle, undivided attention, fine motor skills. I offered it what strength I presently held, which was—and remains as—stamina. 

I was a good long distance runner. I had the long legs and stride and the stubborn edge required to tough out a side stitch. When I was fifteen, a soccer coach told me You’ll never be as strong or as sharp but you’ll always be in the way. As you existed as unsalaried umpire, I existed as unsalaried blockade. 

I quit track and athletics wholly when I passed out one July afternoon and was promptly diagnosed with an electrolyte deficiency. I was glad it happened. I liked running—I still go out from time to time, when my legs get twitchy and I can’t sleep—but I never liked to do it for an audience. 

In regards to my short-lived soccer career, you came to one game and left before halftime. I hated you for it then. I admire you for it now—knowing exactly when to bite it. We grow cancerous the longer we linger.

You left and I forgave and murdered you. I left and you were sent to Nashville. We haven’t spoken in months. You don’t know, and probably will never find out, I’m writing about you. I only write when I have something I need to figure out. Think of the poems about you as parallel autopsy—I endeavor to discover what we both look like on the inside. 

iiv 

“That picture on the wall you're scared of looks just like you (you)” 

Of the violent womb that birthed you and I came our shared charge of whom we have both failed tremendously but unintentionally. Ruthlessness in its most honest and childish form. Often I wonder about the four years in between me and you and the four between me and her. Something must have occurred in the eight years before she came to us; something must have fused you and I in a way that left her separate. I never struggled in the violence I committed unto her. I was truthful with her from the jump. What exactly happened to you and I that made us so dishonest? 

There are certain events of course, things done unto us she was spared of, but there is no radical difference—and her disposition, her nose, are mine; her anger and her way of dress; she cannot seem to shut her mouth for her own good. She is very much my daughter, and I am very much your son. The ancestry is simply traced. So where was this particular tendon, this inexplicable twinning, lost on her? 

She played sports too. Cheerleading, mostly. She wasn’t very good but none of them were. I enjoyed watching her from the stands when I was a cheerleader too—her team would play, I’d watch her fumble through articulating cheers the way a six-year-old does, and then mine would follow and we’d show them how it was done—sharper movements, deeper shouts, cartwheels and backflips oh-my. There was always a sense of pride in my belly those Thursday nights. I was teaching her something and I was doing it cleanly, kindly, successfully. She quit cheerleading after two seasons. 

I think, Abel, she is a better quitter than you and I combined. Perhaps you carpented the door and I opened it but she will be the one to walk through it. That is the nature of things I suppose—installments of three. Three generations to escape poverty, abuse; three children to lock up that violent womb for good. 

vi 

“I wanna bleed, I wanna hurt the way that boys do (oh) 

And maybe you're right and we should stop watchin' the news”

You know, there was a period of time where I was very angry with you, where my own rage and resentment crystallized and I keenly understood the motivations behind Cain’s brutalization of Abel. I did want to kill you and I entertained the idea night after night. In bed I drew up mental blueprints and practiced the violence I wanted to do unto you unto myself. I think this—this violence, fueled equally by dirty dishes left in the sink and misogynistic abuse—reflects back to me most keenly what it is to have a brother, more than the love, because the love is implicit; it is the undercurrent. It will be there whether you reject or accept it. The violence, though, must be admitted before it is violence. Until it is admitted it is part of the love. I hope you, presently or at some point in our past, want(ed) to kill me too. 

But then, in my obvious failure to act on these emotions, we stumble upon the contradiction in that hating you and wanting to kill you I kept you alive. You affected me and invaded my consciousness with floods of anger in the way only a teenage boy could and I suppose that is the essence of brotherhood. Our brotherhood at least, borne of that violent womb. 

Of course you ultimately were given this death despite my failure to literalize it. I prefer it this way even if we don’t speak. I like knowing you are out there; knowing the miserable spirit of our past has been killed and makes way for nothingness in its place. Perhaps we are best that way—or perhaps we are not. In such a case, there is a hole to fill, and we will make dirt. 

vii 

“Think of us inside 

Gardenias on the tile 

Where it makes no difference who held back from who” 

So in my pardoning of you I murdered you and it was written this way. There is no other version of this story. In preventing sepsis cauterization scorches the skin. In butchering Abel Cain momentarily triumphs. And so we, you and I, return to the bowing bridge—to the distinctly humanic realm of dissonance. Just as there is no alternative there is no satisfactory ending. All that exists is the certain truth we must snuff out the fire fraternal shame has lit within us and welcome contradiction as contrapuntalism. 

We are brothers with long legs good for running and rattled skulls good for suspension. In exoneration there is implied conviction. In death there is potential rebirth.

You and I don’t believe in God—we needn’t doctrine to delude ourselves onto the bowing bridge everyone ends up on at one point or another. It all comes in installments and it seemed ours was knocked loose when you collided with the turf in 2015—when I passed out at track practice—when we commenced our respective escapes—and will do so once again at which point we independently accept, whenever this should occur, our spot on the bowing bridge. 

It’s going to hurt, being there. We’re going to murder one another, brutally and kindly in our own ways, and we cannot circumvent that for essential to the bowing bridge is its eternality, its inevitability. I’m unsure if it will ever come full-circle, whether it is thankless or -ful. I’m unsure if I care because we are going to suffer regardless. 

Abel, we are deposited on the bowing bridge with a coded final message: I know part of it. I will never know all of it. I will write for and to you always and it is going to be terrible but that is the essence of fraternity and I refuse you as anything but my fratern—and of course this is love, and of course this is Hell.

About the Author

Riley James Russo is a sophomore creative writing student split between Ohio and Pennsylvania whose creative efforts mostly focus on depicting the horrors of the human condition.