Day Twenty-One: Family Dinners

CRIME REPORT


My schizophrenic brother came home for the holidays
and it wasn't a long-awaited reunion-
not for my mother, who had long since rejected him
and wouldn't accept his collect calls
or for my uptight sister, or my youngest brother, Josh.
I had ditched Danny many times,
but he always found his way back to me, because
I was the only person who would open the door for him.
It was the first Christmas the five of us had spent together
in more years than we could count,
none of us knew how to pretend that we were happy,
so everyone was hostile, it was our default setting.
Danny had spent most of the last ten years in prison,
mostly for petty thefts and fighting in public.
He never won fights, but he was always fighting anyway,
people just liked to punch him on general principle.
Josh was three years younger, good looking and sullen
with a laconic sense of humor borne of deep misery.
He'd submitted often to his brother's bullying over the years,
while my mother drank and had sex in the next room,
and couldn't attend to his needs, not that she wanted to.
In prison, Danny had developed a fondness
for antisemitism, an irrational hatred born of his punishment
at the hands of my mother, the mental health system, and the courts.
Since he was schizophrenic, his arguments
were punctuated by odd appearances from Satan
and other evil deities, and he talked non-stop,
sometimes pausing to look in the mirror and laugh at himself.
But Josh still nursed a grudge, he looked directly at Danny
and said, “Well, you know, we're part Jewish.”
Danny went completely berserk, his face contorted,
and he lunged directly at Josh, throwing a punch between his eyes
but Josh looked bored, like it barely fazed him.
With almost no effort, he contorted his fingers into a thick fist,
and punched Danny in the nose as hard as he could.
Danny's face was like a broken fire hydrant,
with more blood than I thought a nose possessed.
He let out a loud shriek, and Josh just smiled and said,
“Don't ever fuck with me again, or I'll kill you.”
My mother finally stuck her head around the door jamb of her room
and peered at the small pool of Danny's blood on the floor.
She said, “Goddammit, make sure you clean up that mess”
and disappeared again, leaving the tidying job for me,
even though I was no longer her daughter, but just a guest.
I wasn't sure what to do, so I made a pile of quesadillas,
and a weird calm descended over the kitchen
because everyone was hungry after all that fighting.