Dead Colorado

      I laid there. Almost as if I was dead. Even under four layers of blankets, the coldness of the mountains still managed to find a way to my pale flesh. The sheets were stale with the bitter frost. I could hear my brother outside my room, down the hall, in the kitchen.  The faint footsteps could be heard clearly due to the dead-quiet of our cabin. I hated it.

         My mom, brother, and I moved here about 2 months ago from Flagstaff, Arizona. Our dad was killed in the house fire that the investigation team claimed was accidental. I got pulled out of class and met up with Robby in the school office while we waited for our mom to come pick us up. We had no idea what was happening. Apparently, there was a towel stuck in the oven door and it ignited. The towel burned up to the stack of notebooks and papers that I accidentally left on the counter. It all evolved into a roaring flame that would eventually take down the house and our dad.

         So here we were. Robby, mother, and me in the desolate mountains of Colorado. I once asked mom “Why Colorado?” She said that she thought we’d be safer if we weren’t around all the bad things in life.  I went to Macarthur Middle School and Robby went to Macarthur High. It was a typical school. Nothing exciting ever happened there. Nothing exciting ever really happened in the whole town down in the valley. The adults went to work. The kids went to school. They got home. They ate dinner. They slept. Everyone was always chained to their schedule. Being spontaneous was unheard of. Everyone was dull. Macarthur was dull. Colorado was dull. Everything, dull.

      My thoughts were distracted by the slamming of the closet door. Robby must’ve gotten his jacket. I decided to follow him. It was Saturday and I had nowhere to go. Robby and I never really got along. We weren’t like the get-along kind of brothers you’d see in movies who talked to each other whenever they needed help. We weren’t the kind who fought about everything either.  Neither one of us really acknowledged the other.  We just lived our lives as strangers who happened to be related. Close yet far. Near yet distant.

          Mom was out working at the steel factory by the time we woke up. We didn’t know what she did exactly but we didn’t seem to care. Her schedule made it hard for us to ever really see her. I think she liked it like that. She seemed to try and hide from her own kids so we didn’t see what she really did. We knew but we never saw. She became addicted to heroin right after dad had passed. First it was minimal but gradually it increased to potentially lethal doses. Her screams of anxiety would pierce our ears at night when there were no drugs in the cabin. She made sure this didn’t happen often by keeping a large supply hidden in a little groove in the corner of her room. Whenever she would feel pain or stress, she’d always have the bubbling liquid to take all the problems away.

        He was about 20 feet out the door when I finished putting my boots on and started behind him. He gave me a what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-following-me look but then formed an expression on his face that appeared as consent of going with him. The sky was grey. Pure clouds. I haven’t seen the sun up here in a while. It’s either grey and cloudy or dark and snowy. It didn’t bother me too much though. I got used to the dreary mood in the air. We headed out into the woods where there was a lake about a mile ahead. No words were spoken. The whisper of the air was loud enough.

         Being with him like this didn’t really feel awkward. It was just kind of like well I don’t know. It didn’t really matter how it felt I guess. It was just somewhere to go. Someone to be with. We were passing this little creek that ran down from the top of the mountain. He sat down on a rock at the edge of the creek and looked at me. It wasn’t an angered or even annoyed kind of look. His eyes stared at me as if he wanted me to understand something. I didn’t know exactly what it was I was supposed to get. His eyes gave up and shot a glance at the flowing water.

         We sat there for twenty minutes. I thought about the project that was due tomorrow that I managed to put off three whole weeks. I though about Robby and why we could never talk. I thought about dad and what he would be doing right this second.

“Hey kiddo!” shouted dad from behind the tree.
“DAD! What are you doing here?”
The ghostly figure looked confused as if he didn’t know how to answer my question. “I’ve missed you. That’s all”
“Look Robby! Dad’s here! He misses us! He’s come back.” I shouted blissfully to my brother.
“That shit’s not funny. What are you trying to do? Dad’s dead. He’s never coming back. You think he misses you?!?! He doesn’t miss any of this. He hated mom. He never spent time with us. He’s dead. Dead.”

I turned to dad to look for an answer. He was nowhere to be found. I looked all over. Robby had gotten up and continued walking north.

         I thought about what Robby had said. Sure, mom and dad fought a lot but I don’t exactly think that he hated her. Why wouldn’t he miss me? We used to spend hours just playing catch in the yard when I was little. I’m still here and I miss that. I miss the memories. Everything just rushed into me all at once. The family vacations up north. Picnics at the park. Movie nights every Thursday. I missed all of it. Somehow, I believed that they would all come back. As if I could just wish really hard, those days would be here again. I knew deep down that this wouldn’t happen though. Never. No matter how hard I wished, things would be different. They changed. They always have and they always will. It’s a cycle of life.

         I slowed my steps behind my brother. I was afraid that if I got too close, he’d turn around and yell at me. Even though I was a good distance behind him, I could hear is soft whimper of tears. I started to cry in sync with him. Unlike Robby, I didn’t have a reason to cry. I cried because he was sad. He cried because of things I didn’t even know about. The trail of the tears warmed my frozen cheeks. The drops trickled down onto the forest floor and absorbed into the ground. He sat down again.

“Why are you following me?”
“I wanted to go with you. There’s nothing to do at home.” I replied
“That’s your problem. So what was with that whole ‘seeing dad’ thing back there”
“I swore I saw him. He was standing behind the tree. So you didn’t see him”
“No. I did see him outside of school one day though.” He admitted
“Did he say anything to you?”
“No, he just kinda stood there and watched me. It was weird”

         He pulled out a tube that was attached to a chain around his neck. He put it up to his nose and snorted it into his right nostril. He’s been doing coke for a while now. Probably around 6 months now. Mom knew about it. She never said anything to him though. I think she was scared of being called a hypocrite. She hated that word.
The stranger known as my brother just kind of sat there for a while. He closed his eyes and then opened them to look directly at me. Before I was going to ask him something he got up and I followed. The trees around us stood still. The air was still. There were no little rodents in sight. It was dead. We were in a dying town and there was nothing we could do about it. Nothing except sit back and watch it rot into nothing. We knew there was nothing to look forward to. All we had was ourselves. Neither one of us was academically proficient and had below-average grades. It’s not that we didn’t know the stuff. It’s that we didn’t give a shit.

We were approaching the lake.

         Walking a little bit closer now, I was still trying to understand him. I somehow knew that he was attempting to understand himself as well. I could see the lake up ahead. The white ice coating above the water made it appear as a flat clearing that was just placed in the middle of a dying forest. A dying forest in the middle of dying mountains. Dying mountains in the middle of a dying world. The end was inevitable. Who’s to say the end of the world is a bad thing. For every end, there is a beginning. For every beginning, there is an end. The wipeout of this culture allows for a new and innocent culture to arise.

         He stepped onto the ice about 5 feet ahead of me not caring whether it would give out or stay strong. I was a little more cautious than my stranger relative. His paced slowed down a bit. Robby approached to what seemed to be about the middle of the frozen lake. He just stood there completely still as if he himself were dead. His head turned around so I could only see part of his face. His mouth grinned a bit. It wasn’t a happy grin. It seemed like an evil one. A grin that would haunt me. He lifted his leg up and stomped a large hole in the ice. I would’ve thought it would take more of a force but he still managed to give a forceful impact.

“Goodbye” he said.
    I ran to him to try and stop him but I was too late.  He plunged into the water and I dropped to my knees. I wiped off the snow to try to find his face beneath the shield of ice. I used my hand to brush some more snow off and saw his dissolving face sink to the bottom. He still had his grin plastered on. I cried out for help. I knew no one could hear yet I still cried. I cried and cried and cried while my brother faded away.