The Petrichor Gazette

Now it hangs, half-empty, from my hand as I rot in the desert. If I lay here any longer I might decompose. The vultures would swoop down and feast upon my bones. Pull strips of flesh from my person, smack upon my eyeballs. It is a macabre thought, a comforting one. Morbidity is my only respite from the bleary Hell that is your ghost. You have this photograph in your wallet, of your parents when they were about our age. Your mother looks as lovely as you, though your father looms over her fine shoulder like some terrible beast. His eyes are vacant and framed by dark smudges for eyebrows. I always pitied your mother in that photograph. To have to coexist with someone so unpleasant, to share a photograph with him. You would slip out the photograph when you were drunk, let it dangle blithely from your fingers. But you studied it with importance, and your boyish face would turn into a sinister imitation of him within moments of its appearance. I’m not sure if you were aware of your fascination with your father. Sometimes you told me stories about him, spinning the atrocities he inflicted upon your family into silly little tales of clownery. The broken bones that never healed quite right, the cigarette burns along your

arms, each told as just common household occurrences. Your wrist still jutted out at an angle. You left home at thirteen, so why are you still desperate to please him a decade later? Why are you still so angry? And yet I cannot deny my own equivalence. I suppose you were always kind of holy to me, a beautiful brother I never had. A lanky, wolfish deity outfitted with a chipped tooth smile and skin that appeared stretched too thin over your bones. My longing was, is, infinite. A starving dog salivating over a hunk of meat, a knowing lamb kneeling for the slaughter. I am not naive. I can see myself reflected in your fatherly pining, how even your most awful qualities appeared edged with perfection. My anger towards

you could never surmount my love, my yearning. Since the moment we arrived, Tombstone was different. Every other town we visited had a hedonistic sheen over it, men dripping in grease and women, those hunting for some Western fortune drinking their money away. Tombstone seemed disheveled in comparison. Less ascetic than frighteningly human. Dying

out.