Every night, Jay smuggles cleaning fluids to Twin Lakes to help his dead brother, Michael, get high. He buys Windex, Cascade, and Febreeze with his Dunkin’ Donuts paycheck and stashes them under his bed. After school, around 6:00 PM, he bikes along Beltagh Avenue before cutting over to Old Mill Road, where a dirt path snakes away from the street, toward the northern lake. Invading grass is beaten back, tamed by teenagers stomping its length. Years of solo cups, beer bottles, and cigarette butts crust its shore, some fresh but most decayed into chips, shards, and mounds of paper and tobacco.
This is where The Overdose happened, where police found Michael’s body but not his soul. That stayed behind and pulled earth, swamp water, and refuse around it into a new form. Last year, after The Overdose, when Jay came to Twin Lakes to honor Michael with a limp ring of flowers he’d twisted together, he found Michael re-animated. After Jay screamed, cried, and hyperventilated, Michael made him promise not to tell their parents about his condition. “It’d be too much for them,” he’d said. Mom and Dad had suffered Michael in life and didn’t need to suffer him in death, too.
Jay finds his brother at the shore’s edge. Once, they’d looked alike, pale, dark-haired, and short. Now, Michael’s a vague form, eyeless, hairless, owning nothing of his old self save his voice and personality.
“Baby Jay, here with the good shit.” As Michael waves hello bits of plastic, glass, and dirt crumble from his arm. “What’s on the menu?”
Jay dumps his bag’s contents beside Michael, twists the top off a Windex bottle, and tilts the fluid into Michael’s gaping “mouth.” The chemical stink is barbed. Inhale, exhale. It stings both ways.
Michael’s blunt, crumbling lips envelope the neck. He suckles and shudders. Blue fluid sinks down the bottle’s upturned neck.
Why cleaning supplies? Food, water, soda, milk, drugs—none of it sated Michael. Cleaning fluids had been a last-ditch, desperate attempt that just happened to work.
“Lightning in liquid.” Breathy giggles play on Michael’s tongue. “I got skin, Jay. Look at me.” Jay imagines Michael as a human with bloodshot eyes and pinhole pupils.
Michael drops the empty bottle and smacks his lips, making them crack and erode. “Ah, wow. Okay, I think I’m coming down.”
“Am I crazy, or was that like a really short high?” Jay asks.
“Maybe it’s a weak batch.” There’s unspoken knowledge between them. With each week Michael’s highs shorten. After a year, they’re lasting as long as the bottle. Before long, Michael scratches his neck and groans so loudly it cuts Jay off. Bits of him flake off as he worries one spot over and over.
Unscrewing the Kleenex’s top, Jay says, “Open your mouth.”
It goes down smoothly, and yet… “I got a little something off that, but it’s leaving, already,” Michael says.
This has never happened before. Jay has no well-trodden mental paths to guide him.
Michael twitches and twists, shedding grit until finally he gives in and scratches his neck to pieces. His head and his body separate, an island and an isle.
