Fiction: The Irreconcilable Differences

By Chris Carrel

"So, we're talking to each other again?" were the first words we spoke to our brother in sixteen years. He called out of the blue one day to tell us that mother was dying.

It was leukemia, he said, and she was nearing the end.

"She wants to see you before she dies. She wants to see..." We cut him off.

"We are not her son anymore, Derek. We can't ever be her son again."

"I know," he said, sounding weary, though the phone call had just begun. "She knows. She wants to see you...whatever you are now."

We didn't know if we wanted to see her. But since there wouldn't be a second chance, it seemed prudent to do so, whether we were ready or not.

"Please..." He pleaded. "She won't stop asking for you."

"Okay, then."

 

"So, what have you been doing with yourself?" my brother asked into the awkward silence after our concession. 

"That is such a difficult question to answer after all this time," We exhaled a cloud of air cut with tension and other waste gases. "Let's just say, trying to live a normal life."

"Hey, me too," he said, suddenly brighter. Derek had married his high school girlfriend, Jodie, and they had three kids. 

"You've got two nephews and a niece," he told us, reciting names and ages. 

We marveled at the sudden proliferation of family-related complications. There would be a maelstrom of childish questions to face.

Derek and Jodie owned a small house painting business that was a lot of work, but he said they were happy. They kept busy and made enough to get by. 

We supposed he had been happier still for sixteen years without the problem of the sibling with the "alternative lifestyle." But he kept insisting that he wanted to see us, too. He missed his "little brother" is how he put it. We did not correct him.

 

I was born three years after Derek, though we are unsure of how to calculate the age difference since the transition. In childhood, I looked up to my big brother. He was everything I thought I wanted to be. When he joined the Boy Scouts, I had to join the Cub Scouts. When he started playing soccer, I wanted to play soccer. 

As a big brother, he treated me reasonably well. He played games with me, and we built models together and practiced kicking the soccer ball. I wanted to be just like him, and he liked having a doting admirer around. Sometimes, he even let me hangout with him and his friends.

Then puberty hit and I began to see the world in hues of ultraviolet and flavors of pheromones that he could never experience. I began to sense the multitude that swelled within me.

 

We quickly became an embarrassment to our church-going family. We probably still are, though that's a two-way path, isn't it? 

Where we now live, most everybody has a conservative family in their past, and tales of wrongs committed in the name of some rigid sense of propriety and hierarchy. 

Love ceases to feel like love when it demands that you abandon yourself to remain its subject. That is the steepest rent in the known universe. 

First, we came out. Then, we were thrown out. Derek was sent to deliver the verdict. He told us that our parents wanted us to live our 'life of sin' elsewhere. 

They would no doubt protest that tolerating a "godless life of perversion" was not love. That they had hoped to shock us back to our senses, back to a unitary state and godly living through tough love and the strict obedience to erroneous category definitions. 

That is a strategy with a body count. When do you reconsider your beliefs, before or after you drive your child to suicide?

Fortunately, we survived. Not everyone does. Here we are, still alive and able to decide whether to reopen that door, even temporarily.

 

We exchanged information, discussed details and came to an agreement. Was this a good thing? Who knows. Like most things in life, there is only one way to discover the answer. 

It took several of our bodies to press the button ending the call. We stretched one thousand four hundred and twenty-seven sets of wings and a greater number of legs. A few of us groomed our feelers with our forelegs, while a larger group, feeling particularly drained by the call, dipped their mandibles into small wax cups of warm nectar and drank the sweet, invigorating substance.

There was a lot we would have to do before the trip back home.

Chris Carrel writes from beneath the canopy of a majestic Western red cedar in the Pacific Northwest. He has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine and Idle Ink.