when my brother came home

Every night, Nicky wakes up screaming.

Sometimes I can hear him crying. Sometimes it’s just gasping breaths. Either way, Mama goes to his room every night, and holds him close. Just holds him. She’s given up on saying anything, given up on the idea that anything she says could make it better, could erase what he’s seen. She just holds him.

I think she’s glad to have even a single child who lets her touch him.

Fi flinches whenever Mama’s hands go to caress the soft down of her hair; she knows she shouldn’t – she’s told me so – but the touch feels foreign now that it’s only three fingers on her head.

Markus grew up while Nicky and Papa were gone, made himself the man of the house. We don’t really need one – it’s a small town and everyone likes Mama plenty – but he insists he has to be strong to protect us.

I think, secretly – I wouldn’t even tell Fi this – that Markus is afraid of Nicky.

Nicky and Papa left together a long time ago.

Markus was barely grown, seven or eight maybe, and when Nicky came back, he didn’t know who he was. He wouldn’t even let Nicky past the door.

Nicky wasn’t angry. He’s too tired to be angry. And too shaken. Far too shaken. Nicky was always a quiet boy; they never should have taken him. Papa should have found a way – surely one man per family is enough? But Nicky was eighteen, so they took him too. When I think about it, Papa was a quiet man too.

Nicky’s told me he can’t remember Papa’s voice without the sound of gunfire accompanying it. They spent so long in the barracks, he says, that the cacophony became their ease, and the silence could only mean something was wrong. It was hard to differentiate important yelling from normal yelling, he says. And there was a lot of yelling.

I can’t imagine Nicky yelling, but he says he did his fair share of that too.

Fi’s a strange kid. She’s the only one of us left that you can truly call a child anymore. The day after Nicky came home, she asked him, “Did you kill anyone?”

He wasn’t surprised, but he had a haunted look in his eye. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I hope I did, or if I hope I didn’t. Maybe if I did, the fighting could’ve ended sooner, but maybe if I didn’t, another bloke like me could come home to see his family again.”

Fi was quiet after that.

None of us needed to point out the empty seat at the table. We didn’t even need to look. The wooden structure seemed to mourn enough for the five of us.

There’s something else you should know about Nicky.

Before he came home, he was sitting in a truck driving back to the country areas to drop off the men that did their service. (Nicky told this story the night he got home. He had to. Mama was distraught.) As you probably can guess, Papa wasn’t sitting next to him. Papa wasn’t sitting anywhere anymore. But Nicky says that he’d stare at the empty slat next to him in the back of the truck, and wonder if they could fit one more body. They were all gaunt and skinny from the rations – would Papa have been thin enough to crouch next to him?

The other blokes on the truck were quiet too. Nicky wondered if they had folks they’d left behind, folks that came with them, but wouldn’t be coming back. One of the boys in the truck is Will – do you remember Will? he asked my siblings. Markus did, or at least he knew Will’s younger brother from school. Fi got him confused with another Will who works at the granary. I remember Will. Red hair, brightest I’ve ever seen it, and faint lines at the corners of his mouth from smiling so much. A fast runner. Hannah from Church told me he was a good kisser. Hannah from Church is kissing someone else nowadays. Poor Will, so quickly replaced.

Poor Will, Nicky would agree. He’s sitting in the back of the truck and his back is hunched forward, knees brought up to his chest. There’s enough room to cross his legs, but Will digs his thumbs into the crook of the opposite elbow, and stares at his boots. Just staring.

No one is saying anything.

There’s nothing to say.

There never has been.

It’s just that it seems so much quieter now there’s no gunfire in the background.

It’s an emptiness that takes some getting used to.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s the emptiness that makes Nicky shaken too.

All this to say, Nicky is on the back of a truck with some other country blokes, and is coming home.

It’s a long journey, several weeks from the ships to the countryside, so that means a lot of time to think. They stop regularly for piss breaks, and every night to sleep. There’s only one driver. None of the men in the back volunteer to drive. Nicky said he reckons they don’t know if they know how to anymore.

So they stop one night, and everything’s dead quiet. They’re in a town tonight, dropping one of the blokes off at home and then shutting off the engine next to a barn nearby. They sleep inside on the hay. It’s a lot softer than the weeks of sitting on wood that’s constantly moving and jolting because of the rubbish trails the driver takes.

And Nicky’s up thinking that night. Thinking and seeing. And when he eventually goes to sleep, he sees the same thing he sees every night.

He screamed back then too.

He says most of the blokes do.

And he’s awake and his heart is pumping and he sees a rifle on the tack next to the hay and he knows what he has to do and he takes the rifle, puts it to his eye and-

Nicky wears an eyepatch now.

He didn’t want to see things anymore.

When Mama heard all this, she just cried. Tears rolling down her face, and she sobbed into her grubby apron. Nicky couldn’t get up to hug her, he just sat there and stared at her. He didn’t know what to do. We didn’t either.

Every night, Nicky wakes up screaming.

Last night, I found a rifle under his bed but I didn’t say anything.

Last night, I didn’t hear Nicky scream.

I heard something much, much worse.