Jake often said that the figures in the dark were just figments of my imagination. But no matter how many times I asked, he never explained what an imagination truly was. It was a noun, and I was certain of this because of its suffix, but to perceive it as something that was not real really didn't make much sense because of how something that was apparently really not real was a real word in the first place.
There was an ant crawling along the wall as he explained this.
Jake said no, an imagination was not a fake word. But if it wasn't fake, then how was it real? My questions grew more densely populated, and he eventually stopped explaining. I wasn't sure why, so I asked him.
"It's a nice day outside," he said. "We should go play ball." I didn't protest. My brother never lied. So we played ball for most of the day. Jake let me hold the bat, and I felt something that my doctor called happiness.
Father's hand was on my shoulder. A sharp pain shot up my back, the sky was lolling back and forth. His mouth was moving in the corner of my eye, but all I could see was the ant crawling around a bruise on Jake's temple.
"The ant has blood on its legs."
Father rose his eyebrows and opened his big brown eyes and the skin folded over itself on his forehead. My father had a large forehead that was usually covered by a black top hat. He wore suits and choking necklaces that he called ties. The men at his workplace all wore black and white, so he did, too.
"Why weren't you responding?" Father said. He shook his head and kneeled down beside Jake without saying anything else. Father had arthritic fingers that cracked when he flexed them.
"We were playing ball. I was focused."
Father pressed two fingers against the side of Jake's neck. Flynn McDonnell was an Irishman that had once done the same to Lacy. Lacy was Mr. McDonnell's cat. She had white fur that blended in with the occasional snow-day and dull blue eyes. I didn't understand why both Mr. McDonnell and Father touched the necks of others, I would have hit anybody who touched my neck, out of pure instinct if nothing else, but my doctor said that it was to check someone's pulse.
My doctor would have called Father's tone emotionally unhealthy. "Focused?" he said. He rose his fists and I backed away. "Focused, you louse?" Father cursed at me with words he had told me not to say.
When Father raised his voice, I knew to stay away from him. We were usually satisfied with our father and his hard work, but he had an explosive temper that usually ended with someone getting hurt. Jake often leaped in front of me when he opened fire, for a reason that he refused to reveal. Yet something about my brother's limp form in the grass told me that he wasn't getting up anytime soon.
My cheek hurt and the door was locked. Jake and Father were gone.
Isolation was like the time Lacy's fur had turned red and Mr. McDonnell left me in his basement in order to give her a wash. The desire to run my fingers through her fur was stopped by one of those big signs that cars read in the streets. He had told me strictly to stay in the basement until Lacy was ready for burying.
Why someone would bury his own cat, I still wondered why.
The sun held its head high in the sky. Plants thrived beneath its light. The little marching ant was gone with Jake. It was a shame because even though it couldn't really speak, the ant took my empathy.
My brother often told me about ants. An ant can lift twenty times its own body weight. If a second grader was as strong as an ant, he would be able to pick up a car. When ants fight, it's usually to the death because of cutthroat and competitive tendencies. There are more species of ants all over the world than I can count on fifty hands, and even if I could, I wouldn't want to. It would take too much time.
Ants don't have ears. They feel vibrations in the ground through their feet in order to get around. Not having lungs, either, oxygen enters through an ant's porous body and carbon dioxide leaves through the same holes. Although Jake and Father never agreed with me, it was somewhat saddening that while humans could do terrible things and get away with it, ants only tried to feed their colony and got squashed beneath a disciplinary shoe.
Whenever the insect came to mind I saw Jake, and whenever I saw Jake I saw the black and blue mark on his forehead and the dull look in his eyes. Jake had blue eyes, the only person in the family that did. They usually held what my doctor called outrage and mortification, but never toward me.
A stinging pain in my knuckles broke out after I punched the door. Why wouldn't Father open it? What had I done that was so terribly wrong? The world was beginning to spin. My shoulders ached terribly, but the back door wouldn't budge.
It had a thin screen to filter out bugs and bring in the fresh air. As far as I could remember, the window behind the mesh was always tightly shut. Red dripped in fragile splatters down the inside of the glass.
The window was cracked. Bits of skin were paling between the fissure.
The back door led into the kitchen. Father was usually always testing out new recipes and different techniques to flip eggs and teaching Jake how to cook all at the same time. To keep knocking, to keep pounding my fists and shoulders and body against the door, surely he would notice. Never did I take a second glance.
But nobody came except for him.
In the dark background, my doppelganger stared. I moved and he waved a hand. He clenched a fist and so did I. The doppelganger looked like my brother. Thin and lanky, lithe and graceful. Except he had my chubby face. He lived in a black-and-white world, but in the bright light I would imagine that his eyes were golden, too.
Sirens echoed in the distance. They grew louder, and louder, and higher pitched, and closer. Jake would have said that they were rounding the corner by now. The police, I mean. Everyone in town knew that the police were the only people who used sirens besides ambulances, and they both rang so often that the younger kids knew just how to tell them apart. The police sirens were long and whining and always made my ears hurt. Ambulance sirens managed to be louder, somehow, but also reassured that everyone in the street would get out of the way.
Until someone didn't. Lacy hadn't, now that I thought about it.
Long since my shoulders had begun to bleed had I slumped against the back door in embarrassing defeat. I was not anymore heartened by the idea of Father being cross with me. It was more than shameful to think that Father had whipped me and chastised me so many times already, but I still did not know my crimes in context. The last time Father had punished me was less than a month before my eleventh birthday. It had been for leaping into a pool in order to save an ant from drowning. The moment he was finished I scampered back to the kiddy pool on red legs, only to find the ant and many others floating lifelessly atop the water's surface.
Father watched now as the policemen grabbed my arms and legs and dragged me toward the police car. My doppelganger screamed with me on the other side of the glass. Surely Jake would stir in Father's arms from how loud I was. In reality, I couldn't hear a muffled thing, but the policemen grimaced by my sides in the same way I grimaced at their sirens.
Perhaps it was a mutual relationship. They hated me for yelling so loudly, and I hated them for touching my neck. It wasn't legal to hit a policeman, or at least Father had chastised Jake enough times for doing it that it seemed to be in the wrong. Doing something illegal had always felt off beam, out of kilter, plain illicit and that was that.
I don't know what possessed me to do it. Maybe it was my doppelganger, the one peering through the window with a body like one I'd never had but a face more round than my own. Or had it been instinct? Instinct was something that I'd asked my brother to explain many times, but like an imagination, it was difficult to understand without knowing it.
"You let go this instant, son!" One would have thought the cushions of a chair to be soft and comfortable. The pain up my spine from colliding with the car seat wrinkled my nose like the putrid corpse of a squirrel in the nighttime.
Handcuffs soon became another irritant on the list of things that made me angry. Anger was an emotion that expressed great sadness at a disturbance, so much so that one usually became violent. Anger was a strong feeling of grievance and displeasure. I was familiar with the definition because Jake said it ran in the family for all men to be temperamental. My brother never lied, or at least only twisted the truth.
Being arrested allowed more time to think than what would have been permitted in the house: Jake was always talking to someone one way or another, whether it be me or Father or perhaps one of his beloved blondes; Father often wanted me to play ball in the yard, but whenever I agreed he sent me back inside and said I should be thinking about my upcoming career. But whenever I thought about my upcoming career he began to holler about some disrespectful child, and why couldn't I be more like Jake? Jake was always so much more conscientious than I was, and it was a mistake that Father married Judith and divorced Jake's mom Rebecca because maybe then I wouldn't have been born.
It wasn't often that I took him seriously, but whenever Father came to believe that he knew Jake better than me, I laughed. Father frequently took the time out of his day to point out that the feathers were rearranged differently on my skin. What he meant when he said that, even Jake wasn't certain. The more I thought about it the more confusing it became, so I stopped thinking altogether.