Braden Schwim sat before undeserving ears with a mouthful of words that wouldn’t be spoken that afternoon. He didn’t want to talk about what Dr. Tarquinn wanted him to talk about; he had significantly more substantial issues before him that made his hands and feet feel as cold and hard as those of a corpse. In fact, this was a situation far more immobilizing than death. Forty-seven hours and fifty-two minutes until he had to face it. Her problem, on the other hand, he’d been dealing with for the past six months.

What would he do if he ever got there? His sister, Brenna, would be there too, with her armfuls of literature and theory in tow. Braden would be coveting them disdainfully as he gripped his neuroscience handbooks with suffocating force.

The dark glasses that Dr. Tarquinn wore prevented Braden from looking into her eyes, so he settled for her mouth. He watched her with mocking intent as the bullshit spat from her collagen stuffed lips at 500 miles an hour.

He’d read all of them, Brenna’s summer assignments, and they consumed him more completely than anything he’d read before. His thoughts regarding them were incomprehensible, most of them even to him, but they were a part of a conversation that he needed to be having. The same questions kept being asked he’d begun to feel like he was the only person who could even begin to answer them. He just needed to be in the right place; a place, he’d decided only too late, that was not the laboratory.

Dr. Tarquinn’s accusations continued without regard for their target. She was still talking about his parents, an issue that, for him, had been resolved forever ago. Telling her this would have been like trying to explain the divest joke from A Tale of A Tub to someone who had no experience in Latin. Braden considered the options before him and decided to remain silent, to continue to hold his words until they could be appropriately realized.

It had happened last summer. He could still remember that it had begun with a pain in his fingers— or maybe a sensation would be a more appropriate way to describe it—the pain only relative to the outcome of the sensation once the action that arose from it was complete.

It never occurred to him that he would actually follow through with it when he began. It was nothing more than a thought that became actualized as he pictured each movement in his mind. As if the figuring of the words in his brain were enough to make them real. Like reading a work of fiction so great that the pictures just appear before you as you read—like that, only much more real, much more deadly. Before he had time to realize what he was doing the completion of the thought became the completion of the action.

While Braden sat with Dr. Tarquinn, Brenna was a few doors down with Detective Krug. “It wasn’t the first time” Brenna said to the detective, watching him with the same cool blue eyes he’d seen in Braden earlier that morning. “He wrote an article in the school paper, about something he’d done that was sort of similar. Nobody made the connection, but I knew. It didn’t seem so strange then. Though, in some ways, it was just as violent.”

Detective Krug watched as Brenna fingered the hem of her left pant leg, which was folded across her right knee in a way that seemed too masculine, too lacking in the grace that her body at first presented . Her fingers, he noticed immediately, were different from those of the murderer. Though they both carried the same short stature in their bodies, her fingers were long and slender, beautiful.

“It was connected in a way to the events of his life at the time,” she continued. Krug leaned in, waiting to hear the description of the event, reacting internally to his desire to watch the train wreck over again. Not the part of the wreck that meant most to her; or the part that probably should have meant the most to him—the emotional reaction to losing her parents. He leaned in to hear about the part that would turn necks in traffic; the part that would bring hands to eyes if seen in movie theaters; the gruesome part; the murder that he had already heard all about.

She kept the detective waiting. He watched her, which brought some small relief from his morbid curiosity. “I figured it was a reaction to that.” Brenna finally continued. “I figured that he, and I, had suffered enough that year, that we didn’t need any more negative attention coming our way. I brushed it off because I thought that it would never happen again. I dealt with it by writing about it.”

She paused and snorted, or laughed, almost, and Krug wondered what words would come next from the little published, but still published, writer who had lived in her brother’s shadow for the past decade.

Brenna related her moods through her involvements; not in her actions so much, that was her brother’s agenda, but in everything she did: her music, her writing, what she chose to do in any given day, what she ate, what she drank, what she happened to read, or smoke, all were in some way indicative of what she was feeling at a particular moment. Not in a normal way, certainly all people do this to an extent, but in a manner that always seem calculated, so that you knew, for sure, exactly what she was feeling if you knew her at all. God could have set his watch to Brenna’s habits.

That was that case, at least, until the murder. Then Brenna became a different kind of predictable. A kind of predictable that, if handled appropriately, would be the key to convicting her brother, the person with whom she’d shared a womb, of the murder of their parents.

© 2008 Alix Purcell