The Favorite

My brother is much preferred. I cannot prove it empirically but I see the way my father leers across the kitchen table.

He took a beating at the train tracks last week. His eye was split, his lip gouged. He sat in the kitchen afterward and I was there and my father was there too and I remember my father got up and got a dish rag and ran it under a warm tap and handed it to my brother and my brother pressed that rag to his face. What I remember next is casting my hand on the back of his head, all up in his hair, the way you would with a small child, and I said his name and my brother went still under my hand. My father made a joke and my brother laughed. When he laughed he brought his hand to his cut lip and though my father's face does not change, there is something behind his face that reminds me of a light in a window going off in a house across a field of wheat in the night.

There is something bugging my mind and I deal with it and return to thinking about nothing in particular. Thinking about the way the table was set and whether she would have set it the same way. My father puts down his fork, picks it up, puts it down again, and for a moment I have the thing I was after, and then the moment closes. It means everything to my father that my brother turned out blond.

It is a heat wave and my brother is peeling his clothes off on the wooden porch, and I am there as well. This tableau is happening in front of the frosted kitchen window, where my father is at the sink scrubbing plates. He catches me staring, my brother does, and puts me in a headlock. His armpit is hot and familiar.

“That was good, man," he says afterwards, pumping his fist like he’s at the train tracks.

In the mornings after my mother passed, I would hear my father in the kitchen. What was he doing in there? I thought. And I would wonder whether he knew I was listening, and I would wonder if he was listening for me, and I would wonder what, if anything, he heard.

When I was a child my father sometimes said to me, "A good smack upside the head will straighten you out." These days he looks at me with the face of someone who's overstayed their welcome at a party.

“Dad is dying,” my brother tells me one day. His face is looking at me like, no more rules. The day is ordinary otherwise. I find myself in the kitchen afterward and notice a mess on the counter. I deal with the mess. I hear a car reversing out of the neighbor's driveway and their dog is losing its head about it and somewhere even further off someone is slicing something hard with a machine.

I have the feeling of having forgotten something important in another room.

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Dylan Ohryu lives in Orange County, California.