More on: siblings

“I have come to love you in spite of—” ―Darin Strauss, Chang and Eng   straddling the windowsill                   watching morning glimmer from the terminal spectral gray         becoming blonde as coffee cools     here near where                   chirrups erupt       whoosh of man hosing down cleft sidewalks               raising wraiths of spray against loops of barbed wire…

BECAUSE IT WAS a Monday, the day their father, Pastor Eino Hililla, spent eight and sometimes twelve hours preparing the Sunday morning sermon, Lowell led his younger brother Jonas through the parsonage yard, past the cemetery. Past the dark walnut trees, through a thicket of manzanita, down to the dark tongues of water where they…

Like one nation divided, the older—by three minutes—bragged: We had a race, and I won. The younger would respond: We had a fight. I kicked him out. Impossible to tell them apart— in photos, in home movies— hairy and smooth in equal measures, matching clothes, thin bodies, freckled, blue eyes behind black-framed glasses— as babies,…

ON MY BROTHER DECLAN’S third day on life support—the morning he becomes newsworthy—strangers begin to leave messages on the home phone. A funeral director leaves his number. An alarm-system salesman warns of the characters who scour the Globe and the Herald for stories like Declan’s, for tragedies that strike families from well-off towns, leaving their…

from The Book of Brothers 1. In the book of brothers, only one is chosen, only he walks with father, servants trailing them, to a place that will be known when it is known, only he is given to ask of father, when they arrive, the offering, where is it? (And where, while this defining…

GWEN LIVED IN LOS ANGELES and her brother Dan lived in Chicago. They sent each other spoof news reports, fake X-ray glasses, envelopes full of plastic ants. After the horrible-smelling flowers were delivered to her at work—“What is that, road kill?” asked her friend—Gwen gleefully bought a pound of chocolates, stuck her thumb through the bottom…

THROUGH A WARMING NIGHT the ice dams on the Big Slough thawed, and in the morning the first robins, antic in their hunt for worms, hopped in the south yard. Freddie Cahill’s spirit, dormant through what had seemed the longest winter of the eighty-some she’d spent on earth, stirred once again to meet the season’s…