Anna Peerbolt worked as a copywriter and journalist before turning her hand to fiction. Her work has appeared in Drunken Boat, Aoife's Kiss, Prick of the Spindle, Apollo's Lyre, Luna Station Quarterly, and Ink-Filled Page. She lives in Oregon with her husband, a cat and a dog, and works as a web designer and bookkeeper in order to keep the left and right brains functioning.

Janet finds there's no getting back from having never left (January 20, 2011. Issue 24.)

My brother Michael is a human table. He kneels for hours at Evenson's Art Gallery on Polk Street in North Portland, his black hair fallen over his forehead. He says, “Staying still feels good.” I think he's crazy, but then he's always been odd, even when he was a kid.

When Michael was eight and I was fifteen, he used to make coffins out of shoe boxes. He'd take Kleenex and pad the boxes and lay his transformer toys in them. “They died protecting me,” he told me. The toys, with their huge shoulders, knees, and clunky feet, stared up at us. “Thank you,” he said, as he put the box tops on. He buried the boxes in our mother's vegetable garden, scrapping away the dirt under the zucchini plants, because, as he patiently explained to me, “She won't see I've messed with the ground there.”

At fifteen, I was determined to escape from North Portland and figured that if I worked for a travel agent, I could go to lots of exotic places and find hotels for people. I'd seen a movie where Cameron Ditz, or someone else, did that. I spent part of my tenth grade year trying to memorize a list of country capitols: Argentina, Buenos Aires; Botswana, Gaborone; Canada, Ottawa; Iceland, Reykjavik. I never got beyond the I’s. The rest of the year I watched my mother watch my father drink. She tried throwing the bottles out. I think he hit her once, but she'd never say so, and he was really nice after that for awhile.

That summer we went on a trip to Washington, D.C., and we made a stop at Gettysburg. Michael insisted on counting all the tombstones, and our father finally grabbed him by one arm and marched him back to the car. It upset Michael, but it was worse for me because I had to sit in the back seat with him and he kept crying about all those dead people until our father said, “If you don’t stop that goddamn noise I’ll give you something to really cry about!”

A couple of months later, when I was a senior in high school, my father crashed into a bridge abutment, blind drunk. He was in the hospital for a day or so before he died. Michael was ten by then and, although he'd stopped burying his toys, he still was fascinated by death.

“Will they put him on a slab?” he asked me. “You know, cut him open and look at his insides?” I didn't think so, but I wasn't sure. What I was sure about was that with him dead, Mom was going to have to go to work and it made her mad as hell, as she said often enough. “You can get a job, too, Janet,” she said to me. “Help out once in a while.” As if I'd never helped. I did the dishes lots of times.

That winter, coming home from work in the rain, I was walking from the bus stop fast with my purse over my hair when I saw Michael standing in the middle of the street. “Hey!” I yelled at him. He turned his head and looked at me. “Hey, Michael, get out of the street!” He just stood there. By the time I got to him, two cars had swerved around him. I was shaking with anger and fear, and I had to drag him to the sidewalk. He didn't say anything all the time. But, when I started for the front door, he pushed me aside. “No,” he said. “Don't.” But, of course, I had to. Mom was in the kitchen on the floor, and the blood from her gaping wrists was pooling beside her.

After the ambulance took Mom off to the hospital, I told Michael we had to follow. “No, we don't,” he said.

“It's what people do, Michael. I've seen it on TV. Someone does what she did and the family wait in the waiting room until—well, until.”

But he was right; there was no reason to follow. She was DOA, as they also say in TV shows. This time, Michael didn't ask about the slab or cutting her open or anything about death, he just put his head in my lap and went to sleep. That's when I realized I'm all Michael's got, and he can't go very far from home. I tried to remember the capitol of Botswana and couldn’t.