Blood Brothers

Thoughts raced through my mind faster than my footsteps along the sidewalk. Had Mikey changed his mind halfway there? Was he threatening Frank already? Was Frank still alive?

We reached city hall in a few minutes as cold, steely rain began to fall, plastering my hair to my forehead and soaking me completely. It was eerily silent within, giving me the feeling that I needed to prepare myself for the worst. When we entered, Ms. Way led me to Frank’s office, knowing precisely where it was. The door was open when we approached it.

“I thought we were friends, Frankie,” Mikey said with a quivering tone. “Hell, you were supposed to be my brother, right? My blood brother.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” Frank said calmly, though his eyes betrayed him and showed his fear. “Just put the gun down.”

“You listen to me!” Mikey shouted, waving the gun in Frank’s direction and making the man jump. “You’ve had everything handed to you on a silver platter your entire life, and what do I get? I get nothing. And then…” He glanced at Alicia, sneering in her direction as she stood frozen in one corner, terrified of what he had become. “Then you have the audacity to take away the one thing I do have! What, your little skank of a wife not good enough for you? Had to take mine too?!”

The wailing of sirens outside caught everyone’s attention, cutting through the seemingly impenetrable wall of water and wind. I thought about trying to tackle Mikey and get the gun away from him, but it was too risky.

“This is the police. We have the building surrounded,” said a voice amplified through a bullhorn. “Just put the gun down and we can end this all right now.” I glanced through a crack in the blinds and saw several gunmen with their weapons pointed up towards the building. Towards the window.

At Mikey.

“Mikey, just calm down,” Frank said quietly, holding his hands up defensively. “I don’t know where you got that idea, but it’s not true. I would never want to hurt you.”

Mikey gave a cruel, laconic laugh and raised the gun. “Too bad I can’t say the same.”

“Mikey!” Ms. Way cried. “Don’t shoot Frank, please! He’s…” She swallowed nervously, eyes full of reproach. “He’s your brother.”

“What?” Mikey said incredulously. She nodded gravely and spoke shakily, her voice threatening to crack and give way to the tears trapped inside.

“You had a twin brother…I couldn’t afford to keep the both of you. His mother couldn’t have kids, so I…I agreed to give one of you away.” She could take it no longer and started crying softly. Mikey lowered the gun slowly, painfully, and looked between Frank and his mother with glassy eyes, the eyes of a man whose life has fallen to pieces around him.

“Oh, mom,” he said quietly, as if trying to comfort her. His tone suddenly turned cruel. “Why didn’t you give me away, mom? I could’ve been…I could’ve been him!”

He flailed the weapon towards Frank in his anger. The bullet exploded from the barrel before anyone had time to push the man out of the way. He collapsed backwards as a second bullet soared through the plate-glass window and into Mikey’s heart. Both of them fell to the floor simultaneously, and the decimation was complete.

“…No…”

Ms. Way took one tentative step forward, her eyes brimming with tears as she looked down upon her sons.

“…No…This can’t be happening…” She suddenly collapsed to her knees, sobbing with her face in her hands. Alicia joined her, wrapping her in a half-embrace as she allowed herself to cry for her friends. The rain had diminished into a quiet patter of drops outside, no louder than the steps of a ballerina, as if the sky itself was showing respect for their undeserved deaths.

“Tell me it’s not true…”

I watched silently as the next set of events played out before me. My ears still rang from the simultaneous gunshots, and I could see Mikey and Frank falling to the ground again and again, as if it would never go away. They had been standing there only a moment earlier.

And then it was as if the world backed up to that moment on the beach when, at the young age of eighteen, Frank had announced he would be leaving them for a while.

Or when they were just seven years old and couldn’t decide what game to play, and Gerard threw dirt into Alicia’s face and Mikey defended her from his big brother.

Or even when they had just been born and their mother had to make the difficult decision to separate them in the first place, a choice she would have to live with every day until their death.

The police arrived and covered the bodies with clean, white sheets to hide their screaming faces and exposed eyes of the same color. I slipped away from the scene, not wanting to give Ms. Way a grim goodbye as a reminder of me. It was time I moved on from this story and let the ending play out as I had always known it would.

Once I arrived home, a deep sigh drew itself from my lungs, almost in a show of relief. An invisible force brought the pen to my hand and the paper to my desk, and I wrote my last poem as the shattering rain picked up again.

And do we blame superstition for what came to pass?
Or could it be the thing that we have come to know as class?

Did you ever hear the story of the two Way twins?
As like each other as two new pins
How one was kept and one given away
How they were born and they died
On the self same day?