Taco Bueno
I knew you to be there, even at three and a half years old. Those opaque, numbered days as a small child in a house of many. Sunbeams filtered through the upstairs hallway as I tip-toed down to your room, the floorboards giving me away under their hundred-year-old weight. Your room was at the end of the hall and I wanted to peak in, perhaps, and catch a glimpse of you. The ceiling light that hung just inside your door reminded me of a skeleton, plastic and groovy-looking, and I would stare at it sometimes when you weren’t there. But today you came out of your bedroom door before I could get there, and you smiled at me, bonking me on the head with a rolled-up piece of paper. This is my first memory of you. Brother. You were sarcastic and funny and sometimes I felt that you weren’t allowed to be mine, that my time with you didn’t count. You left when I was three, graduated and gone. My memories with you were limited to the times you’d come home, arms full of gifts at Christmas-time