Under the Reptile Moon (excerpt)

I had a friend once who had a brother named Kenny.

Kenny was nice and responsible and a good kid and all, but he used to do this one cruel thing. On summer nights, when we roamed the suburb streets with a bunch of other neighborhood kids, high on hormones and filled with an urgent sense of adventure, he’d stomp on fireflies and drag his shoe across the pavement. Their guts glowed in neon yellow streaks against the black tar.

We could be friends, and then I’d tell you about my brother, who on summer nights liked to hold toads in the moonlight.

He’d find them trapped in the drains of backyard pools or cowering in freshly mowed lawns. He’d squat beside them in the grass very still, listening for the hoot of an owl or the rush of bat wings before picking them up just to cradle them. He’d open his cupped hands and show them to me, an offering. We’d study the red bumps and lines down on their backs and wonder what species they were. After a while, Mom stopped bothering to freeze the warts off his fingers. He kept on finding toads.

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Do you ever remember things from your childhood, things that happened that are so hazy and remote now, that you wonder if maybe you dreamed them up?

This happens to me. Like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Not the Disney animated one, but the 1955 German live action. Mom used to put it on for me, and I’d watch it alone in the big playroom. Something will remind me of it now, and I’ll want to put eyes on it. I’ll tear the house apart, looking for the VHS but I can’t find it. Did it even exist? The dated, fuzzy film quality, the fanciful costumes, the nightmarish Evil Queen. It’s possible it was only in my imagination. I can’t trust the memories made by my soft, half-formed child brain.

But Mom remembers. She knows the one I’m talking about.

Sometimes I wonder if Warren was a dream. My little brother, 18 months younger with clammy hands and warts on his fingers. A dream filled with family road trips and dinners and imagination but somehow had a horrible end.

I’ve looked for him everywhere. I’ve torn the house apart. Did I dream him up? But Mom remembers. And Dad. My other siblings, too.