“Have you ever thought about death, Brother?”

I gasped at my little brother’s question. Those eyes of his that never once widened, those eyes that always stayed calm just wouldn’t tell me where he was hinting towards. “Come again?” I asked him back instead, throwing damp gravel into the pond on whose border we were sitting.

“I’m curious, how could death possibly feel like?”

Tao’s eyes did not even glance at the spot where the gravel I threw fell into. Letting out a long sigh, I smiled. “Ask our neighbor’s cat. He must know exactly how it feels.”

My sensitive, quick response to almost everything in the world caused me to notice it the second his head made a swift turn towards me. Those black marble-like eyeballs shot their gaze at me, and to avoid the incessant look he was about to give, I looked away.

“Is it painful?”

“You really are not laughing?” I asked him back for the second time, although now the tone I used indicated that the question was rhetorical. I knew exactly what I said about the cat was not even worth laughing at, but I said so anyway. Part of the big brother role, I would define. “Who knows, maybe it can be painful to some people.”

His face had left me, but his eyes still stayed. “You think so?”

“I don’t know, maybe,”

I believed I saw him nod, and then his eyes eventually diverted their attention from me. Moving his eyeballs towards the ground, those strong, tan fingers of his danced through the damp gravel beneath our bodies, searching for the one he willed to pick.

The pond had turned still.

“Who do you think will experience it first between the two of us?”

I once again threw some random gravel into the pond, making the surface diffuse once more. “You’re weird today.”

He let out what he said was a laughter—which sounded more like a deep snicker to me—and finally picked up one beautiful white gravel. As if catapulted, the gravel flew in the air towards the pond, following the path of the previous gravel I threw, jumping into the pond like a swimmer making a perfect jump into a pool. “I hope it’s not you,”

***

No one can properly define wishes.

Wishes are ambiguous—they can mean different things to different people. To some people, wishes can be their source of strength, while for people like me, wishes are just merely taboo, intangible things that do not exactly exist. I never believed in wishes. I never had, until Tao came to my life.

My mother’s marriage life had never been explainable. I believed I had seen my father when I was not even in primary school, but the image of him in my memory was not clear. It was always blurry. The only spark of memory I remembered about him was when he patted my head and muttered some words I could not remember, before he opened the front door and left.

Apparently he never came back.

I had always been an only child in the family, but then my mother and I went to a birthday party of a friend held in an orphanage, and we fell in love with this one boy. I was not sure who fell in love first, me with him or my mother with him, or even him with one or both of us, but the thing was that we decided to adopt him. The process went a lot faster and easier than we thought it would, unpredictably. Short story, Tao became my brother.

That was twelve years ago.

For Tao, who was a lot of the total opposite of me, wishes were everything. In fact, they used to be the only things he had. The only things he could trust. Growing up without parents during the earliest years of his life, he could never trust people, and even until now I still couldn’t really be sure if he trusted us. He always told me everything and so did I, but his strange way of giving affection rose questions in my head sometimes. Okay, often.

We had a small pond in our backyard, surrounded with little gravel. Mother said father built it. I never really cared of it, and again, I began to do so after Tao came to my life. The moss and dirt in the pond started to disappear ever since we started breeding fish in it, in his command, of course. He told me his theory, something he liked to call a ‘hypothesis’, that if you threw awhite gravel to the pond, whatever wish you said along with throwing it would come true. I never believed this either, until he proved me wrong, multiple times.

College then came entering our lives. Moving out to the dorm of two different universities, Tao and I only came to the place we grew up in once or twice a month, three times at maximum. We would chill with mother and spend hours and hours around the pond, talking about things life had offered us. About the future. About this pond. About wishes. About father. That’s the only time we could really listen to each other, outside the business this life had gotten me into. The only time I could look at my mother and realize that she was getting old, and still had that look of a caring woman she always was. The only time I could hear those words Tao said that were worth tons of gold. The only time I felt home.

So, when one day Tao didn’t show up, I knew something was wrong.

“Kris, could you call him already?”

“I tried,” I said to my mother, pressing the call button once more. “7 times so far, no answer.”

My mother sighed. “We probably should just stop and wait,” she said. “He’s most likely busy.”

“He must have told me,” I frowned. My head turned to look out the window and saw that the sky was darker than it was supposed to be. Then came the drizzling sound of rain, getting louder and louder each and every second, and then I knew, that maybe waiting was the only choice.

***

Dinner was almost ready when loud knocks and thumps on the front door were heard multiple times. I told my mother to stay in the kitchen, and walked quickly to the front door. The knocks and thumps were still continuing, and instead of checking first who it was through the door hole, I banged the door open and screamed the hell out of my frustration.

“DO YOU LIVE IN THE PAST OR SOMETHING THAT YOU DIDN’T KNOW THIS HOUSE HAD A—”

My mouth was wide open but my words came into a halt when I saw the person standing in front of me, drenched by rain, with his eyes looking into mine, sparks of sorrow were in them.

Tao.

“WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?!” I pulled him into a long and tight embrace, not giving a damn about how wet he was. I remembered how I would always hug him in the past and he would just lie there with his hands hanging still on his torso, and although he never hugged me back, he never pulled away either. But this time was different. I felt his arms around my back, wrapping it tight. I slightly pulled away, intending to shut the door, but he tightened his embrace. Not wanting to break something I had always wanted him to do, I used my leg instead to slam the door shut.

“Tao?” I heard my mother’s footsteps coming from the kitchen, and her voice grew louder. “Tao is that you?”

Only then when mother made an appearance did Tao let go of his embrace. He turned to look at mother’s figure, his eyes making an unfamiliar beam. Wet and shivering, he went to approach mother, but his seemingly uncertain steps skidded to a halt when he was just a few inches in front of her.

I stood there confused to see even mother didn’t lean in to hug him.

“It’s time,” Tao said. The cold and indifferent tone his voice always had were not there that time. He tilted his previously bent down head upwards and looked at mother in the eyes, then turned his head to look at me. “It’s time for me to leave,”

I gasped.

“Dear, what did you just say?” mother searched for his eyes, her tone indicated that she didn’t believe what she just heard as much as I didn’t.

The sound of the rain was still fairly audible, but even so I could hear him gulp. “I have to leave, Kris.” his voice weakened. “My job is done.”

Kris.

He just said Kris.

Never once in my life had Tao called me Kris. Brother was the only word he used to refer to me, even when we’re talking. So when the symphony of his voice sang Kris, my ears quivered to hear that.

“What do you mean?” I came towards both of them, my sight was targeted at Tao’s eyes. “Tao, what happened? What’s wrong?” I reached for his upper arm. “Tao, you gotta tell us if there’s any—”

My voice halted, in response to what my eyes believed they just saw.

He looked away.

Tao looked away.

For the first time in twelve years of being brothers, those dark marble-like eyes avoided my gaze. For the first time they looked weak and helpless; they were not the determined eyes I believed Tao always had. He avoided my eyes, and then I knew it. My eyes trailed to find mother, and her face said the same thing. It was not our Tao standing there in front of us.