TWO BROTHERS WAS PUBLISHED IN THE HIGH HORSE, EDITED BY EMMA JACKSON AND ISABEL WAIDNER, 2007

The sun is at its highest. Mingled with dusty sand, sweat moves over my lips and into my mouth. I taste the comfort of my own salt and behind it the alien salt of the water as I push forward. The shallows fall away to a darker expanse, My head bobs under with each stroke. A second of blur, then up to air, then under. Up.

 I slow down and linger, treading water, sinking so that my ears are below the surface and eyes above it. Beneath I can hear a distant speedboat like a wasp. Some distance in front I can see Gregory Taylor’s narrow ginger head. His wet hair is plastered over his skull like a tight shining helmet. He’s in the deep darker water, nearly at the raft.

 It doesn’t ever move, it isn’t a boat. It’s a large square. It bobs on the late afternoon ripples. The paint peels. A faded canopy is held up by poles at each corner. A small ladder will take you from the sea two feet up the solid poles onto the deck, but I don’t remember anyone ever climbing up. It’s under that people go, though only some. I don’t. The sealed air has been under there for years, people say it’s green and poisonous. He fills his lungs before disappearing under.

 In the classroom, I watched him stroke a spoon until it gave way and bent. He told me he once fought a shark. I knew it wasn’t true. His voice was a rasping whisper, like thin paper. His bony fingers were freckled. One of these afternoons when the heat made everything muffled, we found a fat cicada buzzing in the dry grey bark of a tree. He pulled off its wings and we held it in our cupped hands. It vibrated between us like a heart.

 We looked so alike that the teachers called us the terrible twins. He wasn’t my brother. He was a triplet. In the afternoons their mother would lock us out of the house, spilling us all into the harsh sunlight for hours. The other brother is a distant shape to me. The sister was called Samantha. She had the same feral hoarse voice and she would whisper to us from a distance, excluded from our sealed world and at a loss in the vast afternoon.

 He comes up gasping, swimming lopsided because he has something in his left hand. We both peer as the wrinkled fingers unfurl. A spiny seahorse. Back on the beach we shiver, our long torsos are the same.