Why, yes, yes I do believe it is my brother, Thoyt.
Well, he was always was a drama queen. Flouncing down the aisle of the church at our father’s funeral like the bride of death in his silly hat and coat. He used to burst into the dining room like that when he was a boy too. Door banging off the wall, fists thumping on the table, making the crockery jump and rattle and Brace fuss like an old woman; and why? Zilpha got more pudding than me. Who has all the pudding now, James? Who always really had all the pudding?
Yes, I might have gasped when I saw him, shouldering his way to the front of the church, enjoying the ooohs and ahhhs, but I know that my brother is an illusionist. Just the same as me: a facade. Except he has the privilege of being able to move freely throughout society, despite his protestations that we all make him sick, we are a disease, it’s all so false. He’s been saying that since he was 12, and it wasn’t his mad mother that planted that particular seed, it was our bloody father.
While he is master of his own destiny, I sit and seethe at my embroidery frame, trussed up in my corset, as Thorne witters on constantly about money, money, money and James Delaney. His only topic of conversation, and it is on the edge of my tongue, always: “Perhaps, dear husband, you should work this obsession out with my brother”. It would earn me a crack on the face but, oh worth it. Worth the iron tang of blood in my mouth, a loosened tooth or two. Thorne does not hold back, much like my brother in many ways. A freedom of the body as well as the soul. Not that any of that liberty extends to me. A bird in a gilded cage.
When he muttered his incantations over our father’s coffin, flicking his fancy dust into the grave, like a ladies powder puff, (a grave which was dug to exactly the right depth), I’d have been forgiven from stifling a laugh. What was this but another game of dress-up, just as he liked to play when we were children, only it was our father’s old clothes he would parade around in, not the outfit of a demon. Not that there is much difference.
There is no offer of freedom from you, dear brother. Not really. You think you open the door of my cage so I can hop out, a tame little canary onto your finger, but all you really bring me is another cage, woven by you from myths, half-truths, from those dark, oh so mysterious places you went to. A fretwork of your desire, which is to say, no desire at all, just a need to consume.
So you will forgive me if I do not welcome you back, brother. Perhaps you should have stayed adrift after all. All of us Delaneys are lost and you could have had the courtesy for it to remain literal as well as figurative.
