She Coyote

44. The earth felt our rage

COYOTE
It was the worst day of any days. There was death in the air. It was a blur of chaos. Like jumbled up words playing on a record at the slowest speed.

Jasper was on the ground, paramedics buzzing around him frantically like bees. He was drained of blood. His eyes were dead. So was the rest of him.

Jude was in hysterics. The cops wouldn't let him get anywhere near his brother.

"That's my baby brother! Let me through! That's my brother, Goddamnit, can't you hear me? Don't let my fucking brother die, don't let him die, he can't die!"

We were walking home with plastic bags full of groceries swinging down by our sides when we encountered a scene that would change our lives. Ambulances were crowding the outside of our building, hoards of people gathered around them. Jude said to me, "who died?" He was making a joke. Then we saw them carrying down a body from the front doors.

It took Jude a second, then he realized who it was. He was silent. Then he took off running as fast as he possibly could towards the building. He plowed down everyone that stood in his way, screaming Jasper's name at the top of his lungs. Jasper didn't reply, he wasn't here anymore. I knew Jude wanted to hear him say his name one last time, he wanted him to scream it back. He wouldn't never hear that voice again.

"Get him in the ambulance." Someone said. A doctor, maybe. Someone important. They did that. They picked him up off the ground and carried him to the back of the truck. Jude screamed at them to wait, his face flushed in red. I didn't think he could feel the cold anymore.

He finally pushed through the wall of police, scrambling to the place where his baby brother was. They covered him in a white sheet. They pulled it up over his face. He was a shell. Jude knew that. It finally hit him. It hit him with everything unholy in the world. It absolutely destroyed him.

He crumbled to the dirty, snowy ground as they shut the ambulance doors. Maybe they would take the body to the hospital, maybe the morgue. I didn't know where it would go. Maybe heaven.

Jude pulled his hair, his whole body shaking. I was close enough to hear him sobbing. But I wasn't as close as I wish I was. He pounded his fist against the ground, coughing and weeping. "Who did this? Who fucking did this, you sick fuck!" He screamed, his body covered in snowfall.

The funeral was dismal. It was full of tears from loved ones I had never met. I had been dreading it, having to stand silent next to Jude as he watched strangers lower a lifeless body into the frozen ground. It seemed too real, it seemed to happen too fast. There was no goodbye, there was no last parting words. It was thrown at him like a grenade.

I didn't know how to comfort him as family members crowded around him, asking an endless amount of questions, drowning him in their disruptive sympathy. Jude was quiet, he barely spoke. He stared at the earth, I couldn't possibly decipher was he was thinking.

His mother stood with her hand in Jen's grip, trying to contain the tears that broke through, slipping down her cheeks. I watched as she broke down all at once, when Jen looked at her mother who wanted to appear strong, but couldn't.

And then I looked at a man I had never met. He wasn't crying, he wasn't looking into the ground: was staring at us. At Jude. Jude noticed it, and glared back, only his stare was a thousand times more venomous. I felt like I was standing in the middle of a battleground, two opposing sides. I could only put two and two together and assume that man was their father. Jude had told me many horror stories of being beaten and screamed at, talked down to as if he were the scum of the earth. I suppose to his father he was.