I want to say that maybe none of what I am about to tell is true, but only a version I prefer to dull reality, in which my kin still live their lives: the mother and father and the two children no longer small, no longer children, still here in the same place where they settled and began, or maybe elsewhere, some other indistinguishable place, imperceptibly sinking into the banality of mortal existence like meat dissolving slowly in a stew. If so, I have blotted them out of my mind with a story, as you may blot the stars with the palm of your hand.

If so, there would have been no graves, or only the graves of strangers.

On the third night, or maybe the fourth, I drove across the river north of the town, pulled over, and looked back. A peaceful vista, I suppose. In the small hours of the morning the windows of the houses were dark. A few had eave lights burning, for fear of prowlers.

In the air, the heavy sour smell of paper mill pulp fermenting. Downriver, the factory sparkled and hummed, emitting a great cottony cloud of yellowish smoke, spreading, dissipating into the night sky.

Close your eyes and think of Shawnee town. But then that hadn’t ever really been exactly here.

The cemetery was there in a bend of the river, whose muddy coils twisted away to the south. It was cold here, much colder than Nevada at this time of year, and I hadn’t thought to buy real winter clothes.

I looked into the star-speckled sky, then again down into the graveyard, the gray stones like crooked rows of teeth. The chill persisted. I got back into the car, cranked up the heat, and crossed the river on another bridge, back toward the center of town. The names were what you would expect in a little town like Chillicothe. Bridge Street. Main Street. Terrell’s house had been off Water Street, on a short little spine running back to the fence of a golf course that blocked the way to the river from downtown.

I idled past, then let the motor die. The house was nondescript, a little brick ranch. It appeared to be inhabited now, though for a long time afterward no one had wanted to live there. In the starlight I could make out toys scattered on the patchy lawn, a soccer ball and a multicolored plastic tricycle. In a bedroom window was the glow of a night light and one of those round stickers that lets the fire department know there is a child inside.

I read about it in the papers, and watched it replayed on TV. But I’ve forgotten most details, or else I never learned them. Suffice it to say that my brother’s life ran off its rails of quotidian cruelty, its humdrum routine of domestic abuse, to bloom into something more spectacular, complete with the mother and children held hostage, the siege and rings of police with their weapons and bullhorns, negotiators bullying or pleading on the phone. Terrell had brought in gas cans to set the place on fire, but he didn’t get a chance to light it. A SWAT team sharpshooter picked him off, but by then the others were already dead.

I was surprised, and not surprised, to learn that I had missed the rapture. It was as if I’d always known that he’d take everyone who mattered. All but me.

As for what went on inside, imagination fails me. What I did picture was the pyre that didn’t burn. The house and whatever world it contained collapsing to its molten core. The hide and bone and tallow crackling, and the smoke of my brother’s offering rising to the mottled sky.

But now the house was distinguished by nothing. It harbored other mortal lives.

I got back in the car and crossed the river. The cemetery was enclosed by a spear-pointed iron fence. The gates had been locked with a chain since my last visit. I broke it with the bolt cutters and went in.

The long grass crunched beneath my feet, white and brittle with glittering frost. I hadn’t been here in some time and it took me a while to find the spot. Let us suppose no sentiments were carved into the stones, only the dates and the four names. I’d dressed a way he would have liked, in a short skirt with no underwear, so I had only to stand and open my legs to piss all over his grave.