The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. Thomas Mullen

      It was insane, what had befallen their world. The foundations of normalcy had been revealed as imaginary. Reality had come crashing down on top of them, buried them alive.

      “Let’s be quick about it,” Jason said. They weren’t worried about the car being traced; they had stopped in the middle of the night to exchange tags with a broken-down Ford by the side of the road.

      They climbed the five steps to the front door. A stray, mangy black dog was suddenly at their heels, sniffing excitedly.

      The door was locked, so Whit, as the one wearing shoes, kicked it in. The door swung awkwardly on its loose hinges, which had been busted by past Firefly entrances. Why someone kept fixing the lock was a mystery.

      They closed the door behind them, though it wouldn’t quite latch, and the dog gleefully nosed it open as it followed them. At least that allowed the daylight to throw a thin sliver down the long hallway, puddles offering stagnant reflections. The house smelled like piss and something dead.

      Jason instinctively unpocketed his pistol. The wood floor was sticky beneath his bare feet, as if the building were sweating.

      They had spent time in no small number of vacant houses and barns across the Midwest, some of which had smelled worse. They hadn’t known the family who lived here, had never visited back when it had actually belonged to someone. As Jason moved, he wondered if he heard whispering from upstairs or if he was just imagining things.

      The dog followed them into the kitchen, still sniffing their feet. It licked Jason’s bare toes, and Jason began to fear that the tongue was only a precursor to the teeth.

      He looked up at Whit. “We don’t…smell, do we?”

      It took Whit a second to realize what his brother meant. “Jesus, I hope not.” He looked at the dog and nudged it with his shoe. “Beat it.” The stray finally turned around and left the kitchen.

      Whit reached over the kitchen sink and removed a loose piece of plywood where the window used to be. He could see the backyard. It was small, like the others in the neighborhood, and enclosed by a wood fence five feet high. On the other side of the fence was their mother’s house.

      “Curtains are drawn.”

      Jason crowded beside him and scanned the side yards. “There’s somebody in the gray sedan there,” he said. They couldn’t make out the man’s face, only his dark suit and tie. Just sitting there.

      “I say we do it anyway,” Whit said. “He probably won’t see.”

      Jason put the gun back in his pocket while Whit opened the back door. Knee-high grass and weeds twitched, aphids leaped from strand to strand as the brothers crossed the yard. The fence sagged and threatened to topple under their weight as they pulled themselves over.

      When they were kids, the back porch would have been safety in a game of tag. They both thought of this as they hurried up the steps. The guy in the sedan could be a reporter or a cop. Were the cops looking to arrest their mother for aiding and abetting? Such persistence beyond the grave seemed sacrilegious, the ungentlemanly flouting of established rules.

      They climbed the back steps to the porch that their brother Weston had rebuilt the previous spring. The door was locked, so Jason knocked three times. After half a minute, he knocked again, harder this time.

      The window on the top half of the door was concealed by a thin white curtain, and he saw a finger lift a corner. It pulled back as if the window were electrified. Then it returned, parting the curtain further this time. With the morning sun behind him, all Jason could see was his own reflection, his cheeks dark with stubble, his defiled hair hanging limp on his forehead. He winked.

      Bolts slid from their works. Then the door pulled open, their mother’s left hand holding it wide and her right hand leaning on the jamb. She was wearing her old white nightgown, and her hair fell behind her shoulders. The veins beneath her caved eyes were visible, pulsing as she stared at them.

      “Jason? Whit?” Her voice tiny.

      “Hi, Ma.” Jason stepped forward just in time to prevent her from collapsing. She clasped her arms around him, squeezing as she uttered something that was a laugh or a cry. The sound sank into his chest. Whit slipped behind them into the house before she released Jason and transferred her embrace to her youngest son.

      “I thought I told you not to believe everything you read about us,” Jason said, stepping into the kitchen. The smells of home came as they always did, coffee and old wood mixed with the sulfur of extinguished matches and a certain dampness. Jason breathed them in deeply.

      Ma pulled back from Whit but kept her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes were wet. “But they said…We’ve been getting these calls…The police…”

      “I’m sorry, Ma,” Whit said, his voice shrinking as hers had grown. “I’m sorry we scared you. We’re okay.”

      One of her hands moved to his cheek as she stared at him, then she buried her face into his shoulder and hugged him again. Jason watched Whit’s hand at Ma’s back, long pale fingers kneading the thin cloth. Eventually she opened her eyes.

      “Jason, you’re barefoot,” she said. “And your toes are black.”

      He laughed at how easily she’d turned maternal and scolding. But damn if she wasn’t right about the toes, he noticed, hoping it was only dirt.

      “Sit down, Ma,” Whit said, an arm around her as he guided her into the dining room. “Take a minute.” Jason scanned the room, as well as the front parlor, to make sure all the curtains were drawn.

      They sat at the table and Jason handed her a dishcloth to wipe her eyes. Whenever he saw his mother after a time away, he was struck by the fact that his adulthood was pushing hers further toward senescence. He always thought she had lost weight, but maybe this was just his new awareness of how frail she always had been. Her thin dark hair was laced with gray, and she usually kept it pulled back, a reminder that she no longer had anyone to look pretty for. It amazed Jason that something as inanimate as hair could possess such sorrow.

      “What happened?”

      “It’s a long story,” Jason said. “Let’s just settle in for a moment.”

      The telephone on the wall began to ring. None of them made a motion toward it, and there were no footsteps from above. After seven rings, it stopped.

      Ma’s face had been colorless when she first opened the door, but now her eyes were red and glistening. So this was what her sons did for her: put color in her face, and texture. She shook her head at them, her boys who were supposed to be dead, and her eyes moved from son to son as if wondering when one or the other might disappear.

      “I could kill you,” she said.

      “You wouldn’t be the first,” Jason replied. Whit shot him a look.

      The small dining room’s evergreen wallpaper, dark-stained molding, and west-facing windows contributed to its customary element of morning gloom, made worse by the drawn curtains.

      Then the sound of the front door opening, the key and the hinges, and footsteps.

      “Ma, what’s—” Jason looked up just in time to see Weston walking into the dining room, stopping midstride. “Jesus…”

      “Boo,” Jason said.

      “Jesus.” Weston moved back a step. He was gripping a copy of the Sun, rolled tight like a billy club. Jason could just make out the word brothers in the headline, see some blurry part of the photograph shaking in Weston’s tensed fingers.

      “You’re…You’re supposed to be dead.”

      “Sorry to disappoint.”

      “What happened?”

      Whit was already out of his chair, grabbing the paper from his shocked brother. He stepped into the kitchen and put the newspaper in the trash bin, burying it deep beneath