• The young boy stared fixedly out of the bus window, watching as his breath inched its way up the glass. With his nose pressed against it he could feel the cold on the other side. He pulled his coat around him, trying to keep himself warm within the frigid air of the school bus. He drowned out the noise of his classmates, trying to find whatever he was looking for on the receding streets.

    On the other side of the window was a barren interlude between fall and winter, a grey tableau of frosty streets, leafless trees and grey clouds. To the boy it seemed as though the world was dead, like it was resting in some sort of living grave.

    “A week ago my brother died,” thought the boy.

    As if triggered by the mere thought of the incident the boy saw the image of his brother’s funeral. He and his mother gathered around a stone with some of his brother’s friends. No one was crying. How could he cry for an older sibling who had never been there?

    There had been fights, between the boy’s mother and brother. His older brother coming home late every night, lots of shouting then silence. The kind of empty silence that made him hide under his covers so he wouldn’t have to listen to it. That was the memory he had of his brother.

    Then it stopped. His brother did not come home one night, only a friend of his brother’s. There was talk that the boy was unable to grasp. Words were used; guns, fight, shot and dead…and his brother’s name. After that there had been more silence, but of a different kind. It was more somber, more solemn, and it had been so much worse. It was the kind of consuming silence that eats away at a person’s soul, a silence that was filled with grim thoughts of sadness and absence. It was that silence that surrounded the boy and at times it was so terrible he wanted to die just to make it stop.

    Pondering all of this, another memory entered the boy’s head. He was two years-old and his brother was holding him. That was it, no cursing, no drugs, no shouting with his mother, no talk about his brother being a disgrace…just him and his brother and the warm summer sunlight on both of them…

    As the boy stepped off the bus, his cheeks turning red against the frosty air he was crying. “Even a disgrace needs someone to cry for them,” he thought.

    Stepping of the bus that day, the boy grew, even just a little bit older.