After the Fire1

Bobby's legs felt heavy as he climbed the stairs to the second floor. Once on the landing, he saw that the door to George's room was closed. Bobby knocked softly. He then gently turned the wobbly doorknob and opened the door. He stood at the threshold, where he was met by a warm, almost liquid, acrid stench of urine, burnt plastic, and something else. George had closed all the windows.

Lying on his side on the bed at the far end of the room, George turned his head toward the door. He seemed to have been caught off guard, apparently not having heard Bobby knocking. He rearranged himself into a sitting position on the side of his bed, his stocking feet planted on the carpet.

George appeared mystified as he looked in Bobby's direction. His face seemed featureless, as if there were no bones or muscles in it. Bobby felt a hole in himself in the place George had occupied. Bobby had, for more than a year now, wanted to tell George to try harder, to pull himself together, to return to being the brother he used to be. The two had been gradually switching roles, with Bobby becoming the older brother, trying to protect George from being picked on at school and humiliated by their father. But most of all, Bobby was trying to protect George from knowing what was happening to him. George's stories had become just a flow of words, sometimes making sense but not at all interesting. In the middle of talking about something he had read — such as the fact that we're almost entirely made of air and our solidity is an illusion created by electromagnetic force fields that tie molecules together — George would sometimes suddenly stop, as if he hadn't been telling a story at all. Bobby would try to remind him where he'd left off, but George's attention was by then somewhere else.

It must have been a hard blow to George, Bobby thought, to see and hear him outside with their father. Bobby had been so caught up in the