He sits at the window. Mornings are better.
The light comes slow.
The coffee is bitter. He drinks it anyway.
The house is clean. Clean enough.
Quiet clings to it. The kind that hums.
He hasn’t spoken aloud in days.
There are letters. A few, unopened.
They wait on the mantle.
He knows what they say.
At night, the sounds return.
Not real ones.
Not anymore.
He remembers dust.
Gunmetal in the mouth.
The cries were sharp, then nothing.
He came home with his body.
The rest didn’t follow.
People said his name like it should still fit.
It doesn’t.
He tried once—
A cookout, children running,
sun on a woman’s hair.
He felt himself outside of it.
His hands trembled.
He left before the burgers browned.
No one stopped him.
No one should have.
He walks sometimes.
Through town.
Past faces.
They look through him.
Or worse, they nod.
Like they know.
They don’t.
A dog bark echoes and he flinches.
No one sees.
He’s thankful.
He dreams of hot, unrelenting humidity
Of jungles and mud in the teeth.
Of the man who looked like his brother
and died like a stranger.
Crucified.
He doesn’t pray.
Not out loud.
The whiskey is almost gone.
He’ll buy more.
He always does.
There’s a photo in the drawer.
A boy with a stick, grinning.
That was him. Once.
Before.
He looks at it sometimes.
But not today.
Today he watches the light
crawl across the floor.
And waits for the dark.
Broken Author 