The photographer left the undertaker’s with all of the deference reserved for the mourning and their dead. He was silent and appropriately sorrowful as I followed him to his cart. The thing was a monstrosity, a hulking darkroom on wheels- it smelled maliciously of chemicals, and I was obliged to hold my breath as we drew close. He hopped up into the back, and took the tripod from my waiting hands.

            “You can have those photographs in two week’s time, sir. Shall I bring them by, or-?”

            “No, no, don’t trouble yourself. I’ll come by your studio myself. In two week’s time.”

            “You have my deepest condolences, Mr. Altwick.” He nodded apologetically as I bade him goodbye, flashing a polite smile his way. He looked taken aback at this sudden ghost of merriment, and his face as he attempted the same through his mask of mournful propriety was almost amusing, but pained and and entirely inappropriate, of course. So I raised my eyebrows, and he frowned again, this time in confusion. He coughed, a bit ruffled by this wordless exchange, and scurried through to his perch at the front. A sand-colored cloud billowed about my knees as he stirred up his dray horse, marking the photographer’s trail as he went. I stood there for a moment, looking up at the sky. It was a vivid periwinkle. If an artist were to choose that color for the sky in a painting, then I would call it overzealous, but there it was, hanging above me, as I stood stock-still in the dusty street.

            I reentered the mortuary. The matter of the funeral had practically arranged itself- all I need do was wait for tomorrow. People are so eager to take the reins in these things, and I was happy to let them. It made them feel better, I think, to know I couldn’t drive the whole affair off a cliff in a moment of grief-stricken despair. Zebediah would be buried with our parents, joining the rest of their children in the family plot behind their empty house. There he’d lived, alone, and there he’d lie forever, with plenty of company. It would be crowded, I couldn’t help but think, sharing the ground with our brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins, the endless dear departed. All the way back to Bartholomew (Died January 1760, age 2 mo. 8 days). As a child, I’d been ever so sorrowful over that grave, about a boy just the same as me, who had never seen the spring. My grandmother, a young woman fresh from London, had given birth to her first son just in time for the New England winter to harvest the child like a well-wielded scythe. Little Bartholomew hadn’t a prayer.

            The cemetery grew out from Bartholomew’s tiny grave in a morbid, mossy pinwheel of endings. Its arms would find me one of these days, and then it would have to stop, having gorged itself on every last one of my kin and I- every last one. Zebediah’s hole had been dug this morning, and was only waiting for his mortal remains, gaping like a mouth in the earth.

I looked down at Zebediah’s body, lying with its arms crossed over its chest, lying obediently where they’d been placed. He had died with his eyes open. The photographer insisted that it made for a more realistic presentation, but now that he'd gone decency had taken hold. The undertaker had laid a pair of coins over his eyes to hold them shut. To pay the boatman, people always said, unintentionally pagan in their rites of farewell to their beloved, pushing them off to meet God without the power in their earthly hands to remove this brand of infidelity from their decaying eyes. And so, I felt, the vast majesty that carried them off would have no choice but to forgive them. Maybe they'd have a laugh about it, how should I know? It wasn't me, lying there.

             I've heard that, if a body is far from home and must be shipped or stored, the rats go for the eyes first. Many an eyeless soldier had arrived home otherwise in tact, accordingly. But Zebediah was not being stored or shipped, as he'd died in his kitchen, and I  trusted the undertaker to keep out any rats for at least that day. The coins were not tolls or shields, but emotionally practical all the same. It made it easier for the undertaker, I was sure, not having to notice that dead man staring at him, with a stricken sort of non-expression in his filmy eyes. I hadn’t really minded. I was used to his eyes after twenty-four years- they were mine, too, after all. I’d see them in the mirror, every morning, for the rest of my life- seeing them in him for one last still, sunny afternoon wouldn’t bother me. It would have made him easier to remember as he'd always been, doing the things the living do, crying and seeing and blinking. But now this eyes were closed, as was right and proper, and there would be no more memories.

            Zebediah was pale, almost transparent. His lips were colorless but for a blue tinge. The skin beneath his eyes seemed to be bruising, and his freckles stood out like pepper on his luminescent skin. He looked false, hollow, like a doll with coins for eyes. I felt hollow myself- I was almost giddy, looking at him on the table there. I wanted to laugh, or scream- some sort of potent cocktail was boiling in me, a scathing brew of anguish and relief. It filled my throat. My brother would never know what it was that lay him here, so cold and mocking- it was too quick for him to turn around, thank God. If his back hadn’t been turned, I wouldn’t have been able to go through with it.

“What chance does he have?” I asked. I leaned in discreetly, hoping Dr. Williams would take the cue. He did. Dr. Williams was a kind man, rather like a patient uncle in the world of sick and wounded with which he dealt. Now he was grave, and the pinch between his eyebrows made him look older. He sighed, trying to convey too much for a single exhalation- it faltered under the weight of his unspoken words, and hung like a dead thing between us. Still, he didn’t want to speak. My stomach drained quietly out of me, and I waited for him to answer straight, in a way I couldn't hope through. It's exhausting, that hoping through the cracks in a verdict.

            “It’s slim, Mr. Altwick. Slim to none. He always did have a weak chest.” He shook his head. “I’m so sorry. I know it doesn’t help- there are no word of mine that can make up for this... tragedy." I said nothing, looking through his watery eyes without thinking about anything. He grasped my shoulder, squeezing in a comforting way, taking for shock what I knew to be absence in my slackened jaw. "Erasmus, I wish there was something I could do. I'm sorry," He repeated.  He clasped his hands behind him and looked at the floor, and all I could think of was that the doctor had already started to refer to him in the past tense- I could still see him, for all the good it did- I could see his shadow on the outside of the frosted glass. He was close enough to touch, and already gone. Dr. Williams had made this announcement of futility too many times; his remarks were dull. "He had such a good heart.”

I left in a hurry, taking Zebediah in tow, like a child, by the sleeve of his jacket. He was taller than me, and we must have made a scene. He almost tripped trying to keep up, his thin face a study in anxious bemusement, fast melting to panic as I ignored his battery of questions.

            “Wait a moment! Shouldn’t I speak with the doctor myself? Slow d- listen to me, Erasmus, it’s not a marathon we’re running, here- hey!” He shouted indignantly over the noise of the street. A not of panic crept into his voice as we sped along. “Hold up, now! What’s wrong? You’re frightening me ‘Ras, what did he say? Tell me, for God’s sake-”

            “He said you’d be fine,” I told him, my focus ahead of us. My voice was steady, almost dismissive. I wondered at it. “It’s just a cold. You’re always fussing so.”

            Zebediah heaved a slow sigh of relief, halting his breath in it's anxious acceleration. He seemed to deflate as his tension dissolved, leaving him just as thin as he always was, sjaking a bit then from nerves or the sea breeze. He closed his eyes, forgetting my late stampede in his relief.

“I’m just in hurry, that’s a-“ I broke off my explanation as his sigh turned to a violent coughing fit. A few passers-by had glanced uneasily at him. The moment stretched on, and I wondered if he would fall.

He’d asked me to take him to the doctor’s a week ago- the medical practice, among a great many other things, made my brother nervous. But I had been busy with something that seemed important at the time, and told him to find someone else, if it really mattered. He got a bit huffy and annoyed, in his way, but left me alone for the next few days- giving me the cold shoulder, I supposed. My brother had been born in the body of a scrawny boy, with the nature of a fussy maiden aunt. He was always worried about something, and if he was worried about a chest cold that week, then so be it. I decided to let the matter rest unless it got much worse.

            By the morning of our visit to Dr. Williams, he’d started coughing up blood.

            Zebediah seemed absent on the way back to his house. He was thinking, or daydreaming- habits to which he was more inclined than I. His head slipped to my shoulder, though, eyes glazed with exhaustion. He fell asleep some time along the way. His breath was loud and dry and terribly hot, but I let him rest there the whole way home.

            My mind was blank, at first, stuffed with a cottony whiteness. It didn’t last long, though. It wore off sickeningly, like surgical ether, and I remembered in vivid detail, in spite of myself.

            When Zebediah was born, I’d had two older sisters. When I was born, they’d had an older brother, too, but he died before I could walk. When I was six, just after Zebediah first made an appearance, my sisters had gone, as well. There had been one final little girl, after Zebediah- but she’d only lived a day. They were all buried in a row, in our little cemetery: William, Lydia, Cornelia, and Frances.

My first memories are of my sisters. Such events can brand a memory, as I think they did mine- obscuring all else. I have no earlier recollections, not a single Christmas or birthday before their illness. Lydia went faster. She cried so- I didn’t sleep for her crying. She would say that she was on fire, and I believed her. When they laid her out in the parlor, though, she’d been perfect and peaceful, and I knew she hadn’t really burned. I can remember what she looked like. She was a little girl, sweet and cold. Surrounded by flowers, auburn hair brushed to a waterfall- that’s how she is in my memory. I am the only witness to her wake still left unclaimed; all she’ll ever be is what I hold. And my meory is gently sad and beautiful.

I have no notion of Cornelia as a little girl, though I know that was what she must have before the fever came. In my mind, she is a shadowy figure, a wheezing, moaning thing. Cornelia clung to life like a vice. She wouldn’t cry, but she’d moan and whistle in her throat. I don’t remember her eating or sleeping, only breathing. It took all she had to breath. She lost her hair, she lost her voice, she lost her sight, and when she finally stopped breathing, I thought how quiet it was, how tranquil for a change. When they laid her out, she was almost burnt away already, a sort of skeleton child. I cried when I had to kiss her cheek.

            “Too sweet for this world,” my mother had said into my hair as she held us after the second funeral. She seemed to be trying to inhale us as we sat with her there. “They were just too sweet for this world, and God wanted them back. But I have you two.”

Mother gathered us up and held us all night, and she must have held us quite securely- for we stayed, fastened in this world. She took solace in her sons.

But she forgot to hold herself, for she’d gone the same way as Lydia, fifteen years later. Father had followed directly- he’d never found much use in the two of us, and with his wife gone he saw no reason to delay. I was already away at university, while Zebediah stayed quietly behind in the old, empty house. I was a little concerned. He was only just seventeen. He used to get these spells you see, as a child, where he would get so upset he’d stop breathing for a minute- not uncommon, apparently, but all the same I worried, remembering our younger days, that I would come home to find him blue on the floor, but it never happened. He cooked, and cleaned, and he thrived. It suited him. He was always so flustered about things- little things, everything- and that house, with his books and his endless rotation of cats, seemed to steady him. He was popular, in a way- a good conversationalist with a flair for domesticity, he often had visitors, but he rarely went out on the town.

            He was gentle and wry, and I knew that he was the bit of sweetness that I’d been given, the same way my brother and I had been left to a mother in mourning all those years ago. I knew, just as certainly, that it was over. I shook him awake when we neared the house, and he coughed in the back of his throat, rubbing his eyes ferociously.

            “I’m simply exhausted,” he announced, removing his coat once we got indoors. “It’s the middle of the day, more’s the pity. It always makes me sleepy, that rocking back and forth- like child in a cradle. Boats especially, I've noticed, have a similarly sophorific effect. Not that I spend much time on boats. You s- why, Erasmus Josiah Altwick, you don’t look well. I’ll make us some tea.” He tutted, in a startlingly accurate impression of our mother. He proceeded to bustle about, stirring up the fire and drawing water, and fiddling with things ineffectually once he was done. His hands were spindly and pale, dancing on the washboard like dying spiders. He noticed me staring at him, and rolled his eyes. They were a bit too bright, and his freckled face looked sunburned in the low light of the kitchen.

            “Do I have a spider on my face, or have you gone catatonic?” He asked me in absent-minded sarcasm. He sat down across the table, and looked at me intently over the rims of his spectacles.

            “You do seem... troubled, 'Ras.”

I shrugged, and he tapped out a carnival tune, drumming his fingers along the edge of the table.

            “How do you feel?” I asked.

            “Ill,” he replied, in a manner consistent with a long-suffering schoolmistress. “Better than yesterday, though- stronger, I mean,” he elaborated in a more businesslike tone. “Not weak in the limbs. But my throat thinks I’ve swallowed coals.” Zebediah grinned nervously. “The tea might help, though.” I nodded, in agreement, and we sat a while longer, Zebediah punctuating the quiet with a muffled cough, almost dainty.          

It was there, at that quiet, unassuming table that I came to a decision. I decided something that I’d been deciding, really, for the past few hours- or days, or months, or years. It’s impossible to say when the thought had first occurred, but it had never been conscious- considering it now, I feel it might have gone all the way back to the beginning, and that I’d always known what I’d have to do one day to keep a boy from burning. However it came, though, and however long in the coming, I went from hollow to light, full of air and rising, all in an instant. There is something radiant about knowing exactly what one is to do, however terrible the deed. I smiled at my brother, and he raised an eyebrow, amused, at the suddenness of it.

“What?” he asked, adjusting his glasses.

“It’s just… oh, little brother, you know you’ll get better, don’t you? You don’t have to worry.”

“I know,” he shrugged ruefully. “That’s what the doctor said, isn’t it? I’ll be right as rain.”

The kettle began to whistle, and he got up to attend to it.

It’ll be quick. You’ll hardly notice, don’t pay it any mind. It’ll hurt, I won’t lie- it will hurt quite a lot, I suppose, but not for long. You won’t burn, you won’t die a corpse. It’ll be over in a moment, and there you’ll be, naïve and calm as anything. I’ll keep you as you are, and you’ll thank me, I think, in the end-

My mouth had been running, I thought. Silently, though. He hadn’t acknowledged a word, so I suppose I hadn't spoken. Was that what he felt like all the time, I wonder? His mouth would run, and he’d just talk. His hands would run and he’d just do things, pick things up and rearrange them, and put them back the way they were before. I’d ask him what he’d just said, and he’d shrug, unsure- ‘My mouth was just running,’ he’d always say, but I never asked him to describe the sensation, exactly. Now I’ll never know. I don’t know I lot of things, and most I’ll never have a chance to learn. That’s the problem with people- it’s never the right time to ask important questions. Is your red the same as my red, or are we comparing a separate set of colors altogether? How could we tell? What do you dream about? Do you hate me? Do you trust me? What do you think of that sky, there? Are y-

I’m sorry, my mouth was running.

I had been staring, silent, while he went for the kettle. My message, all the questions and rationality and reassurance, was trying to drill through him from my eyes, it couldn’t get though his back. He turned before he got to the stove, and looked at me, puzzled but not annoyed. He smiled- a real smile, though I’ll never know what seemed so funny- with the left corner pulling up further than the right to reveal the gap where his tooth had been pulled last year, and his crooked canines, like a tired fox.

“What is it with you, today?” he asked, voice lilting with bemusement.

            “I was only trying to remember something. Carry on.” He carried on, and it was too easy to force my knife through his back, once it was turned again- he screamed, horrifically, I'm sure. The knife went through to the lungs, I made certain. The blood came out his mouth, you see. It was too easy separate that strange, throaty rattle from his voice- from any human voice- it just didn’t sound like any person; it wasn’t forming a word, or even some wordless plea- noise, gutteral and a relief at it's end. It was simple- an animal bucked weakly as I butchered it, efficiently and without cruelty. My brother had flown the moment the knife hit his back, really- the rest of the act was just a motion. It stopped moving, and when I looked into what had been brother’s eyes, they were open, wide and too shocked to even be afraid. They didn’t see me, and I was encouraged, somehow, by that fact.

         It was awful to hear, when the night watchman told me. They found him on the side of the road, gouged in the back as if by some sort of lunatic. I didn’t have to act to seem shocked and dismayed- and that was it; snip, snap, snout.

            Nothing should ever be so easy as it was for me to kill him.

            It’s strange, looking at the photograph in my hands. It’s a tintype, a panel of dull grays and blacks to make up an image, shockingly realistic. I’ve never had a photograph taken before. I had heard it remarked upon by a friend, months ago, now, how the image of the deceased could be so captured, their likeness held for years afterwards. The metal in my hands will last longer than my bones. I may be dust before it first begins to corrode. In this one detail, all is as it should be- Zebediah will outlive me for years, decades- he'll be left to the world long after his name has been lost to the living. I can imagine somebody studying the image in years to come, when there is nothing but a dusty plate between my brother and never having existed here- they'll shiver, I think, if that thought come to them at all. There he is, gazing out at me with half-lidded eyes, slightly slumped, ignoring the care with which the photographer and I had arranged him.

            “They can be hard to prop up sometimes, but they never ruin the exposure by moving,” I heard the photographer had remark to the undertaker before he thought I’d entered the room. “Almost half of the jobs I get are memento mori.”

            “What, exactly, Mr. Lawrence?” the undertaker asked, in his sensitive, sorrowful voice so well suited to his profession. The photographer shrugged.

            “It’s Latin. Something about remembering the dead.”

            It’s a beautiful thing. Sickening, but beautiful. His pose screams something disturbing, out of the ordinary, it’s true. Simply out, he looked dead. He doesn’t look accusing, though, which is odd. I thought that’s how he would seem, at least to my uniquely guilty eyes, but no. Just blank, perhaps a bit smug.

            I wish I could cry, but I can’t. It doesn’t matter how I blink, how much wild grief fills me, flooding my brain, filling my throat and weighing down my breath like lead. You couldn't see this by looking, not this or the endless pleading that pounds like blood in my ears for you to understand that the purgatory I'll receive for the act is worth the days you did not suffer. But I am out of range now, of your forgiveness or your refusal to forgive. It is beyond man to forgive what they cannot see, and you saw nothing. Even as you are, I know that you can only see me standing here in black, staring at a mantelpiece. I’ll watch a moment more, dry-eyed, before I turn around, lock the door to my parent’s empty house, and go home,  at a leisurely pace, though this beautiful, crisp September day.