Short Century by David Burr Gerrard

cry; she cried so much that she resembled a crumpled tissue.
    On the third day of my enforced isolation, Emily opened the door holding a tray of tea. She told me not to be mad, and then she told me that she had a surprise. She had a bouncy little walk when she was a child, and she bounced out of the room. When she returned she grinned, and then whipped her ponytail from one edge of the grin to the other. In one hand she held a naked female doll with its hair cut off. Her other hand she held behind her back.
    â€œIt’s Paul!” she shouted. “He thinks he’s a big man but he’s really just a stupid girl. And the Prince and Princess sentence him to death. Off with his head!” From behind her back she produced a pair of scissors and cut at the plastic neck, though she wasn’t strong enough to do more than squeeze the plastic together. I told her to stop, fearful of what would happen if my mother found her destroying Paul in effigy, but she wouldn’t stop. So I grabbed the doll from her and ripped the head off myself.
    â€œPaul is fallen!” she shouted. “Paul is fallen!” She ran out onto the landing and called out: “Paul is fallen! Paul is fallen!” That is when I heard my mother’s soft voice carrying upstairs.
    â€œHow did you know?”
    Apparently, my mother had just received a phone call saying that Paul had checked in to the Chappine and hanged himself.
    I told Emily over and over again that the timing had just been a strange coincidence and that she was absolutely not responsible in any conceivable way. Each time, she told me: “I know , Arthur.” To my considerable surprise, she did not display any sign whatsoever of actually feeling guilty, and as if to underscore the point, she brought a bright, polished apple to the funeral, hiding it in a pocket of her black dress. During a lull in the service she led me to the wooded area beyond the cemetery, took the apple out of her pocket, took a bite, and held it up to me, ostensibly so that I could eat it while I balanced on my crutches, but really so that she could deprive me of a choice. She just shoved it into my mouth and I took a bite. Then she opened her hand and let the apple fall on top of some twigs and some dirt.
    â€œGoodbye, Johnny Appledead!” she said, looking up at me for approval.
    There are times when I regret what I said immediately afterward more than I regret anything else I have ever done. “Our brother just died,” I said, still chewing the apple. “You’re a horrible person.”
    These words etched a great deal in her tiny face: confusion, betrayal, shame. She hadn’t started crying yet when she turned and ran away, her well-combed blond hair bouncing against her black dress, but I heard her sobbing before I had hobbled all the way back to the funeral site. My mother and some of my parents’ friends had their hands all over Emily’s head, their own faces breaking at the thought of this little girl who had lost her champion and protector, and under such terrible circumstances. My father propped himself up a bit off to the side. A few distant cousins approached with the coffin, and my father looked longingly at it, as though, having failed to keep his son alive, he should at least be able to hold his coffin aloft. Pallbearers bearing Paul suddenly struck me as funny, and I wished I had not antagonized Emily and could whisper about it with her. When Paul’s coffin had been laid in the ground, my mother pushed Emily toward the grave, so that she could throw some dirt on it, but Emily shook her head and shouted:“No! No!”
    â€œPoor thing,” my mother said. “She misses her brother.”
    â€œNo, I don’t,” Emily said, but I’m fairly certain that all the attendees mentally completed the sentence to say: “I don’t want to pour any dirt.”
    My father, on the other hand, did want to pour some dirt, and he