My brother and I attempt awkward conversation at a Chinese restaurant near the dive motel where he lives. I try not to stare at his teeth: gray, chipped, missing. Dark, square caves in his mouth. How to get him to a dentist? He rarely leaves his motel room. I’ve been obsessed with those teeth since I saw him last month, first time in nearly a decade. After hospitalizations for his psychosis, after failed rehab treatments, after slides back into alcohol and drugs and living on the streets, I had to let go for a long time. We speak haltingly to each other over our scallion pancakes, Lo Mein, and eggplant. My brother is polite and hard to understand. I ask him if he still has his sci fi card deck. He pulls the ace of spades from his wallet and sets it on the table. Inside the ace, there is a mechanical bird in a cage, turquoise, gold, and purple, head held up, beak open. He pushes the card toward me. “Take a gander,” he says, then leaves briefly to use the restroom. Both wallet and card are grimy, torn.  My brother’s only forty-six, but he moves like he’s eighty.

***

When my brother was seventeen, he and a security guard hired by our parents played gin rummy all night in our home; the hospital wouldn’t have a bed free until morning. They played with his deck of sci fi cards, a birthday gift from way back when our parents were so proud of his sci fi obsession, those awards he won for his stories and art. That night I alternated between tossing in bed, having fitful dreams, and spying on my brother and the security guard. My exhausted parents’ door was locked. It had been so long since they’d had a decent night’s sleep. After the ambulance took my brother away the next morning, the security guard said, “Your brother’s got a great sense of humor. He said we should be playing Crazy Eights.”

***

When my brother refuses to let the motel management clean or enter his room, when county health removes most of his belongings, including his tattered sci fi book collection, when I learn that he has disappeared, when I put out feelers to the shelters and soup kitchens and no one has seen him, there is nothing to do but file a missing person report and wait. And wait. When the phone call comes—four months later— there is nothing to do but listen. His body: found in some blankets under bushes near a homeless encampment. “He was kind,” says the woman who found him. It was a heart attack. No drugs or alcohol in his system. No wallet or I.D. His childhood dental records identified him. In his pockets: loose change, a book of matches, and the ace of spades. The card is grimier than when I saw it earlier. The mechanical bird is faded and more worn than the rest of the card, as if a thumb rubbed its turquoise, gold, and purple feathers over and over again.

 

 

Claudia Monpere’s flash appears in Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Craft, Trampset, Milk Candy Review, The Forge, and elsewhere. Her poems appear in such journals as Cutleaf, The Cincinnati Review, Plume, and Hunger Mountain. She won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review and the 2024 Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine. She has a story in Best Small Fictions 2024 and a micro forthcoming in Best Microfiction 2025.