Content note: Child death
It was half past midnight when Olga heard the Devil cry.
They were supposed to be wild tonight, the three of them. Cassandra had led the way and Maria and Olga didn’t put up much of a fight. They would visit the Devil’s bridge—anything that claimed to be even remotely intimidating was the Devil’s something—and stay there for a while, record it with their phones to have something to show for it. Smoke some cigarettes.
Technically it was built on top of a river that had been dredged and filled in some fifty years ago which made the ground under the bridge degraded and pretty dangerous. But rumor had it—and by rumor Olga meant Maria’s oldest cousin who had been making up stories about this place since third grade—that the bridge was built upon one of the gateways to Hell. If you walked on the bridge at the right time, when everything was still and quiet, and if you teetered a bit too close to the edge, the Devil’s own hand would stretch from the bottoms of Hell and drag you under the bridge, and that would be the last anybody saw of you.
But nobody said what would happen if you cut out the middleman and just went straight under the bridge. So, the girls—and pretty much everyone in their school, and in other schools, and in places that weren’t schools but people there were sufficiently immature—would challenge each other to spend a few minutes under the bridge and prove it. The proof could be literally anything, from a photo, to a short video, to saying hey, I was there last night; people would believe you depending on your overall credibility.
They called the place under the bridge the tunnel, even though it wasn’t one really because it sounded both attractive and foreboding. Like the tunnel a soul crosses to enter Heaven only in the opposite direction. Like the dark at the end of the tunnel.
Olga lied to Maria and Cassandra about why she had followed them there. She told them it was because she was curious to see if these airheads would get jittery when dampness stuck to their skin like sweat and the musty air from the sea, stale as mold, passed through their lungs. When the wind reached their ears like tiny voices calling from beyond, would they shit their pants and try not to show it?
The truth was more complicated than that, much like what Olga’s life had become. The real reason she had followed them there was to see the Devil—in the same way an unsatisfied customer goes back to the store and asks to speak to the manager. A very, very fearful customer. Because Olga had been through all of this before.
Her friends’ jokes and their loud voices echoed in the tunnel as they struggled to pass through the chain link fence someone put up years ago, even though there was an adult-size hole right in the middle of it. The jagged and rusty edges of the gutted fence screamed Tetanus Central. The signs were warning them to keep out. Bad things had happened here. And because time was a circle, they were bound to happen again. So keep out, you idiot.
Even Olga’s parents—who otherwise stayed out of her way—had kept up with the tradition of admonishing her yearly not to ever go under the bridge.
Still, in she went.
Sometimes you don’t really know people until they have the freedom to get weird. Or until something probes and pokes at them until the weirdness bursts out like water from a balloon. And once inside the tunnel the weirdness rushed out of them. Their voices lowered as if on cue. Their breaths became labored and the air stung their eyes. They weren’t too deep inside—it was after all a smallish bridge that had stopped being important almost immediately after it was built—but the light from their phones barely managed to push an inch into a darkness that old and unused.
Maria, who had taken Cassandra up on her offer a little too fast, was now assaulting her cuticles with her incisors to keep herself occupied. Olga noticed a thin line of blood crawling around Maria’s thumb, but said nothing. Maria didn’t seem to care either.
“Here devil, devil, where are you hiding?” Cassandra started a singsong as if trying to mask her own nervousness, which in turn made Olga both cringe and become more nervous because Cassandra hated singing. She had in fact punched Olga in the arm once because she slipped up and sang along with a tune during a commercial.
And Olga? What was Olga doing? She didn’t feel she was acting too weird given the circumstances, but she was probably doing something without realizing it. It was the moment when she was absorbed by the mystery of her own weirdness that the small child appeared on the other side of darkness, crying his eyes out. His yellow jammies almost glowed against the walls of the tunnel.
“What the hell…is this?” Cassandra ran out of songs surprisingly fast. She didn’t even try to mask the wobble in her voice.
Maria whimpered, and probably not because she hit a nerve.
Olga’s back touched the wetness of the wall. The little boy stood death-still between darkness and half-darkness, wearing the same jammies Olga had left him in a few hours ago. He was clutching his favorite Robin Hood LEGO figure, stolen from her old set. As if things could afford to get weirder tonight.
“Shit, that’s my brother.”
Olga ran to him, even as her mind was trying to grasp if this was a hallucination due to her being a wimp or if this was really happening again, and how fast her parents would kill her if they found out.
Petros, her brother, could not answer how he got there. I followed you, he kept repeating over and over, even though Olga wasn’t at home before they all came to the bridge, but at Maria’s place, pretending to do a sleepover. There was no way he had followed her from house to house in the middle of the night dressed like this. Someone would have noticed. Besides, she was sure she had locked the door. He didn’t look that upset now that she was holding him. His cheeks were dry. It was like the crying was something she had imagined.
“Are you sure it’s your brother? I didn’t know you had one.” Maria mumbled. She still couldn’t keep her hand away from her mouth, even though her fingers were more bone than flesh by now.
Olga gave her a don’t-you-think-I-know-who-my-brother-is look, secretly resenting her for calling him it. She knew Maria didn’t mean it that way but the word still bugged her in a way she couldn’t explain.
“Can we go home now?”
The boy rubbed his sleep-crust eyes and wrapped his arms around Olga’s neck before she was ready to pick him up, as if trying to pull her down before she ran away. Despite the absolute rat-feast this place was, there was no trace of dirt on him or his clothes. Olga would have thought he was standing in the middle of their kitchen asking for a glass of water and waiting to be tucked in. If it weren’t for the girls’ disinterested questions—what’s his name? where do you go to school buddy? is that your favorite toy? The usual stuff people ask when they don’t want to engage with a kid but they feel they have to. Kids can see right through that—she’d think she had dreamed him being here, under the bridge. When she picked him up though his body was as heavy as it was yesterday, his face felt warm and supple against her shoulder blade and he smelled like his favorite shampoo. He felt very, very real. And Olga just knew it was happening again.
Cassandra laughed. “Let him stay. He might grow a backbone.”
“You better not catch a cold or something.” Olga held him tight and made for the exit.
“Are you bailing on us?” Cassandra tried weakly, but they all knew this night was over for her.
When she brought him back home, she moved snake-smooth. She heard the murmur of the TV and knew her mother was probably asleep in the living room by now. When her father was working nightshifts, her mother refused to sleep in their bedroom, in their double bed. Instead, she thought it a much better idea to let her body slowly slide against the couch pillows as her eyelids grew heavier until she was snoring in front of the red screen light of true-crime shows.
Olga grunted inwardly at the boy’s weight as Petros was following their mother’s example and drooled onto her generic, wholesale T-Shirt. She steeled herself to carry him a few more meters down the hall and into the room they shared. When she opened the door though, her brother was already there, tucked under the covers, right where she had left him. His yellow jammies a copycat of the ones the brother in her arms was wearing. Everything down to the LEGO figure and a small scratch on the chin from when she had chased him down the hallway were exactly the same.
Olga stood motionless for the merest of seconds and then, bending at the waist, she lifted the quilt and placed the second brother delicately next to the first one.
“Here we are,” she whispered to no one in particular.
She gave herself a few more seconds to really take in how much she had messed up. This was bad. No—it was beyond bad. She wished the Devil had actually dragged her all the way to Hell, so she wouldn’t have to risk Mom and Dad finding out they were now the proud parents of twins (congratulations, by the way!).
Devil is a trickster, stupid. If you were paying attention you’d know.
She was paying attention and she did know. All those years in Sunday school had not been for nothing. But in hindsight everything looks easy. It’s when you are actually making the deal that you lose all sense of proportion. And she wasn’t even certain she had made a deal with the Devil. Had she? Well, the Devil definitely thought so. Because she didn’t even have to say anything. She didn’t have to say please, please can I have my brother back? Because my parents are sad and I don’t know how to love them the right way. Only he could. Ever since he died our family has been falling apart and I am tired of eating dinner alone on most days. So please can I have my brother?
She didn’t have to say any of this. All she had to do was go under the bridge one night, alone. She was fifteen, a weird age between a kid and not-a-kid and she wanted to test her parents’ limits. Telling herself she was just curious to see what all the fuss was about, that she was now an adult (although she wasn’t, not by a mile), and she needed to get out of her system all the child-stuff that had been haunting her since forever (even though it had only been that one thing for the past five years).
Then, there she was, under the bridge. The man-size hole in the fence was already there, it must have been for a while for the convenience of every desperate soul in a fifty-kilometer radius. No, this was clearly man-made, a Hell gate should be more spectacular, even if hideously spectacular, and at least have someone’s head as a door knocker or something.
And it’s not like she was thinking anything in particular. She was of course thinking of her brother. She was always thinking of her brother, even when she didn’t mean to. Even when she was sleeping. But that was an especially good time to be thinking of him because he never got the chance to do something this stupid. Olga was willing to bet that he would be the type to do the stupid things first. That’s how she remembered him in his six-year-old self. He had been four years younger than her but still much more daring and inventive in the ways he could drive their parents mad. She was usually the one to be reprimanded for letting him do the stupid things, instead of the person who did them. And now she was stuck in the awkward position of having nobody to guard from the stupid. So naturally this was an invitation to act on it.
But besides passively thinking of him, her mind was blank and a little bit frozen because it was winter and the fog rising from the sea chilled her to the bone. Her hand was shaking as she lifted her phone like a flashlight to look around and it might have been the cold, and it might have been that her body was trying to turn around on its own accord and start running. The darkness was still thick as a brick wall but she took small, careful steps and looked around. In fact, she managed to cover most, if not all, of the tunnel while taking deep breaths to keep the rising panic at bay. There wasn’t much to see. No gate she could make out with the light of her phone. There was a plastic bag and some food wrappers on the ground, signs that people—not the Devil—had been eating gyro from one of the joints around the port. She did stumble on a few crawlers and backed away immediately. Bugs were her own version of Hell on Earth. On the far side of the tunnel, she found candles of many colors, but mostly black, reduced to a guttered mess. Confettied all around were pieces of a torn photograph that if you tried to piece them together and squinted really hard, you’d probably get thirty percent of someone’s crush. It was hard to keep track of the exact number of dark rituals that had happened here. Again, kid-stuff.
Olga felt like the only person in the world while inside the tunnel, that much she had to admit. The tunnel’s ceiling looked like the roof of the world on Creation Day, dark and damp and oppressive. And if she was doing a weird thing back then she didn’t even know to question herself about it, because she hadn’t been there yet with Cassandra and Maria, so she hadn’t seen herself mirrored in their faces and didn’t know what to look for. A thought might have sneaked inside her mind then, when she was feeling the most calm, the most one with the universe, and she might not have noticed. Not a passive brother-thought, but an aggressive one. An illusion that she could change everything—but mostly her own life—if only she concentrated hard enough. Re-arrange the stars and the planets and time itself. There was power shimmering from a place just under her, but the shimmering was so low it could have been nothing at all.
And when she looked down again, through the yellow-white glow of the phone, a LEGO figure that shouldn’t be there stared back at her.
When she found the First Petros in that tunnel, the boy was laughing his body into cramps. Olga felt like she was watching a dream she had last night play out like a movie in front of her. Only the dream was an actual memory she had of her brother from maybe six years ago, and this wasn’t a movie.
She realized there was something wrong with First Petros after the flush of excitement wore off. They were in her room in the middle of the night, and she was marveling at him—at her brother and at the miracle of him being there—with half her brain, while the other half was desperately trying to come up with something even remotely believable to throw at her parents when the inevitable reveal happened. Mom, Dad, look who’s here to see you! (cliche), You won’t believe who I bumped into last night! (no, they wouldn’t), I know he still looks six years old but that makes up for all the lost time, right? (pathetic). In the end she decided there was no need for words and that her parents would tearily welcome back this Petros, become normal again, and probably move to another city altogether to get away from friends and relatives who might start asking questions. It wasn’t perfect but it was a plan. That was until Petros started jumping up and down on the bed and yelled something about winning a game of Connect 4. A game she vaguely remembered losing at and him spilling juice all over the carpet, celebrating. Olga wasn’t sure if this was an actual memory or a fake memory he just put in her head.
“Everything alright in there?”
Her Dad’s voice came from the other side of the door timid. He wasn’t working that night but because his body was so used to sleeping during the day, he ended up shuffling around the house like a night nurse. And even though he forgot to even check if she was home most days, the noise definitely had gotten his attention.
Olga was already panicking, but a small part of her—the one that wasn’t looking for an exit—noticed that when she shifted her attention away from the boy, he stopped responding all together and sat back on the bed like the most obedient creature. She kept not looking at him as she headed for the door, trying to cover as much of the opening as possible with her narrow body.
“Everything’s fine, Dad.” Olga’s head rested on the doorframe in a mock-exhausted tilt. She was actually exhausted but all the adrenaline was still coursing through her, and it would still be there come morning.
“Good, good,” he muttered and made to leave but then stopped again and looked at her in the way he always did—without really looking.
Olga was surprised to realize she felt almost annoyed at not getting caught. Even though getting caught now would do her no good. She needed more time to figure out her new-old-brother thing. What annoyed her was that her father didn’t ask about the noise. Did he think the little boy’s voice was inside his head? Was he haunted by Petros like she was? Of course he was.
Maybe the problem was that her father was so unwilling to talk to her—to really talk to her—that he preferred not to know. When it was the two of them—just Olga and him, without Mom or others around—she felt like he was a little bit afraid of her. He kept tiptoeing around her for no reason she could tell. It’s not like he didn’t want to be around her, he kept asking her questions about school and gave her money for takeout whenever she asked, it was that he didn’t know how to be around her. Sometimes Olga felt like he was so kind because he was apologizing for some unspoken insult. Those times she chose to feel insulted.
“Is it okay if I drive you to school tomorrow?”
Olga nodded trying to not resent the way he always asked for her permission to parent her.
“Yes, Dad. Yes, that’s okay. Yes. See you tomorrow. Bye.”
Olga locked the door and turned to look at her brother. His face lit up again and that’s when she felt it in her bones: the trap, the hook, the bargain that had not been made yet but would be.
This was not her brother. This was a movie trailer, a sample you got at the grocery store in front of the cheese section, and not even the good kind of cheese. Devil’s own marketing ploy. The whole brother would come, but he would come with a price. She only had to find what that was.
“What will it take for you to become a real boy?”
It was the most Geppetto she had ever felt.
Olga was the one who had suggested the bridge the second time, but only in an indirect way because she couldn’t stop talking about it. First Brother was at home, locked in their room, and even though she didn’t want to talk about what had happened to her under the bridge, she really wanted to talk about it somehow, so she ended up going around asking about the bridge and the stories about it, like a reporter asks passersby their opinion on new government policies and what do you think about the economy?
Maria—who kindly noted that Olga looked especially miserable that day—was too happy to share all the different legends her older cousin had told her.
That time the Devil asked for the Master Builder’s wife to be sacrificed, to be buried in the foundations of the bridge because the bridge was passing over his prime property. The Master Builder eventually obliged and that’s why sometimes you can hear a woman’s lament when the wind blows just right. (“That’s stolen from that ballad, ‘The Bridge of Arta.’ Which isn’t this one.” Olga said. Cassandra snickered. Maria scowled but kept on.)
That time the Devil stole a young farmer’s beating heart when he came to the bridge to fetch water for his horses. He was to be married to his lover and he became a different man, sullen, and silent, and violent. The night of their wedding she looked at his bare chest and saw a hole the size of a drainpipe going right through him. She left him soon after for his cousin in another village. (“I like the ending,” Cassandra said. Olga nodded.)
That time the Devil made a deal with a woman who was jealous of her husband and afraid she’d grow horns on her forehead because of him cheating. The Devil kept his end of the bargain by taking her head off and putting it on a ram. The horns fit better there he told her. The Ram Woman still roams the forest behind the bridge. (“Corny!” Cassandra yelled which made Maria push her, but Olga sat up straight because this one mentioned a deal being struck.)
That time the Devil possessed an entire herd of sheep because the herder crossed the bridge at night without permission and sent them over the edge where they drowned. That was back when there was still water under the bridge, more than a hundred years ago.
“That last one’s from the Bible, dummy,” Cassandra rolled her eyes.
Maria, deflated, shrugged. “It worked once so he could have done it again.”
Olga did not find any of the stories relevant to her problem but that was when Cassandra said, “Why don’t we do it? Go there tonight?”
Maria, who at this point was too invested in her own second-hand tales and probably a little hurt Cassandra wasn’t impressed with them said, “My mom would let us do a sleepover. We could sneak out.”
This made sense because her house was the closest to the bridge, and that meant it was twenty minutes on foot across the highway.
Olga said nothing. She was already thinking of the thousand ways the Devil could trick her, and ways he had already done so.
Second Brother was not quite like First and they were both as weird as it gets, which made their different brands of weird kind of impressive. But they had one thing in common: they could be really, really passive. They were two opposites of the same person. Like theater masks. You’re so funny! The happy brother shrieked, clapping his hands together; I want to go home, the sad brother whispered behind tears that had started coming down again. Even though they were already home. Unless it was another home he was thinking of, one still under a bridge. Olga didn’t want to ask. It was as if someone took a video of Petros on two different occasions and they were now replaying it for eternity but there was only like fifty seconds of it. If she really tried to talk to or communicate with them outside of that imaginary script, the boys seemed more and more like oversized dolls, without other thoughts or needs, which Olga found especially cruel and therefore an appropriate Devil move. Since they seemed to want for nothing, Olga kept both brothers hidden in her room, the door locked behind her when she was inside and when she left, not that anyone was thinking of checking in there. Her freedom was as much a burden as it was a relief.
The day after Olga brought the second brother home there was a small ruckus in the school yard. The kind of super localized excitement around this one thing that breaks up immediately when a teacher passes by, even if they’re not on to you.
The center of attention was Cassandra and her phone. Maria was standing on the outskirts of the attention, leaning in but not getting as much out of it as Cassandra who had the video. Maria was clearly unhappy about this and her mangled fingers didn’t help either. The video was, of course, about last night under the bridge.
“You don’t have dibs on this,” Cassandra hissed as Olga tried to squeeze her way through the small crowd to have a better look at the screen.
Cassandra was the kind of person who liked to take full credit for things. Whether or not she deserved the credit was irrelevant. Also irrelevant was the level of nastiness of the thing she took credit for, and the punishment she would take from the teachers or her parents, which didn’t do her any favors in the long run, but she had a reputation to maintain and Olga respected that.
“That’s not what—”
“Don’t worry you aren’t in the video. Or in the conversation.” Maria said mercifully and put Olga’s soul at ease. For now.
The video was as generic as one would expect of a video found on a teenager’s phone. It had that “found footage” quality Cassandra was going for. She was rambling about it as the three of them made their way through the rocky dirt roads snaking between the tobacco fields. It was mostly the two girls’ faces illuminated beyond recognition by the phone’s flashlight option. They probably started filming after Olga and Second Brother had left because she could really find no trace of them in the video. The rest was the same stuff Olga had seen herself the first time she had been there. The walls, the ceiling, the crawlers on the walls and on the ceiling (nasty), the food wrappers with the added company of a cheap brand beer can, the melted to the ground candles, and finally the thirty-percent crush, the photo of whom the girls had tried to put together. If the video wasn’t interesting enough for the crowd, the thrill of discovering who was the object of desire would certainly do the trick. Even if it wasn’t someone they knew.
The results of assembling a shredded photo in the dark with a flashlight were less than impressive. What was there was too jigsaw- and puzzle-like to be anything. Most of the hair with an ear attached, the corner of a mouth, both eyes but only half of each which made the whole thing really uncanny. The crush could have been any girl, or boy, or person around. The results were too inconclusive and therefore generic. For it to be a specific someone, every single piece would need to be in place. Or at least most of the major pieces. That’s what made a whole person. And right now, Olga had only two pieces of her brother. The happy and the sad. What was staring back at Olga was not a torn-up picture, but the reason she had to go back.
Olga was trying to work up the courage to visit the tunnel for the third time. She speared some spaghetti drenched in a sauce that people in her house called Bolognese. It wasn’t the authentic recipe; Olga had looked it up on the Internet once out of boredom. This was more like the Greek Mom version of Bolognese. Each household had one and swore by it while scoffing at the other inferior but equally inaccurate versions. Olga was thankful for that pasta in ways she couldn’t really express with words.
It was one of those days when Olga had nagged hard enough and for long enough that it made her parents get up and cook something for her. Mom had said, “I’ll make your favorite,” and Olga’s heart fluttered for a moment until she saw her boiling the pasta and the feeling sagged. This was, of course, her brother’s favorite. Olga had lost count of how many times her mother had mixed them up, but she didn’t dare bring it up for fear that her Mom would remember to be sad again and slump on the couch.
Dad was cleaning off his plate using a piece of bread, preparing to leave for work and Mom was picking all the cucumber slices out of the choriatiki salad. If Olga looked at this picture through her fingers like someone would try to look at the sun, the image appeared almost normal. Boring in the best possible way if you didn’t know enough. Just a family sitting at the table eating lunch, no biggy. No colossal, life-changing event could have ever damaged these people beyond recognition. They even had Mom’s fake Bolognese at the table. They were doing alright.
Olga considered taking some of the food to her room to give both her brothers a taste of home. Perhaps that would fix them a little bit, make them less loopy. They didn’t seem to need food, the way dreams don’t need food to project themselves on to you. Because that’s what they were doing wasn’t it? One was projecting her happy memories of her brother on to her and the other one the sad. She wondered what kind of brother she would find under the bridge this time.
As she was distracted by these thoughts, Dad reached out to steal the last cucumber slice away from Mom, and for a moment their forks crosshatched, and they looked at each other, and they both sorta laughed, and that was the angriest Olga had ever felt in a while. She had been angry at them on and off for years but that level of anger scared her. It made no sense. She searched for other appropriate feelings and found that she couldn’t feel happy. Surprised perhaps, or briefly excited. Happiness though was easy to miss. It was fleeting to begin with. Happiness was leaving the house in the morning and walking to school. Then it disappeared by first period as the guilt creeped up on her for leaving her Mom alone with her thoughts.
Sadness was a more solid bet. She tried really hard, and then she tried harder. For a few minutes she let herself think of thoughts she had been keeping away for months. The really bad ones. There was no sadness stirring inside of her. There was always that guilt circling her, and then came anguish, and as time passed and she couldn’t feel the so-familiar sadness there was fear. Fear because she could see where this was going. Fear that she had left these feelings under the bridge forever in exchange for her brothers and fear that there were many more to be lost.
The Devil is so, so smart you see? At first you don’t even know you should be scared. And then when you smarten up—start to figure out what his deal is—he takes away your ability to be scared.
Olga still felt things. For now. And that meant she felt angry at best and annoyed when she got tired of being angry. But as she entered the tunnel for the third time she lost her fear. A pretty useful emotion when you are dealing with the Devil.
She didn’t find the third brother until she had searched wall to wall. She was about to give up and was feeling both relieved and disappointed, and then there he was, on the ground, pushing his small body against the cold bricks. His eyes had become perfect circles. Clutching the Robin Hood figure with both hands he screamed, No I don’t want to bite it! Get it away from me!
This time Olga didn’t have a doubt that this was a memory. It was a summer a few months before Petros got sick and a few weeks after his fifth birthday. Olga had found the fuzziest, most disgusting looking caterpillar in the garden. It looked more like a tiny porcupine than a bug, and just the sight of its wriggling torso made her whole being shiver. Olga put aside her disgust and picked it up. She had a theory she had been working on for some time that Petros wasn’t afraid of anything and she wanted to test it. She wanted to be a little mean, be the wild kid for once, the kind of kid her parents were constantly worried about. The way they worried about her brother.
“Bite it.”
“Why?”
“Because it bit me and now I am cursed,” Olga said cornering him against the fence. “Bite it and save me.”
She was taller than him and used her advantage to hover the caterpillar over his head.
“No, no, no, no, no, no!”
When he finally got over his fear—of course he did, he wasn’t afraid of anything for long enough—and agreed to bite it, Olga stopped him short of chewing off its head. Then both of them slipped the caterpillar in their Dad’s coffee mug.
“That will lift the curse,” Petros whispered from behind the couch.
She had forgotten to tell him she’d lied.
The brother in her memory and the one right in front of her were two completely different creatures. Third Brother was stuck in a loop of fear that made no sense to Olga’s teenage self and was blown out of proportion. She had the sudden idea that this was what Hell looked like: A self, fragmented. What if the Devil cut you up in neat little pieces of yourself and you were stuck in loops for ever and ever? No matter the type of loop—happy, sad, or fearful—it would eventually get old, not just old, it would become nightmarish.
Olga approached the terrified child and like her Mom would do in the olden days, she kissed his forehead and reassured him. This would be over soon. It had to be. If only she could gather enough pieces of him there would eventually be enough of him to merge into one person.
It didn’t take much for the room to become crammed. Her room. Their room. Hers and Petros’s room. Her room. Their room. The Three Brothers’ room. The ownership of the room had changed in her head so many times it made her dizzy. It wasn’t a big space to begin with. Just a bunk bed against one of the walls. Then a window to fit an entire car through (Olga was still amazed neither of them had fallen accidentally on the patio table underneath when they were playing). Opposite of the bed a small desk with an even tinier shelf that barely held ten books at a time, then a medium-size closet. And finally, opposite of the window, the door. The room was meant to be for both of them when they were little, until Dad got around to fixing up the old storage room into something livable and one of them could move in there, when they grow up and need more space. Then one of them never grew up and the subject was never discussed again.
Now all three of her brothers were safely tucked inside the top bunk like the ogre’s children in that fairytale. Olga remembered there were more siblings in the fairytale, and she expected there to be more brothers in this one as well. The room itself felt smaller somehow, even smaller than when she had Cassandra and Maria and half her class over for a shitty birthday party that ended up in them drinking chamomile tea in the kitchen at three in the morning, courtesy of her Dad—the sandwiches they had been bingeing on had gone bad because Mom forgot to put them in the fridge. The room was not just smaller, but darker too, and somehow slimier like those sandwiches. As if the boys brought a part of the tunnel with them.
But even though things were getting crummy in here, she couldn’t do another sleepover at Maria’s. No—she had caught her father wandering too much outside her room when they were both at home, mostly during the night. She screamed at him to stay away and hoped he blamed it on hormones, but who knows what he was doing during the day when she was at school. She couldn’t skip school because then he would definitely get suspicious. If he wasn’t suspicious now that is. Was he suspicious? The boys weren’t making any noises if she wasn’t noticing them but she couldn’t avoid them completely in here. Once in a while she would unavoidably notice them and then one of them or two—thankfully never all three, yet—would make some kind of noise.
She was starting to get pissed off. So much so that she had daydreams of meeting the Devil and…and what? Giving him a good scolding? She had no clue what she would do but would do something. She had so much pent-up rage nowadays, but deep down she could feel it was because she had more space inside her for the rage to grow and flourish. All this back and forth had cost her a lot. Whole chunks of herself she leaned on every day. The scope of her was becoming more narrow, more specific somehow. She couldn’t feel fear but she did feel the grating of anxiety, there was no happiness anymore but perhaps she would feel some satisfaction when this was over. Sadness was replaced by a vague sense of disappointment.
Perhaps that was for the best. She could split feelings with her brother like good siblings do. Siblings share everything. It would be just like the LEGO set, only she would do it right this time. He could get all the loud feelings and she could get the quiet ones. Not the worst price to pay to have him around again. Intensity had always been his thing anyway. They would have to figure out a new way to coexist, she and Petros. They were going to be so different now. It would be weird at first, but not weirder than what her life had been for the past five years.
Now all she needed was for the rage to go away as well. She could easily go around with a grayscale of emotions. At the end of the day things around her were not black and white. They were gray. And now she had the feelings to match. It almost felt like adulting.
Every time she found her brother in the tunnel, he always held the Robin Hood LEGO figure. That was her figure once. It came with the Forestmen set, a tree and a castle connected by a bridge and a handful of Robin Hood-like figures holding their little bows and quivers, riding their cute LEGO horses. She had begged her parents for this gift and had gotten it for her eighth birthday. She was so obsessed with the Robin Hood movie back then and also obsessed with foxes. The set didn’t have any foxes but she loved it nonetheless.
Petros was almost haunted by that one black-clad Forestman figure he had dubbed Robin Hood (probably because he really liked the movie too or liked watching it with her) and claimed it as his. Olga complained to her parents but it was nearly impossible to stop him because both them and the set were in the same room. He kept stealing it and stashing it in weird places. And the more their parents scolded him, the more unlikely the hiding places became. Once, he hid the figure under a dead mouse because who would think to look there? Thankfully that person was Mom, who got rid of the dead mouse but kept and sanitized the figure.
The moment Olga saw her fourth brother hiding the figure under his pajamas she knew it was all about jealousy, or envy. She would figure out the specifics later.
“Gosh, you can keep the stupid toy.” She was already feeling the weariness of too many lives. “Let’s get out of here.”
She tested her theory by looking at the message Cassandra had sent earlier about a get together at the beach, which of course she couldn’t attend anymore because she couldn’t leave her brothers alone with her Dad in the house. Nothing. Envy it was then.
In the end—that might not be an end—Petros became the sole owner of the Robin Hood figure and she buried the rest of the set in the back of her closet forever.
Olga didn’t notice when she lost her empathy until it was too late to take back everything she had said, and Fifth Brother was safely locked in her room. His room. Their room.
It was one of those days when Mom was sad anyway so talking about Petros wouldn’t make things worse. Not for her anyway. It was these sudden outbursts that made Olga feel like this life somehow overlaid the past one. Everything she did, she said, she thought, her brother had done before—even though that didn’t make any sense. She was a teenager now and her brother had never been one.
Olga was inhaling some toast because she was late for school when her Mom walked in. Mom poured a glass of milk, took one look at her, and started talking about Petros making her cut off the bread crusts so he could stuff his mouth with the insides and swallow them in one bite, and Olga was just exhausted by all of this and her anger was shimmering and pushing against every inch of her body.
So she turned, as calmly as possible and said, “Mom, I don’t care.”
“What? What did you say?” She looked at Olga with such a mix of honest confusion and sadness that would have made her guilt a searing sword on any other day. But right now, it was only a pinprick.
“I said I don’t care. I really, honestly, Mom, don’t care.”
She wasn’t lying. Olga didn’t care anymore. There were some things going on under the anger and the exhaustion that might have meant something in the past. But now they were less noticeable than the stirring of gas in her stomach.
Her mother kept her frozen position as Olga got up and grabbed her bag for school. Once out the door she heard her Mom half-whisper something that might have been I love you or How could you say such a horrible thing? It didn’t matter.
At school she got into screaming matches with everyone, including the principal. (Damn, you are turning into a bigger asshole than me, Cassandra said with a mixture of admiration and annoyance.)
Later in the afternoon, back home, her mother was not sleeping on the couch. She wasn’t in the bedroom either, or the kitchen, or any other room.
“She went for a walk,” her Dad said, stirring his coffee in his grub-free mug. His eyes followed her every step. “You know how she gets sometimes.”
Olga nodded and made for her room.
“Olga.” Her name on his lips stopped her. He kept stirring. The spoon clink-clanked against the porcelain, drowning out something in his voice. “Can we help you? Is there anything you want from us?” He said this carefully, like it was the wrong question, but also the right question.
“I don’t know, Dad. I am fine.”
His eyes glossed over her like she was a foggy pane and the person he was trying to talk to—really talk to—was standing right behind her, peering through her. Leaving invisible palm prints on her body. Olga glanced over her shoulder. Nothing. She exhaled. The door was still locked. She was sure of it.
Her Dad put the spoon down and that made everything worse somehow. Olga was suddenly aware of the way her Dad was sweating profusely but was trying not to look sweaty—as if sweatiness was an inner quality instead of water coming out of him in buckets. When he spoke again his voice was fragmented, and she became nostalgic for that stirring spoon.
“What do you want from me?”
“Jesus, Dad, nothing. I am fine, okay? Just, leave me alone.”
There it was, she was angry again. But this time it was because she wasn’t sure if she was the person the question was meant for. She ran to her room and locked herself in there. The fifth brother stirred when he saw her. He was still fresh from the tunnel and hard to ignore because he slept at the very edge of the lower bunk. He got up and wrapped his small arms around her neck, gently this time.
“I am sorry,” he said.
Olga frowned. “…for what, dude?”
“For what I did or I am about to do. I don’t know. I am sorry.”
That to Olga felt eerily prescient and unbrother-like. But that’s empathy for you.
It’s a strange feeling to be gathering something inside of you for so long and then to suddenly be empty of it. It was more than uncomfortable. It was agony. But once she stepped inside the tunnel, her body felt miraculously empty. The emptiest it had felt since forever. And to be honest it was pure anger and spite that brought her to the tunnel for the sixth time. To finish what she had started. Now, all of a sudden, she didn’t even know what had made her come back here in the first place. To fix everything? By herself? How stupid. What a waste of time.
Now that there was so much space inside her, her other lukewarm feelings were still rearranging themselves, but nothing was really sticking. She didn’t even care enough to take a look around. She didn’t have to. It wouldn’t be the end of the world to walk right out of here. Her parents could figure out what to do with her brothers. She had done her part of the job.
That’s when she felt the crushing weight on her shoulders and neck. Was physical pain a feeling she could give away? She would do it right now in a heartbeat.
“Shit!”
The sixth brother’s claws dug inside her cheeks and pulled at her flesh like it was chewed-up bubblegum. Where did he come from and how could she get rid of him? Even in this state she knew this wasn’t normal for Petros. He had never hurt her at his angriest days. This was her brother on Hulk mode.
She tried spinning around really fast. She span and she span and she yanked her body as if she was trying to exorcise a demon. And she probably was.
“Get off of me!”
Olga had unfortunately watched The Exorcist enough times—and without parental supervision—to know demon-types were supposed to fuck you up. She wasn’t scared anymore, but the promise and the magnitude of pain her sixth brother could inflict on her did give her a certain anxiety.
“Stop fighting already,” the brother snickered. That was no version of Petros she could recognize. He was not her brother anymore. “Just get us home.”
“Okay, okay.” She felt his ever-sharper claws going for her eyeballs. “Just stop doing that.”
“Let’s go then.”
Olga was already in Hell. There was no doubt in her mind now that she had entered Hell when she crossed that cursed hole in the fence that first time, and she never left. Hers was some kind of Sisyphean crap. Only instead of rocks she had to carry increasingly shittier versions of her brother all the way home—her home, his home, their home—until the entire place and later the entire world was full of brothers. Until she brought on the Apocalypse.
Or perhaps until she was reduced to nothing, to one emotion, a sliver of a person and then vanish. Herself for her brother. Was that the deal all along?
When she woke up she was still inside the tunnel. No wait, that wasn’t the tunnel, was it? She was lying on the floor of her room. She could clearly see her bed looming over her and six sets of eyes staring back like the eyes of tarsiers, hanging from tree branches, only not nearly as harmless. It was like her room had moved inside the tunnel or the other way around. She didn’t care really. She didn’t care at all.
“What’s going on?”
The brothers had come to life all by themselves, only this time they didn’t replay some sorry moment of Petros’s past. They were their own creatures. And they didn’t look like her brother anymore.
“Thank you for bringing us inside,” they said in unison. “We will not forget this. You are a good girl. A tasty one at that.”
That made Olga check her body. Her limbs where all there. Her organs were there—as much she could feel her organs kicking inside of her—so what was lost?
“Is any one of you really my brother?”
The brothers shook their heads. “Not yet,” they said. “But we will be with your help. A deal is a deal. Such a good girl.”
It wasn’t fear she was feeling. It wasn’t terror, or panic, or dread. But there was something somewhere deep inside of her that resisted this whole situation on a cellular level. A part of her lizard brain was screeching at her to run but at the same time it kept her frozen in place. Lying on the floor like a dead fish. That same part of her brain made her body itchy and she soon started to shiver.
“Don’t fret now. We took that away from you. Keep it away.”
One of the brothers reached out his fuzzy hand and touched her forehead. It felt like a caterpillar gliding against her skin.
“We’ve been wanting to come inside for so long. So long. Did your father ask you about us? Was your mother worried?”
The brothers one after the other got off the bed and made a circle around her. They didn’t look like anything in particular and they looked like everything at the same time. They looked like her brother and like the caterpillar, and like the Robin Hood LEGO figure and like her friends from school, and like the Ram-Woman and the man with the hole in his chest. They looked like they contained the universe.
Adealdisadealdisadealdisadealisadealisadealisdeal
Olga didn’t know what she felt anymore. She felt present and detached watching herself within and without. Her shivers had gotten worse. That was the only certain thing in her life at that moment, and when they reached every inch of her body, when even she couldn’t contain herself, she screamed. And then she screamed some more. Her body was only made for screaming now and she could barely hear her parents’ voices under the noise her body was making without her permission.
When her parents got into the room, the spell broke. The brothers were still around her, ready to devour (Yes, she was certain they were about to devour the tiny crumb of herself that was left. Even if she didn’t have a word for it, she knew it was there). She was still pinned to the floor. She still didn’t care.
If she did care, she would have felt the stab of betrayal when the brothers called both of her parents with their names. Manolis and Loukia. Had everyone in the house made a deal with the Devil? She didn’t want to find out and yet she just had.
“I never said yes,” her father said to the brothers. Her mother looked as surprised as Olga was about this. She backed away to the other side of the wall, which was not easy to do because it was stifling as Hell, in there.
Adealisadealisadealisadealisadeal is what they replied.
And then they all looked at Olga and that’s how she learned the story. The brothers put it in her mind.
That time a man came to see the Devil under the bridge. The man brought bolt cutters and cut a hole in the fence that separated Hell from not-Hell. The man wanted his son back, his beautiful boy. He said without saying that he would do anything for it, including following an old rumor under the bridge. The Devil, cunning as he was, put the deal inside the man’s head, because he knew there isn’t a worst enemy to the human than their own mind. The deal was his daughter’s life for his son’s. The man both disgusted and terrified at himself fled the tunnel and thought that was the end of it. But the Devil knew there was a part of the man that had been thinking, what if? A contract was waiting to be signed. A deal left up in the air. One day, as these things usually happen, the man’s daughter walked under the bridge on her own free will. It was time for the deal to be struck.
If Olga still cared she would have felt a deep-cut hurt. At least now she finally knew why her father was walking on eggshells around her. And she understood. She really did. The fact that she had gone back to the tunnel time and time again was proof enough. Now her father had become a waxen statue, his words choked in his throat. Her mother was trying to melt herself in a corner of the room.
“That’s bullshit,” said Olga. “—what did Mom do?”
And the brothers obliged.
That time the Devil found a woman wondering in his forest at night—the forest that was right next to his bridge. She was taking a walk she told herself but what she was really doing was mourning her dead son away from everyone’s eyes. She was mortified she would forget him. So the Devil made sure she would remember everything in the most excruciating detail until that was all she could think of. In turn she would remind her daughter of her lost brother. Her daughter that one day would come and find him under the bridge. Feeling guilty, and in need of a deal.
That was rotten, even for the Devil. Olga would feel heartbroken for her Mom if she could. If she cared again she would hug her, and they would talk and talk until she was assured nobody would ever forget Petros.
Olga did want to care again. And that want was outside of deals. It was written in her bones, the same way that scream was written in her bones. It was part of her DNA.
She wanted to live.
The Devil is a trickster.
“None of this is a deal,” she said to the brothers. “That’s all trauma and guilt, my dudes.”
She felt her limbs loosening, her body reshaping to a sitting position. She had to give it to the Devil. He could guilt-trip people at an Olympic level.
The brothers weren’t moved.
“You have no right to be here,” she told the brothers. They smiled a pointy smile because they had one more story to tell.
That time the Devil found a girl snooping around his property and scaring his favorite centipedes. The girl told herself she had come for her dead brother but really, she had come for herself. She wanted—no—needed the Devil to save her from the memory of him. She thought she could win back her parents’ adoration by sacrificing part of herself. She was a good girl. She was a greedy girl. What she didn’t know, what none in her family knew, was that hers was the final stroke that sealed the deal. Like the chords in a symphony. And she had made that deal willingly by returning to the Devil every single time. It is time to collect.
“No, that’s not how it happened,” Olga protested. “Why would I want to upstage my brother? I carried you all the way home.”
“There are actions, yes,” the brothers agreed. “And then there are thoughts.”
“Bullshit.” That was her father talking from somewhere behind her. “Thoughts don’t mean much. I am having dozens of thoughts right now. None of them good.”
Olga felt her Dad move closer to her. He rested his hands on her shoulders and squeezed. She tried to remember the last time he had done this but couldn’t find a single memory of it.
“We know,” said the brothers, their smile becoming even pointier. “We know all of it.”
“What if we make another deal?” Her Mom materialized again. She gradually became more than a shadow on the wall. “One that we know we are making.”
The brothers turned their collective heads to Olga. “What do you have in mind?”
“No.” Her Mom was getting really cocky there. “We won’t do it like this. You. Out. Now.”
Olga was slow in getting the message so they took her hand and led her outside. “Our girl,” her Mom said, “we’ll always protect you. We were afraid, but not anymore. Let us do this for you and for us.”
Dad’s voice was barely a whisper. “We hope someday you’ll forgive us. The last thing we wanted was to hurt you.”
Olga could hear the lie in their voices. They were not afraid; they were freaking terrified. Their eyes had the intensity of someone who was going away to war. Olga saw them lean against each other for comfort as they went inside and that’s when the door closed in her face.
When it opened again the brothers were only one brother and her parents were almost the same. A little paler perhaps—maybe a couple of inches shorter?—they felt different somehow, more mature but technically not older. Olga couldn’t tell what they had given away. Perhaps they didn’t know very well themselves.
Olga was already feeling a wave of melancholy at the thought of what her parents gave up. Whatever they did, it was working. Slowly, like a numb limb gaining sensation, her emotions returned. The next feeling was her skin prickling at the view of the brother. Because now she could be scared of him but also because he had gone back to looking like the innocent boy who had once been her brother and still wore the same yellow jammies and held the Robin Hood figure. But it was also the realization that she would now associate her brother’s image with something sinister and evil, something after her soul. That would put a horrible stain on all her favorite memories of him and was an injustice she couldn’t bear.
“What now?” she asked her parents.
Her father, tired beyond his years, said, “Now I take him back to the tunnel. That’s part of the deal.”
“I should come with. Finish what I started.”
Her parents tried to object but this was her story too, she reminded them. If they were going to be honest with each other, they should start listening to her. In the end, they agreed. Her father and mother got in the cabin of the truck, while Olga and the brother-who-was-not-Petros settled in the cargo bed. On one end the brother, looking more normal and silent than ever before, and on the other her—probably looking weird as ever.
“Can I ask you a favor? And if you say yes, it will be a favor and not a deal. I don’t do exchanges anymore.”
The brother looked at her but said nothing. Olga figured that it was because once a job was done, there was nothing to be said.
“Can you make us all forget about this night and forget about you? The deal—whatever it is you struck with my parents will still stand, but I just want us all to forget we made it. For now. Even if it comes and bites us in the ass later.”
The brother-who-was-not-Petros, the Devil, the child in the yellow jammies, smiled an innocent child’s smile and said, “If you forget and come back looking for a deal, it will all happen again. Only much worse.”
“I promise you, we won’t.”
Olga didn’t know how she knew that, but she was certain of it. Just like she was certain that she wouldn’t give up when she had been lying on the floor of her room. It was something buried so deep inside not even the Devil could scrape it out of her. They were all different now in a fundamental way. Forgetting would not change that. But it would help them move on. And she could have her brother’s memories back as they were. Perfect in their messed-up, human imperfection.
The brother said nothing, and Olga only felt the truck slow down as they approached the tunnel. His face was not Petros’s face anymore. It became someone else’s and if she wasn’t sitting across from him on the cargo bed, she would have forgotten who he was in moments.
Once the brother was out of the truck, her Dad picked him up in his arms—and if he was devastated, his face betrayed nothing—and placed him gently on the inside of the fence through the hole, taking care to not step inside. A leftover fear, Olga thought. The brother stood there watching the family huddle together in the cabin of the truck. Olga wedged herself between her parents like she was five and hiding in their bed again. She wanted to feel their bodies, the reality of them being there like this (for how long? She didn’t know). Be the child she had talked herself out of being.
“I’ll come and fix this tomorrow,” her Dad said.
He would remember none of this tomorrow. The door to Hell was now permanently open. Once you open a door like that, it can never close again. It was something they had to live with.
Her Mom put her arm around Olga’s shoulders; the arm was weak but her hold on Olga was strong. “We’re done with this.”
Olga wasn’t sure they were done with this. Because the Devil would come to collect eventually. They could count on that. But maybe they were sort of done with something. Done with the silence. Done with the walking on eggshells around each other. Done with the not-listening. Maybe they were at that point where they could talk about the dreadful thing: the brother-shaped emptiness in their house the Devil came and filled in. Talking about the Devil was magnitudes easier compared to this. But they could do it now. Olga knew they could do it. She believed in them. She believed in her family as much as she believed in the Devil. Hell, she believed in her family magnitudes more.
The truck turned and Olga lost the bridge from her sight.
And then?
And then she felt so much lighter.
(Editors’ Note: Eugenia Triantafyllou is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)
© 2023 Eugenia Triantafyllou
