Susan L. Leary

My brother was born with a tumor wrapped around the bones in his right ear. The tiny structure a snail’s shell, this time with the snail inside. As he gets older, the tumor puts pressure on the bones & they break into a shrunken tuba or finch’s claw, something to move across the board in a child’s game. While the bones get rebuilt, my brother’s hearing is never the same, which means he has a good ear & a bad ear—& by the time he’s eleven, a mouth as crude as The Dude in The Big Lebowski. So it becomes a thing: in the backseat of the car, my brother leaning to whisper all the cuss words & dirty jokes to try & get me to laugh. Which I do, before murmuring back in his bad ear words tireless enough to wait. Because when dying, hearing is the last sense to go—& as my brother sank onto the bathroom tile, his head propped against the tub, perhaps he heard for the first time what I’d told him then: I like you a lot, you know…