I was thirty-three years old when I killed my brother. He pushed the knife into his chest, but it was my hand that may have well been on the hilt. He died quietly in my arms, lying on the cold ground. He looked up at me once with no surprise, then released a last breath slowly and was gone. I sat with him till my legs and hands were numb and the sun lowered itself uncaringly into the trees.

 

Then I rolled him over gently and, with finality and tears, let him slide heavily into the water. The small lake buoyed him momentarily, then embraced him entirely in frigid fingers. With no sound, his unseeing eyes took in the sky for the last time.

 

I sat immobile on the bank and wept huge tears. An unwanted and overwhelming feeling of regret paused unwelcome in my mind, and I tried unsuccessfully to hurry it away before it could settle there.

 

We had grown up on this property; he and I had lived here together, outliving both parents, and neither of us felt the need to marry or raise children. We worked separately, I as a writer and he as a teacher. We purposely chose a lack of interest, no close friends, and only a few acquaintances. We didn't want money or possessions and required nothing else.

 

I, by choice, chose to remain close to home, agonizingly preparing for days in advance for any venture that took me farther from this place. He saw me as dull and shook his head often in my direction, but never willed me differently. I watched him, with no envy, explore the nearby countryside with eagerness, always returning with glowing eyes, a flushed face, and excited stories told over drinks. He was adventurous, and I was not.

 

When his teaching position let him off for the summer, he, with wide smiles and quivering energy, packed a light backpack and departed in haste, assuring me that he would see me in a few weeks.

 

“Try not to miss me,” he waved and never asked me to go with him. And always he returned as promised, thinner, suntanned, and with the scruff of a beard that he immediately dispatched. Without fail or hesitation, he went every summer.

 

And every summer, one person disappeared.

 

It had been happening for seven years, but three had passed before anyone, with belated horror, noticed, and even then, because the circumstances seemed to be void of pattern, no one took a critical look.

 

A frail man fast approaching eighty, unsteady in gait and mind, no family left to raise red flags. He, with finality, could have tumbled down an embankment and died where he lay, unable to help himself or be heard should he yell.

 

A small waif of a woman, mid-forties but ages older, strong of heart and mind but not of body. She vanished early one morning while her family slept, and by the time they woke, she was a memory.

 

And a young man barely nineteen, seen by many and picked up by none, hitchhiking on the side of the road, in a t-shirt and beer fumes. His mother finally missed him days later and, calling the police in panic and determination, they finally rolled out in cars and set out to search for three people long gone.

 

The next four summers saw four more unlikely souls follow, with nothing to bind them together except geography and bad fortune. Whispers turned into screams as hysteria spread relentlessly with each passing year. Not one of the missing was ever found, nor did they speak to their loved ones again.

 

The police knocked, with force and notebooks, on our door late in the summer, having discovered, quite belatedly and with haste, that my brother had been seen backpacking in the area they were investigating. And since they were looking obstinately, if not in a timely manner, into every lead, and because they had no witness to say he was elsewhere, he rose quite quickly to the top of their list.

 

He was appalled and shocked to his very core. He denied their accusations and answered their questions vehemently; they wrote in their notebooks and finally retreated in disbelief. He sat, heavy with shock and silence, and looked to me with hope for help I couldn't give him.

 

The police returned again and again and finally escorted him away in the back of their car, him not able to meet my eyes, and tears gathering in his. They let him go after days, but not without continuing unbearable scrutiny. He hid away in our home, refusing to leave its safe walls, but it could not protect him. In the end, not surprisingly, he lost his job.

 

Autumn came, cold and inevitable, and my brother had been reduced, through torment and distrust, to a devastating version of himself he and I no longer could recognize. Hope had drained him until he wept constant tears.

 

He asked me quietly one afternoon to accompany him on a walk, a request so innocent I never imagined his intent. We walked in silence to the distant back of our property, to the clear lake where we had swum as children. It lay as always, still and isolated, calm, cold, and knowing.

 

I could never have suspected that he had hidden from discovery, carried with him our father’s hunting knife, until he, with clenched fist, pulled it from beneath his coat and drove it with irrevocable force into his heart. He gasped once and slumped hard against me, me trying to steady him with all my strength and no success, and we both fell to the ground with my arms holding him tightly.

 

My brother died horribly that day, and I, with unfathomable sorrow and utmost care, laid him to rest in the lake, an unknowing companion to my other seven victims. He unintentionally made eight and was the one I would regret the most.  

 

Diana Felts is a fiction writer living in Northern Ontario. This is her first publication. When not writing, she can usually be found riding her horses.