The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,47

I’d mention. For instance, the fact that we never bought a mop, preferring instead that childish thing where you attach damp cloths to your feet and slide across the floor. A Sunday evening ritual, with beers in hand that sometimes dropped and made the cleaning all the more necessary. There was much of adulthood we had no idea how to navigate, and new challenges arose all the time, but we found ways to live happily within them, and the shrieks as we cantered down the long hardwood hallway were loud.

I might also tell the jury how talented we were at presents. My because-it’s-Tuesday honey sticks countered with his fish of strange colors waiting to be named, my strings of little lamps made of mason jars complementing the cerulean he’d painted the living room as a surprise. I’d mention that he mostly always placed a glass of water and two Advil before me without my requesting it (he just knew), that he had a habit of buying fresh flowers and a knack for arranging them. That also a favorite joke between us was to tape a terrifying photo on the inside of the toilet seat or the cabinet, ideally at night so the other would find it in the morning: that famous mug shot of Nick Nolte, a particularly disturbing image of Carrot Top post steroids.

Everyone who visited our home found it just that. They clucked their tongues at the history it implied, some awed given their free lifestyles as just one person, some envious, some inquisitive. We hung photographs by wooden clothespins on a string that ran the length of the east wall. My father and Jackson, age nine, on the afternoon of the Fourth of July, Dad holding a fifty-dollar brick that Jackson is fixated on, fascinated by the promise of pyrotechnics. James and Jackson and myself, sitting on the steps of Julia’s porch on what was my first day of high school. James has grown shadowed already, turning his face away from the camera so that his awkward nose seems larger, doing that thing boys of that age do where they hide their hands inside the sleeves of their sweatshirts. Jackson in a worn shirt that details species of birds, his eyes so bright they’re almost garish. Me in a tight-fitting striped linen button-down that I adored and jeans I’d put holes in over the summer. There was evidence of later years also, of course. Jackson and me, home from college for Christmas, smoking cigarettes on someone’s absent parents’ back porch, in on a joke, our blooming intellectual freedoms nearly a third figure in the photograph, one itchy scarf wrapped around both our necks. Jackson pissing off the winding two-lane highway that follows the edge of California and sometimes closes for repairs when chunks fall into the ocean. A picture taken just after, the first morning of the camping trip we were driving toward, of our faces mashed against each other in the two sleeping bags whose zippers we tricked into meeting. James at sixteen with his guitar on Julia’s porch, singing and his mouth open as if waiting for the unbridled refreshment of a hose, Jackson and me barely visible in the background, smirking at each other; my father’s thumb in the bottom left corner, so intent on capture that he was careless.

When new friends came over and saw all of it, when they asked how long we’d been together, we had several answers.

“Since somewhere between simple addition,” I’d start, “and multiplication tables,” Jackson would finish.

“Since before cursive.”

“Hell, probably since before we knew the alphabet.”

Some of them wanted to know: And do you fight? And we would say: Yes. Of course. Doesn’t every family?

Paul couldn’t explain how it happened, but given the circumstances, it was the one blunder of the evening I forgave him for. Somewhere between Jackson’s frenetic outburst at Caroline and her subsequent breakdown, I asked you nicely the first time went missing. Though we both remembered Jackson leaving the space empty-handed, we both figured he had something to do with it. It was too obvious a symbol. He had asked us nicely the first time, hadn’t he? He had asked me not to provide him with the materials in his sleep. Not to let him take buses and wander into art stores. Not to show anyone, and certainly not to exhibit the pieces. He had asked nicely the first, second, and third times, but I had insisted, as always, on knowing that surely this