Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: Illustrate the meaning of “A Stitch in Time Saves Nine” (without using the actual phrase or literal example). (01/03/08)
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TITLE: My Brother's Keeper | Previous Challenge Entry
By Amy Michelle Wiley
01/10/08 -
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Perhaps it wouldn’t have helped. Perhaps it would have made things worse. But it’s sure it would have changed the course of events.
There’s no use fretting over things that can’t be changed. I know that, but still that night goes over in my head like a kid going over his part the night before a speech. I think of all the ways I could have changed things, and what that might have lead to. I follow the dominos and make up stories with happy endings, stories where things remain like they always had been, or get even better.
If you’d’ve asked me, I would have told you that my brother and I were best of friends, as tight knit as Mum’s stitchery. In retrospect I realize it was one-sided. I adored Michael: he was the world to me. He was everything I wasn’t allowed to be. Everything I didn’t dare to be. He knew it, too--took full advantage of it.
I can’t say that night was the first time I realized he wasn’t so wonderful, that there were kinks in my brother’s armour. Certainly it was the first time it slapped me in the face, so I couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t make it into something else.
The moon was shining full, and maybe that’s what did it. At any rate, I could see them full on, my brother and his friends. I heard them too, their voices carrying on the breeze that came across the moor. The night was warm, but what I heard made me cold through to my gut. It was a cold that didn’t thaw, left a sliver of icicle through to this day.
So I watched them that night, and didn’t say a word as they carried Da’s gasoline can out the gate. I didn’t say a word the next morning’ neither, when the newspapers were full of the story of the old factory burned down, right to the ground.
That was only the start of it. My brother was home less and less, and one night he didn’t come home at all. My mum was crying when I got up that morning. This time the news of another fire held stronger consequences. Serious consequences.
A homeless man was in the hospital with severe burns.
Somehow Mum and Da knew. I saw it in their faces, in the way Mum pleaded with me when he still hadn’t come home. “If ya know something’, Sean, you gotta tell me. Ya gotta understand, this is only gonna get worse. He--he’ll do something worse. If you love him, you gotta help him.”
But this time I didn’t know. I didn’t know where he was or when he’d left. Or if he was ever coming back.
The weeks dragged on. My brother was gone. Yet he wasn’t. He was always there as a nagging guilt in the back of my mind. As a gaping absence in my heart.
Then one day I saw him, across the town square with a group of his ever-present friends, if such a group could be called friends. For a moment I froze, torn between a desire to run to him, and to run from him.
He saw me and, with a nonchalance that surprised me, sauntered over and jabbed me in the shoulder as he’d always done. He chatted about nothing, as though nothing had happened, and I felt once more grasped in the power of a big brother.
As he turned to go, his eyes caught mine with a glint of steel. “You’ll not tell ya saw me. You’ll do that for your bro?”
I saw something different in his eyes, a hardness that had grown over the last weeks. I saw also my mum’s eyes, pleading and tearful.
I knew then what I would do for my bro. This time I would speak up. This time I would change the world.
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Laury
It might have been stronger if you started with the action instead of explanation.
Good writing.
I'm glad that it ended with him finally telling on his brother. Though that would be a hard thing to do, it was the right thing, and it showed that he truly loved him.