The one in the polaroid

I’d always found it quite strange—the phantom weight of my mother’s hand upon my neck, even when she was nowhere around. A tingling pressure, like invisible fingers in dire need of some ghostly suffocating. In fact, I don’t remember the last time I was allowed to make a decision. It’s as though they’re scared to let me make one all by myself. Like I can only imagine a parent does when deciding the appropriate time to let their kid play with a knife without parental supervision.

I used to think it was sweet, endearing, genuine. Now I find it cloying, unpleasant, phony; this incessant need to control my every move, my every word. Sometimes it feels as if she were trying to mold me into something else, into something that might fit an unrealistic mold that she considers ideal.

It’s safe to say she still likes to baby me, to treat me like some kind of child, even when I’m fifteen-years-old and clearly not one anymore. She knows it. She just prefers to turn a blind eye to every change in my body, in my clothing size, in my tone of voice. I don’t know, some people are like that.

I sometimes think that she’s repulsed by it actually, her only living baby boy, now a blooming canvas of paint she has no intent on admiring anymore. Now I realize that feeling was not just that—a fleeting tugging of the stomach, but a fact, an actual reality.

“I’m sorry I’m not him, mom,” I’d whispered to her a few days ago, when I’d caught her staring at a polaroid of Ethan for a whole consecutive minute without blinking. I hadn’t been able to get a clear view of him in the polaroid, but I just knew it was him. She’d whipped her head towards the bedroom door where I’d stood, seeming flustered. She’d been quick to stuff it back into the dainty drawer in her vanity table before standing and walking towards me.

“Sweetheart don’t say that, you’re better. You’re better because you won’t ever leave me, will you?” Her grip on my arm intensified in that moment, as though squeezing and tugging the tried and true cue for me to utter a well-performed, comforting answer. I shook my head no in that moment, her invisible hand wrestling all over my throat.

But today, when she was out, I went upstairs and took out the polaroid from that dainty drawer, held it in my hands, studied my older brother in it. It took me less than a minute to come to terms with what she’d made me do last Christmas. Back then, I’d thought absolutely nothing of it. She’d wanted a picture of me by the Christmas tree. I had found it a tad strange, her adamancy for me to wear this particular ugly, oversized sweater of an overweight Santa surrounded by quirky looking elves who were sorting out gifts. When I’d tried it on, I remember thinking how odd it was, that this sweater she’d just supposedly bought for me emanated such a clammy smell.

“It smells weird mom,” I’d let her know, sniffing the collar. Dad had entered the room at that very moment, caught me standing idly by the tree, my face a half-grimace. With a hand perched on his stiff waist, he’d stolen a murky look at my mom before sighing and heading back into the kitchen without saying a single word. She’d quickly walked over to me, seemingly flustered, a sudden nervous energy coming off of her pores.

“It must’ve been this new detergent that I used sweetheart,” she’d answered, swatting her hand away, as if saying, ah, its nothing.

“But why did you wash it if it’s new?” I’d asked, casually frowning. Her hands ran up my arms with the intention to calm myself down. But I hadn’t been altered to begin with. I hadn’t thought I was anyway. They were always so God damned jittery around me, I find it quite obnoxious.

After my question, she’d suddenly stopped short—as though her brain had short-circuited, and she wasn’t physically able to think of an answer and run her skittery fingers through my arms at the same time. A lie, I’ve come to know, takes more energy to come up with than a simple truth.

“Sweetheart, you know I always like to wash new clothes,” she’d answered then, taking out a small polaroid camera from the back pocket of her jeans and fidgeting with the buttons.

But then that very Christmas night, when I had time to recall how things went, and while the red wine they’d let me drink settled into my stomach, I realized it wasn’t true. She didn’t usually wash any of the clothes we bought after shopping. I’d never seen her do it anyway, had I? And the way she’d asked me to pose, it’d been unusual. It really had been. As though she’d had such a clear vision in her head of what she’d wanted. Acting like a seasoned professional photographer all of a sudden when she very clearly wasn’t.

I jolted back to reality when I felt my thumb idly stroking the crinkled polaroid in my hands. I felt the start of a shiver going down my spine, the odd sensation of my nape slightly dampening. Every single thing that’d happened last Christmas suddenly made sense. Right now, with my feet perched upon my parents stained carpet—a stain that will serve to remind us just how much was lost upon its wool—I jitter with reality sinking in.

The ugly, mildew smelling sweater, the ultra-specific poses, the way the ornaments in the tree had been carefully arranged, the lighting, the small stool she’d made me stand on so that I appeared taller. I felt like the wind being gutted out from me, as though someone had just casted a deadly blow to my stomach. She hadn’t wanted to take a picture of me, she’d wanted to recreate the very polaroid being held by my hand right now. The last picture she’d been able to snap of him on their last Christmas, before I was here, when I was nothing more than a bundle of cells inside her belly.

I was nothing to her but a puppet she wanted to convert into someone she’d loved more. Someone she’d loved first. I was her sloppy seconds. The plate of food she had no choice but to eat because there was nothing else on the menu. I wished, I wished dearly, that all of this was new to me. But it wasn’t. It never felt like it was.

“Sweetheart?” A door slammed downstairs. Sweetheart. The sound of that word, the cloying intonation, everything about it suddenly made my eyelids flutter, my hands turn into fists beside my waist, my vision turn maroon. I turned, stuffed the polaroid inside the drawer, only to have my finger poke into something sharp. I yanked the drawer further out, and it clatters to the ground, scattering all of its contents by my feet, by the faded halo stain in the wool. My nostrils flared at the sight, at the cut-out polaroids, the strips of paper, the tiny scissors. I ignored the sound of her footsteps coming up the stairs as I crouched down, feeling bile creeping up my throat like lava.

“What are you doing?”

“What—what is this?” I barely muttered, without regarding her standing figure by the door. In my peripheral, I could swear I could see how pale she’d just turned. “What the fuck is this?” I whispered, letting out the curse word I seldom used, but heard often enough behind the walls of this house. It felt liberating—soothing almost—listening to the word slip from my tongue and release into the world like smooth honey.

“You shouldn’t be looking into my things Vinny,” is what she chose to reply, strutting determinately to where I crouched, a circular piece of my face cut out from that very same Christmas photoshoot dangling by my fingers.

“No more sweetheart?” I stood, stopping her in her tracks, my voice thick. A vein in her neck popped up like a fat worm inside a condom, bulging and see-through.

“Vinny...” her hand reached out for me.

“Get away from me!” I screamed, pushing her with every ounce of strength I found within me. She stumbled back, hitting her head with the armoire before falling forward, her hand immediately flying to the back of her head to inspect the damage. She looked up at me, disbelief crossing through her features like flickering lights in a dark alley.

“Vinny, not again,” she stuttered, trying to get up but failing to do so, “calm down, sweetheart, calm down—”

“How do you even know who I am?” I screamed, crouching down again to inspect all the crescent pieces, the missing parts of my body that’d been snatched away to be replaced and swapped by my dead brother’s. “You’ve reduced me to an arts and crafts... grief project.” I felt a hot tear falling down my cheek. I wiped it away with the sleeve of my sweater before it could hit my jawline.

More and more polaroids. Polaroids of my last birthday, a couple of friends embracing me from behind. Jason’s head cut off. Ethan’s face glued in a hectic haste atop my own friend Jason’s. It’s as if she wanted him to be a part of all of the things he had been robbed of the second after the accident that changed everything. The accident no one seemed to remember a god damned thing of. Not clearly enough.

I suddenly felt like I was in the middle of a horror movie, as one of my hands trembled with the light weight from the scissors she’d used to play pretend.

“He was always your favorite, wasn’t he?” I asked, scoffing at the thought. It was always Ethan this, Ethan that. The older brother, the one to set the prime example, the successor. Her lips parted, but nothing came out, nothing more than a soft wheeze anyway.

“You can’t just admit it, can you?” I asked, taking a step towards her, my hurt thumping out of my chest. She was lying idly against the armoire, seemingly still quite dizzy from the hit. She stole a quick look to the scissors dangling by my fingers, then back to me.

“Vinny, please calm down.”

“Tell me what happened that night.” Her lips parted again, but this time, she has managed to stand up, and this time, a string of words do manage to glide out,

“Sweetheart, you don’t remember?”