Page 51 - HEF Pen & Ink 2020

GRAND CANYON CROOKED
by Aaron Robinson by Miya Nettleton
BROTHERS IN ARMS
by Anna Ries-Roncalli
Fifteen days after our older brother, Giuseppe, died in the war, my twin, Giacomo, took his own life. He’d always been the most delicate of us and the war had hit him harder than most, but he was still happy. He still knew how to have fun. No one had expected this. No one had heard his tears in the middle of the night, the strangled cry of him choking himself with his pain. No one had heard him chanting fervently to himself every spare minute, prayers for mercy, prayers begging the Lord to save him. No one had seen that fraction of a moment where his face crumpled and his eyes cleared as he shed the mask he wore to achieve a semblance of normalcy, shed the mask to reveal his true self, a shadow of the man he once was being swal- lowed by the inferno inside. No one except me.
Giacomo had a habit of saving people. He saved me from countless fights when we were young and saved my life countless times on the battlefield.
“Battista,” he would always say. “Nothing is too broken that it can’t be fixed.” I would always laugh it off, him and his crazy ideas.
“What about that mirror?” I would ask. “If I were to take that mirror and break it into a million pieces, you would be able to put it back together?” But he would always just smile at me like he knew something I
didn’t. He was always doing that. Although we were the same age, Giacomo was ahead of me in practically every sense. His brain blazed hot and bright like a star you could still see from millions of miles away. Mine, on the other hand, smoldered, still burning but unable to give off heat. Our mother held big dreams for him, away from Sotto il Monte, away from us, away from everything we knew. Specifically, she dreamt of priest- hood, the greatest honor that could be bestowed on any family, its shining hypocrisy glittered rather seduc- tively with hope and the promise of salvation.
49