Orange

1

Pumpkins, slick from the recent rain welcomed our visitors with eyes like slits. Hallowe’en was three days ago but temperatures have already committed suicide, plunging off of cliffs into icy waters, and because I’m me, I’m wearing a knee-length denim skirt and red fishnets that had faded to this carroty colour that the pumpkins like but I don't.2

The world was smeared with the anxiousness before a storm; the sky was one rumbling expanse of a black smudge. The towering pine trees in the front yard shook and twisted and fidgeted. I was watching them out a window in the stairway when my brother left.3

I was fourteen; he was twenty five and still lived with us—college hadn’t taken him anywhere. The only time I’d ever felt close to him was that day. His arm brushed against my back as he ran up the stairs and I, being me, didn’t turn around. By the time I decided to react, he wouldn’t have been there to notice it anyway. A few minutes went by and then I heard his heavy shoes clomping back down the hallway towards me just as quickly, but I didn’t actually look at him until I heard the front door at the base of the stairs open.4

I tried to follow quickly and ended up stumbling. I fell on the last step and banged up my knee. Climbing to my feet I went out the front door after my older brother; he hadn’t closed it after himself.5

“Are you ever going to come back?” I asked from the brick steps, ensconced in the centre of the clique of four pumpkins. The rain made its entrance and a cold drizzle started.6

He stopped in the middle of the ugly cement foot path that sprawled across our dead brown lawn—no one had watered it all summer and no one felt like working on it in the cold. The pumpkins tsked at it in disdain whenever I walked by. I supposed to them it must seem like a graveyard.7

He only had his old navy duffel with him. I guess, when pressed you can fit your whole life into whatever’s available.8

He replied through the splattering of water and I couldn’t hear him. I glanced to the four pumpkins and they confided that he’d said, “Maybe for you.” When I focused on my brother again, he was digging around in his pocket. He took out a black and white lighter—the one that had never worked that he’d gotten at Kyoto Tower in Japan—and he fumbled as he threw it to me so that I had to stoop to catch it with two hands.9

To avoid getting any more soaked by the downpour, he turned and clambered into his car through the passenger-side door. I tried not to breathe too loudly so as not to make opaque puffs that would obscure my view as I watched him climb into the driver’s seat and twist the keys and reverse his bromidic car down the grey driveway.10

And I, being me, stood out there until his car slowed at the stop sign at the end of our road. I turned to look up at the trees thrashing in the wind, and by the time I looked back, he had driven off, and there was only an empty street and four pumpkins backing me up.11