O:JA&L Flash Nonfiction
Personal Essay/Memoir/Vignette
Anya Connelly-Howland
Pyre
My brother Paul is a ghost. He floated in to raise us when my mother and father were wrapped up in graveyard shifts and waves of depression. Our house was cold and empty, but there he was, biological cousin promoted to brother, wielding love as he created dinners after working long hours at the IRS in Fresno. I can still feel the coolness of the empty white plate as I held it to my face, impatient, hungry. I learned that garlic, red wine, and onion were integral to any red sauce and that the pan must be hot before you add any oil. Each step drew me closer to a full stomach as delicious aromas rose up and transformed the air. Here was Paul, laughing as he took kielbasa and cut each section on a bias before tossing the pieces into a pot, bubbling and popping, the sausage melding with the succulent scarlet sauce. Paul’s birth father never cooked for him, and beat him to near death at age four.
Paul was enamored by the ancient Cossack warriors of Ukraine; he sketched fighters with shaved heads and long braids by fluorescent lights and the glow of the moon. When the forgiving nocturnal winds of May whispered through the Central Valley, Paul taught my younger brother and me how to play Dungeons and Dragons. He was the sculptor of our imaginations, and as my kid brother and I clumsily rolled dice for character stats, he eloquently scratched emerald worlds by blending maps of black mountains and lapis oceans. The creatures that lived in these places were happy.
I was twelve when I took the call. My aunt sobbed wildly on the phone that her son Paul had been stabbed and almost killed by his wife. Soon, Paul would be lying in my parents’ living room as my mother, a nurse, expertly unpacked and packed the large hole in his midsection with a gloved hand after he acquired an infection from the surgical repair. As she pulled out each gauze square, I knew his wound wasn’t healing, that it would never be enough. I don’t blame him for getting addicted to pain pills, but I’m sorry that they never helped.
At 17, I decided to take off in the middle of the night, jumped into a car with a guy from Visalia who I barely knew. The next thing I knew, we were on the freeway, driving to Fresno. He had taken me against my will to his house, and tried to have sex with me. I refused, so he became angry and left. I was alone and knew I needed to call someone to come get me, if I could only find a phone. I can’t recall what the street names were, but I ran out of the house and located them; the two names that held me hostage. I called Paul, and he drove up the 99 and found me. I was frantic, wringing my hands and ashamed, and had been suicidal because I had come out as bisexual a few days earlier. Now I was safe with my brother, so I disclosed everything to him. He smiled as he told me that death was far, and that someday, I would be able to find peace with my sexuality. Paul must have seen a glimmer of my smile because then, laughter bubbled out of him as he joked about the funeral that he wanted, when his body was twisted and silver from a life well lived. He wished to be set ablaze.
Paul died in the summer of 2023, when the moon was full and charged with chaos. His fentanyl dealer dumped him off at the ER entrance at Clovis Community and fled. Paul waited, cold and lifeless in the bereavement room, but I often wonder if his spirit hovered over his body, surprised or bewildered at the thought of dying so young and alone. I went to my aunt, his mother, in the nursing home and told her that he was gone.
“Where did he go?” she asked.
Paul transported me to another realm when he would play games with us, and perhaps that place was one he created for me to remember and return to in my deepest moments of grief. Green hills and azure skies. Black horses and scaly gray fish. Wide pits dug deep into the earth, lined with Slavic warriors, bears, and spears. Blood and fire and ash.
About the writer:
Anya Connelly-Howland is an English Professor at Reedley College. Currently, she is an MFA student with a focus in CNF at California State University, Fresno. Her work has appeared in Calaveras Station Literary Journal and The Squib.
Image: Kozak Mamay by Pavlo Mikheyev (contemporary). Oil on canvas. No size specified. 2024. By free license.
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