BROTHER'S BREATH
Peter Markus
One night, down by the muddy river, Girl took hold of both of us brothers and she held us there, here by our heads, our heads held down by the scruff of our necks, us brothers held under this muddy water, until the both of us brothers learned how to underneath it all breathe. At first, we held our muddy breaths inside us. We were still just boys. After a while, we let the mud come mudding out. We breathed. We breathed back in. The river filled our lungs, with water and mud, with mud and water. That was the night that us two brothers became what we are no longer right now: we became fish. Us boy fish swam back up to where river turns to sky, our boy fish heads sticking up out of the water, us, between two worlds, our buoy lights blinking brightly, flashing on and off, from green to red, from in between Girl’s legs. Girl’s legs were two twin lit from within lighthouses where the two of us brothers, the two of us now fully finned and gilled, we lived and loved to swim through. Now don’t you two boys get your fishy selves caught by the hooks of some fishing man’s pole, Girl told us brothers. And remember, Girl said, to watch out for what looks like the real thing. What looks like it’s real, Girl warned us, isn’t. We won’t, one of us brothers said. We will, the other of us added. We swam away, down river, our sticking out backs finning this river in half. That night, when we swam our way back up river, kicking and swaying back the river up, back to where we had that same night earlier came to be fish, we saw Girl standing alone by the river’s muddy bank, fishing with two uprooted telephone poles in her hands, the steel casted out lines baited with sparking blue fire. We nibbled and played with this fire until we were brothers blue and sparking inside. Then we ate the fire, hook, line, sinker, we swallowed it inside us, as if it was mud. When Girl lifted us fish brothers up out of those muddy waters flowing mudly at her toes, her fishing poles’ hooks dug deep in to our hearts, us fish, we turned, inside out, into burning stars. Us brothers, we were star fish on fire. Our hands and arms and legs and feet, our hearts, too, they burned with a starry kind of light. We swam in circles in the muddy dark water of the bottomless river sky. The moon that night was a frozen pond we could not get down to the bottom to. We tried, us brothers did, to break through that iced over water. We threw our starry bodies against the cold white ice of the moon. We fell from the sky in our try to break through to the moon’s other side. We fell, hard, our star bodies shooting, our star light burning, across the black winged sky. Girl was there to watch us in our falling. Girl was there to catch our fall. Girl reached up with her bare mud hardened hands and she caught us in the muddy webbing, taking us brothers back, away from the sky, back to the muddy river, back to the mud, back where we belonged: no longer fish, no longer stars. We were sticks, us two stick brothers, stuck like sticks into the mud.