Brother broke Grandma's urn and lied about it.

Looking back on it, I think my brother did our family a favor. Of course, I didn’t like being the least favored child from that point on after he broke grandma’s ash urn. That moment still lingers in my head; the grey ash spread all over the carpet like a gruesome glitter bomb in front of the fireplace. The way it caked and dusted itself all over the carpet and walls. A little got on us both, but the moment mom screamed and saw us both there, he was the fastest one to point the finger at me. The little bastard was always a liar, always cheating. Although I was the big brother, he would be the one to pull the unplugged controller trick on me in the middle of Smash Bros. He left me with the punishment and the duty to put grandma’s ashes into a plastic bag until we could get a new urn. 

The punishment was a sentence of being grounded for two months. No video games, no friends' house, nothing, so those two months would’ve been agony. Every day was a saw-like torture session of pure, uninterrupted boredom, and I couldn’t deck my brother because that would just make things worse. He would leer at me from the stairs, and never in my life had I ever seen him play so much GameCube in a short time frame. 

My brother did give mom all sorts of affection during this time, feeling guilty about what he did but never wanting to admit it. Grandma was a blur in my life—the woman was a mystery, and we didn’t visit her much. The last time I saw her alive was back when I was nine, and when she lost her battle with lung cancer, my mom lost it. She would scream at dad whenever he tried to go out to see his friends, even if they didn’t smoke. Yet, dad would always comfort us, saying that she just needed time to process. 

Mom would’ve only gotten back to her old self in the last month of my punishment and three months after her death. Dad could go with his friends again to drink and go hunting, but my mother still wouldn’t give up her constant attention on my brother. She would shower him with concern; “are you sure you’re eating enough?”, “Are you getting enough rest, honey?”. I only leered at him as he looked solemnly back at me. He wouldn’t cough it up, so he got to stay home from school that day as I sulked over to the bus stop, cursing under my breath. 

When my brother and I returned home, mom and dad would be gone, leaving us alone to do homework or just screw around. He was still lying on the couch and playing the sick act like Daniel Radcliff. All I did was shoot him a look and go back into the kitchen to get something to eat. A peanut butter sandwich is all I would eat, and after fixing it up, I slammed the jar back into the cabinet. Afterward, I heard something fumble onto the ground in the living room. Peeking into the room, I saw my brother wrapped up in blankets and his boney, white chest pumping rapidly.“What's up with you?” I grumbled, yet he didn’t say anything. “Fine.” He would sleep on the couch that night, what I thought was faking being too sick to go to his bed. 

It was around thirteen at the time. Yet, It had been four years since I had smelled the musk of tobacco gas in the air. It was like someone lit a cigarette and waved it in front of my nose while I slept. It made me nauseous with how strong it was, so I ran to the bathroom. No one in the house smoked, and my alarm clock lit red at two in the morning. The only sound in the dead night was a sharp chirping of crickets, with something else I couldn’t quite make out at the moment. The stairs creaked as I tried to make as little noise as possible, but a faint murmuring—someone mumbling behind layers of walls. My brother was missing from his couch, and I thought he was just rambling about his bad dream with mom and dad. 

The smell of tobacco was growing more potent, and I pushed on into the dark. My eyes adjusted, seeing more. Below the crickets and the murmur, low wheezing crept into my ears from the fireplace. A white plastic bag sat where the urn used to be, next to a picture of dear, sweet grandma. When I first saw this, I thought it was just my brain being half asleep, and it probably was, but I saw the back inflate and deflate with the rhythm of the longing wheezing. Maybe it was the cool autumn air flowing through the cracks of the house, I’m still not too sure, but the whispers were there, I’m sure of it. 

That mumbling was seeping through the door of my parent’s room, and as I got closer, it became clear it was my mother talking. What exactly she was saying is still a mystery word for word, but I did hear a few fragments. “I gave him a fair punishment” and “It’s a dirty habit” were the only two things that stood out to me—mostly because they were the only two things that were clear to me. 

When she went back to sleep, the tobacco smell started to disappear, and I turned around to see my brother shaking in his blanket. A jolt struck me, and I almost screamed. “Jesus Christ, dude! What’s wrong with you?” 

“Is she gone?” He said.

“What?”

“Is she gone?” The blanket rumbled as his thin body shook. “She won’t leave us alone. I’m sorry.” He turned away, crawled back into the couch, and just fell back to sleep as if he didn’t say anything at all. The following morning, my brother and I went back to school. He said he was starting to feel much better. It’s better now because after my punishment is over, my mother’s biased parenting subsided. My brother is now grounded; he started smoking behind the school. Of course, he lied, saying he didn’t—I could smell tobacco smoke on his clothes.