My brother called again and I didn’t answer, never answer. He always leaves a message. His reaching out has come to seem almost constant and I can’t. Just can’t. Not now—when we were little, we were tight as brothers ought to be.
Sam, a brother, same mother, same father. Sam, my brother, a man always needing connection, and I can’t do it. The struggle, if he only knew…I mean, I’ve tried, but it’s impossible to look at him in the way that’s right, because he’s not right. All I see is the blood and the tears and the compressed muscles and shattered bones.
But it’s constant from Sam and I’m too busy, too damn busy to reconcile my eyes and my heart. His incessant nature is a tight space I’ve been trying to climb out of. Helps that he’s useless and lazy. Helps that I don’t live close. Helps that I don’t need him the way he needs me.
When we were kids, he was different and I was different. I was big brother and he was little brother. He didn’t need money, didn’t ask advice, it was better, he looked for guidance and I needed him to need me.
“Think it’s safe, Gary?” he’d ask.
“Sure, it’s safe,” I’d say.
He’d puff his chest out, bravado budding. “Yeah, I thought it was. I was just seeing.”
I knew he was full of it, but he’d follow, blinders on to whatever. I did, then he did. That’s how it worked.
We grew up on a small farm in the south of Ontario. Dad always wanted to call it the Nelson Ranch. He liked the television ranches of his childhood, wanted to relive part of it, I think. Always a good time on a TV ranch. Nobody but Dad called it the Nelson Ranch. None of us saw it as such a good time.
Beef cows and cash crops: wheat and corn, plenty of hay. A lot of work and a lot of trouble for meagre remuneration. Despite its downsides, the farm gave us space to adventure and that was good. Boys thrive in room, at least people in the country like to say so and I’ve come to agree with them, but too much of anything might bring about a funeral.
The first week of summer break had come and both Mom and Dad had to work outside the farm at wage-paying jobs. The acres on the deed weren’t sufficient to sustain an entire family, not on labor alone. I thought those days Mom and Dad both worked off the property were great, it meant Sam and me had the place to ourselves. Sure, there was always work to do, but it didn’t eat up whole days, not even close.
Things happen early on a farm. You learn birth and death, you learn work and stress, but you also learn fun things too, shooting and driving and lighting fires. The summer I’d turned twelve—Sam was ten—we had an old Mercury truck we used around the property. Dad got it in exchange for some hay and cash. Must’ve been from the ‘sixties because it didn’t have seatbelts and only had one wiper. Rust and pale blue paint. It had a dumper bed on the back, meaning we could use it to pick stones. Meaning I had to learn how to drive a year before I ever sprouted hair from my armpits.
“Think it’s safe, Gary?”
“Sure, it’s safe,” I said fighting back my fear as we looked through the windshield, staring at the lip on the side of the laneway down the field. The ditch came up like a stubby halfpipe, offering air to the front end while the rear continued to push.
“Yeah, I thought it was safe. I was just seeing.”
I took a deep breath. “Right.” I floored it. I’d left a good seven hundred meters between the truck and the lip. The speedometer climbed. Trucks that old show miles rather than kilometers. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, forty-five, and then we hit the lip. The arc tilted us and we gazed at the clouds for a heartbeat before the back came up and we shot into the air. It felt like we flew.
Hell, we did fly.
Felt like that Mercury was an eagle.
We came down on the gravel and then dipped over onto the other side of the laneway, rolling into another field. “Woot, woot!” I hollered and Sam seconded the sentiment.
“How far do you think?” he asked, we’d come to a stop and looked out the back window at what we’d jumped.
I spied Sam, squint-thinking. His blue eyes were wide and eager. He turned to me and shook the mop of golden hair from his forehead.
“We got to jump something, then we’ll know,” I said.
“Yeah! Yeah!”
I started the truck back up and drove it to the barn. There were five-gallon pails that we used to feed grain and corn to the cows.
“What if we break them?” he asked as we were already coming back onto the spot with the highest lip.
Dad would tan our asses, that’s what. I knew he would, even if we only cracked the pails; he’d tan our asses for any old reason. “We break ‘em, we hide ‘em and hope Dad don’t notice for a while.”
The answer placated Sam. Three pails stood about two-feet high on the edge if the lane and I put the truck in position. From as far as we were, they were only shapes and colors. “Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!” Mimicking the voice on the monster truck commercials. “Monster Mercury on the stage!” I hit the gas pedal and got it all the way to forty-seven. We shot high over the pails and landed with a bang that rocked us around the cab. Sam slid across the seat, laughing and flailing his skinny, sunburnt arms.
“We got to see how long!” Sam was eager as it got. I thought the same and we hopped out of the truck and moved the pails. There was no more worry about tanned asses, this was for science.
How close to the sun does a phoenix need to get before it’s cooked?
Back in the position, I looked at Sam. I knew he was wondering, second-guessing, but he gulped it down. “Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!” he yelled.
“Monster Mercury on the stage!” I finished and floored it, we burned dirt, fifty even this time. Like eagles, but better, higher, and instead of stopping I wheeled around and bounced us back to our starting point in the hayfield—the very field our father wanted us picking stones out of.
I felt invincible when we glided over the laneway again—the back wheels hardly touched gravel. We needed a bigger challenge. “Not enough, not enough.” I shook the wheel. Adrenaline clouding my brain.
“What’ll we do?” Sam was just as excited. “Could put the bikes down.”
“Not enough, not enough.” I panted and an idea formed. The weekend earlier, Mom and Dad took us to the triple-feature at the drive-in. We hardly ever went anywhere on account of cost, so it was pretty awesome. The first two movies had been out for a three or four months, no big deal, but the last one was a blockbuster, fresh in the regular theater still. “Free Willy,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you be like the kid and the truck’ll be the whale. But you got to lay flat.”
“Think it’s safe?”
I didn’t even consider it. “Sure, it’s safe.”
“Yeah, I thought it was. I was just seeing,” he said, but his heart wasn’t in it, and he added, “You sure?”
“Sure am.”
“Yeah, I was just seeing.”
We moved the buckets so they formed a protective box around Sam, in case the truck did come down. I told him the buckets would hold should the truck land early. He nodded, looking like he felt better about it.
I was flying on something in my veins, it was like a drug, and I needed more.
How close does the phoenix need to fly before its wings burst into flames?
My guess, it smells it before it ever feels it.
I got into the position and from where I was, I could barely see Sam. “Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. Monster Mercury on the stage!” I hit the gas pedal and immediately slammed the brakes. The air caught in my chest and I thought I’d choked.
Looking around, gasping. Panic had never hit me in such a way, but I focused and got my breath back, told myself it was a false start. They happen sometimes, even at the big shows where the real monster trucks roll.
“Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. Monster Mercury on the stage!” My body had stiffened, foot still pinned on the brake.
Sam was flat out there and I accused myself of a lot of different things in those short seconds, but being a bigger chicken than my little brother did it. I slammed my foot down and moved the shifter into first and then second and then third. Flying again and Sam was so close. I saw his golden mop, his hands over his eyes. He didn’t want to see what I saw.
I’d only hit forty-two and I knew I was about to run him over. I imagined fat black tire prints covering him like a cartoon fall-guy. I imagined blood coming out of his ears, I imagined his questioning gaze as life fluttered away and fluid bubbled from his lips.
My body froze and my foot slid from the accelerator.
“Sam!”
What a mistake, a horrible mistake.
I hit the lip and met air, my speed: thirty-nine miles an hour.
My eyes snapped shut and my body loosened when I heard the crunch of the plastic pails. Tears welled and the truck came to a full landing. Those tears sprouted and I slammed the brakes, skidding in the far field. The truck stalled. I hyperventilated. I knew exactly what I’d see once I went to look: blood, rubber, insides. Intestines coiling and eyes burst like the cat run over by the neighbor’s truck.
I’d killed him!
I was his big brother and I’d killed him!
“Gary, you got a pail!” I heard a voice.
Sam’s ghost had already come to haunt me.
“You got a pail. Dad’s going to spank us.” Sam’s ghost was at my door.
I leaned away from the open window, couldn’t speak.
“Pretty cool though…worth it.” I could hear Sam nodding by the way his words went up and down, heard the way his tone changed as he looked back at the scene, retrospect in his voice. “You got dust in your eyes?”
Turned in my seat, I peered out behind me. Sam’s body wasn’t there. No dead boy. Nobody mangled by heavy old tires. Sam had lived. I wasn’t a murderer.
“Yeah, dust.” I wiped my eyes. “We should probably get picking. I’ll tell Dad I broke the pail myself.”
“Looks like maybe two’s broken.”
“I’ll say I did them both, wasn’t looking and run them over.” My face kept forward.
“You got them with the bed. I opened my eyes last second.”
“We best get at it though, stones I mean.”
Sam got into the truck. I finally looked at him. His face had two cracks running from forehead to jaw, gullies of gore. The blood had coagulated and turned to something like strawberry jelly. His left eye bulged and his right eye had been popped from its socket, dangling on tangled threads of sinew.
“I can say I distracted you ‘cause there was a deer.”
I swallowed a scream. We drove back, collected the pails and got to finding the big rocks. That night, Dad’s hand was sore, but not as sore as my butt. I told Sam not to say anything about the deer—part of me was so relieved my parents didn’t see what I saw when I looked at him that I welcomed my punishment.
—
When I turned sixteen and puberty and sex-drive had me a bit wayward from where my parents thought I ought to be, they sent me to live with my grandmother in Talbot, Alberta. It was just like home on the farm, but for more animals and the adults thought they had to work the demons out of me. Being away from Sam helped me settle and I laid off getting boozed up and looking for pot. I hung around other farm kids, we still drank and we all still fooled around with girls, but everything seemed more natural, less forced by a bad hand.
I found I could talk to Sam on the phone after a while. I remembered what his normal face looked like and thought I was cured until my aunt Susan died and at her funeral, I saw a teenaged Sam, falling apart from when I ran him over.
I’m thirty-four and he emails and calls. Life gets busy and I don’t need the image in my head distracting me; I just can’t look at him because I know that he isn’t my brother. My brother is dead, a smear on the laneway and that’s all he’ll ever be.
XX
Bio: In August 1984, Eddie Generous was born into a family born to shit the bed. He has a print-journalism diploma from a community college, which is important if he ever accepts one of the job offers to rewrite articles vomited out by AI technology. He was the first of his household to go to college—and first child to avoid institutionalization, thus far.
Currently, Eddie lives on the west coast of Canada with his wife and their three cats. He is the author of close to 40 standalone books, has edited 6 anthologies, and put together 19 issues of Unnerving Magazine.
More than 100 of his short stories have seen print in anthologies or magazines. He created and operates Unnerving, a small press responsible for publishing 85 titles and counting. He enjoys getting stoned and dancing around his living room.
For more about Eddie Generous, visit jiffypopandhorror.com
*FLYING THE MERCURY first appeared in Twisted Vine (2014)
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.
No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.
FLYING THE MERCURY © Eddie Generous