Dead space.

Dead air.

The silence that strings together moments.

Ritsu toes his shoes off in the genkan, neat and careful. They'll be heel-to-toe with nii-san’s shoes in as long as it takes for Shigeo’s passivity to be taken advantage of. It could be an hour, it could be three. The land line could ring in its cradle – work went long, he’s going to be in Vegetable Province. He’ll be back in time for school tomorrow.

It's early evening. The color the setting sun paints the far wall is almost offensive; violent tangerine and the dark fingers of shadows stenciled atop. The negative space bobs in the shape of his silhouette, very nearly Shigeo’s shape – a few finger spans taller, hair longer, mussed.

It was supposed to rain today, but it didn’t, doesn’t even taste like rain. Autumn has a specific color, a specific nip of cold that squeezes in his throat. Decomposition, all things wet and right and good.

“I’m home,” he calls out. Their mother is home, their father should be home soon. A greeting is echoed and returned. The light is brightest right before the sun goes down, a brilliant exhalation.

Ritsu toes his shoes off in the genkan.

Ritsu has been not-breathing for what amounts to a very long time now.

It's simple: an aborted inhale. The air fills and compresses in his lungs, saturating in the shape of a promise to himself. The pressure builds twice as fast if he plugs his nose. He could write a novel on the intricacies of every draw of breath.

There's a hitch right when he thinks he can't get any fuller. He doesn't hesitate to push past. If he walks with his breath held for too long, he can see the blood behind his eyes. If he walks with his breath held past then, his knees buckle.

He unconsciously draws a gulping breath.

Start again.

He read somewhere that you can’t die by holding your breath – at some point, instinct takes over and you inhale. The body fights for itself, the body fights and the mind can’t overcome it. There’s an inevitability to it. He coughs, and there’s a wet roundness to it, it catches. He never gets sick, not really, not unless you count the way his mind is sick, but he coughs when it’s fall because the outside comes inside, the decomposition spreads and invades, and he raps his fist on his chest, twice, perfunctory.

Ritsu is sitting at his desk.

Ritsu is often sitting at his desk when he’s home. All his things are arranged along the back; pencils in a plastic cup, the sharpener with its shavings, the wastebasket that’s getting closer and closer to where his right foot falls as he grows.

He’s growing faster than Shigeo, some small disturbance in the natural order of things, some small way to tip the scale that Ritsu has been obsessively balancing since he became the embodiment of petty envy. They’re different shoe sizes now. There’s a gulf between where their mother marks their heights on the doorframe. She tuts her tongue and teases him for it, gently – growing so fast, how will we keep you clothed? But it’s never been a problem, and then, from his height marked to the centimeter on the doorframe, Shigeo’s small smile, and the sense of vertigo Ritsu gets wondering if Shigeo will disappear into his shadow, wondering how to feel about it.

Ritsu finished his homework at the back of the classroom during the last five minutes of Math. He finished his worksheet, turned it over, and moved to the next, diligent as a machine. Ritsu is careful not to not-breathe at school, because he can’t be the only one who notices the quiet cacophony of inhale, exhale, inhale – everyone breathes, a quiet woven chorus of runny noses and mouthbreathers and the – it’s called dead space, the air that never gets used by the body. It’s a waste – what’s the point of breathing at all? Dead space, calculated by the Bohr equation, the volume of useless air, the volume of useless people. Instead, Ritsu holds his breath only when he’s already in motion – on the way home from school, one foot in front of the other (heel-to-toe with nii-san’s) – in the genkan, in his room, forcing his fingers to tap, to burn a fuse lit from both ends so that he runs out of air faster, and if there’s a formula for that, Ritsu hasn’t stumbled across it yet.

But he can’t burn it down to nothing.

He fantasizes about a vacuum, imagines the air coiling out of him in technicolor until his soul is exorcized.

There’s only one person in his life who performs exorcisms – he could, uncharitably, be compared to a vacuum, but Ritsu prefers to equate him to a black hole, some cosmic breach of reason, distorting time, drawing people to him without even realizing, but not in the superficial way that Ritsu functions as a blackhole – Shigeo is consumption, consumption in that he is all-consuming, all-consuming in that he leaves nothing behind, nothing left untouched, a wick, a match, a flame, a roaring bonfire, a carbon monoxide leak, unseen and unheard until it’s too late.

(And there is nothing, nothing in this world that Shigeo can’t destroy. Nothing is left sacred.)

A flame requires fuel and oxygen. He’s not sure if oxygen can function as fuel on its own, but high concentrations of oxygen are particularly flammable. The funeral pyre of his bloated lungs.

Ritsu is sitting at his desk. Ritsu doesn’t need to be sitting at his desk – his homework is in his bag. It might as well already be graded. Ritsu has his pencil in a loose grip. He’s forcing the fingers of his spare hand to play a rhythm for him on the surface of his desk. Nii-san should be home soon – will be home soon – probably, at least. Maybe after dinner. Probably, hopefully before. Nii-san has been busier, recently, with the expanding palette of his world. The gulf between their heights. The empty space beside his shoes. He has a cough, should probably close the windows, it’s getting dark and cold.

But then – he’ll be the first to hear, if he listens closely, if his window is open – quiet footfalls, blackhole brother. Just three more minutes.

Dead space.

Dead air.