Itto and Mekiya Outini
It’s my eighteenth, and the axe is calling. And it’s my brother’s eighteenth, too. I know this even though I’ve never seen him, unless you count those fleeting glimpses over the fence between the yards, him planting, digging, pulling weeds, gazing off vacantly into the sky as my father and I pull in and cross the yard, our grocery bags wound round our arms. I could get over the fence if I wanted to, but the house was first divided, according to my father, and the axe is hungry for that first division.
My father taught me how to use it, how to set the blocks and swing so birds would startle from the trees, so I believed him when he said he’d teach me other things. Sometimes I hear my brother and his mother chopping wood on their side, so I know they also have an axe, a need for wood. It was too hard, according to my father, to divide the heating. Better to learn how to live off the land than to split the utilities. One side could’ve cranked the heat up in July to make the other suffer. One side could’ve left the water running just to make the other pay. The only way to keep the peace was by returning to the 1800s.
In town, I’ve seen electric lights, I’ve shivered in AC and sweated in winter, I’ve watched water spatter out of faucets and swirl around in toilet bowls. Just in case I ever have to make it in the world, I’m prepared. But my father doesn’t think I’ll have to. He says that all the world’s good for is supplies. He’s always worked so he can buy them, but he says it’s only habit, says it’s just as good to steal. Like hunting—stealing life—which he also said he’d teach me, and I really thought he would, only now I’m turning eighteen, and he’s gone, and I’ve never met my brother, never even seen his face, unless you count those fleeting glimpses, or my own face in the mirror, which might not count for all that much since he might have something I don’t have, like scars.
Your brother isn’t like you, says my father. He looks like you, but he’s not like you. You run into him, don’t try and talk to him. Or, what the hell, go ahead, try and talk to him if you want to. You wait till he opens his mouth. You’ll see.
Which I take to mean he’s missing teeth.
She could’ve made him like us, says my father. Like you. But she won’t. She’ll never. More than anything, she hates us. She could never stand to let him be like you.
My brother is the biggest mistake my father ever made. Getting him. Not making her get rid of him. Bringing her back here, to where we live now. Going down there in the first place, to the place he found her, crossing that border and roaming that country of whores who look and talk and smell like her—by which I guess he means the underworld. I’ve read about the underworld. Or else it’s the house—buying it with her, putting it in both their names—that’s the biggest mistake he ever made. What kind of idiot does a thing like that? he wonders, which leaves me feeling like it’s good that I’m there, otherwise he’d sound a little crazy, talking to the walls. And while I’m feeling that, he answers, gripping his bottle by the neck: a drunk one.
But what kind of drunken idiot stays to raise his child? What kind of drunken idiot works like a dog to keep him fed and sheltered? What kind of drunken idiot takes him into town and lets him get a load of all the craziness that’s out there, even brings him books so he can learn about the world? And the underworld? Would a drunken idiot teach himself everything, work with his hands, build walls and fences, firepits and wells, just to stay in the house that’s his? My father isn’t lazy like his father always used to call him. Whatever else he is.
Gone.
He’s gone.
At first, I thought it was just for the workday. Just like every other workday. But then his goneness lingered on. It spread through evening into night, stretching like a shadow toward the witching hour. The house was so still, I could hear through the wall that my brother existed. And also his mother. Still there. With each other. Which meant they were hearing each other. Not me.
It was everywhere by morning: a colorless, odorless, bottomless sort of gone. You’d think my first question would’ve been where he was, what happened to him, whether he was coming back. But it wasn’t. I already knew that he wasn’t.
My first question was why I was there.
And then my second question: if this was happening to me on my eighteenth, then why was it not also happening to him? Why was she still there?
My third question was about his face.
That’s why the axe is calling me.
That’s why it’s in my hands.
Through the living room runs the plywood curtain. I don’t pause to ask myself what he’ll think, or do, or say. I close my eyes and howl, throw myself into the swing. I can feel my brother waiting on the other side. Everything my father ever said to me is true, or true enough: the two of us are not the same. If we were, he would be over there swinging too.
The wall becomes a wound. The wound becomes a jagged window. And then the window is a door. He’s facing me, just like a full-length mirror. Instead of wide, his eyes are narrowed, maybe against the flying woodchips and the dust I’ve raised. His hands hang axe-less, empty, at his sides.
I kick the bottom of the hole I’ve made a little wider. A chunk of plywood flies into the other living room and vanishes beneath a chest of drawers. My axe is heavy. It drags like his would if he had one as I duck through, scratching on the hardwood.
We stand facing each other. My eyes sting with dust, but I don’t dare to blink. Liquid is creeping in, making him warp and blur. I don’t know what to say to him.
I say, “Happy birthday.”
He says nothing.
“Happy birthday,” I say once more. “Happy birthday.”
He opens his mouth, but what comes out…it isn’t words. It’s a stream sounds, but they’re moving too fast, like words, but not like words, not meaning anything, not like anything I’ve ever heard.
There seems to be nothing wrong with his teeth.
“What?” I say. I feel the hot frustration like a snake behind my eyes. It’s almost like he’s mocking me, but I can’t make out how or why. Which makes it worse. “What the hell?” I snarl. “What the hell are you saying? Is that how you say happy birthday?”
He cocks his head. I am reminded of a bird.
With a stomp, I raise more dust, a suffocating cloud. “Happy birthday,” I say. “Happy birthday, goddammit. Happy birthday! Tell me happy birthday!”
And then there’s no more axe. There’s nothing in my hands.
My head jerks to the left as if tugged by a string, so hard that my neck almost torques—and there she is. A bronze face. Brilliant eyes, emerald green. Cheekbones as high as plateaus. Hair flowing out from her in great, dark, buoyant waves. She grips the axe she’s taken from me, not as if she doesn’t know how her way around a blade, but as if she is distracted by the image at which she is gazing, the mirror of her son.
When she speaks—to him, of course—it’s those same incoherent sounds, more like music than words, except that something tells me there actually are words, that they’re hiding inside the sounds; or maybe it’s the meaning that’s hiding, escaped from the words.
He says something back to her. I stand in the swirling dust motes, my flesh prickling as the particulates land, wanting to track what I’m hearing, to follow, to comprehend. There’s still a wall between us, and the axe is useless.
She extends a hand.
Hesitantly, as if uncertain whether he believes in this motion, my brother reaches out and takes the axe from her.
Her head bobs. Almost indiscernibly. And then she’s gone, vanishing through a doorway into some other part of the house, or the yard, or the world, leaving the three of us there, alone: my brother, the axe, and me.
His eyes cut the air, the dust, and lock on mine. And finally, I am seeing him. And he is seeing me.
ITTO AND MEKIYA OUTINI write about America, Morocco, and all those caught in between. They’ve published in The North American Review, Fourth Genre, Chautauqua, MQR, CommuterLit, Modern Literature, Lunch Ticket, Hobart, New Contrast, Eunoia Review, Gargoyle Magazine, and elsewhere, and their work has received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship Program, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the New York Mills Cultural Center, and the Fulbright Program. They’re collaborating on several books, running an author support platform, and co-hosting a podcast about literature and the arts, Let’s Have a Renaissance (https://www.youtube.com/@TheDateKeepers).