[Twillight - Jasper Hale] SILENCIO

2

MY BROTHER, MARIUS, WAS THE BLACK SHEEP of the family, the one who was brave enough to embrace the world beyond the wooden fence of our tiny village. He left home when he was sixteen, following the persistent call pounding in his chest as he flew into an opening sky, never once returning after decades of being a vagrant. He had been a news reporter, he had been a sailor, he had been a dealer. He worked as hard as he could, he flew as high as he wanted. He used to be employed in a bakery, a restaurant, and a post office. Once in a while, he would stop for adventures and money and lifetime opportunities. Or at least those were what he had claimed in his annual letters.

Truth to be told, I had never met Marius before the age of fifteen, when he went home and, strangely enough, settled down.

It was a sweltering summer day, not long after his return, that I found the miniature collection he had got from the journey lying at the end of an old drawer. There was no more than a few minute stuffs; some appeared as refined as creations of artwork, the others were scratched and scattered, like something he would incidentally take in along the way. It mounted up like a small dune, covered under layers of dust. In the bottom curled a blue ball of something appeared to be a uniform.

The air in the house smelt like a greasy mixture of dirt, putrid meat and spoiled vegetables, mingling with a whiff of animal blood from Marius' previous hunting affair. Behind the cottage, my brother was chopping wood, pieces of timber lay in absolute disorder around his feet. The anosmia of firewood rushed through my nose before smudging into the humid mid air as I reluctantly dug the cloth out. The blue fabric was crisp under my fingers, layers of caked grey dirt fluttered once I dug the blue thing out of the dark.

As I called out to him for permission to clean off his souvenirs, the first reply was a sharp clang of metal falling upon harsh ground. The mid-sized axe was flung out in a rush while my brother dashed through the doorway. The feverish heat trailed after him like a puppy followed its master, except it was not, so it dissolved and contributed to the thickness of the air.

He cried. "How did you find it?"

The floor rumbled beneath my brother's footsteps. He smelt of sweat, of the wood he had been slicing. The odours reminded me about father's, but more vague since it had been partially concealed by his signature salty sense. The salty smell was so viscous it started to replace him in my wobbled memory after a course of a lifetime.

Long after, I knew it was the smell of the ocean.

O-c-e-a-n. In my idle mind, it was the sky reflected on earth in a deeper shade of blue. It was wind and cloud muffled together, melting like ice under a sunny day until there was nothing except a vast, glittering pool of blue liquor where the continuous movements of waves made it appear volatile. But I knew, beneath this seemingly dangerous shell lay a different world. It was a peaceful kingdom of fishes and corals and octopuses and seaweeds, an absolute mystery that many seek to discover. I had always long to witness an ocean myself, for such beauty cannot be fully appreciated through means of black and white sketches in books.

Yet back into the time, in my mind eye, my brother was a more detailed and figurative image of ocean than the ocean itself. The man had always been a secretive person. He came home as a typical gentleman, calm and well-mannered, never a vulgar word, never a discourteous gesture. It got to an extend he was seemingly emotionless sometimes, like a machine kept doing whatever it was made to do without any excess sentiments.

This came with the cost of me not understanding him at all. I knew him. He was my brother. I lived with him. He raised me after the death of our father. But to understand the heart of a man was as easy as to interpret the mood of a woman. It was more than 'see' and 'know', since an undecipherable maze remained undecipherable until the guard led us to where the key laid, far from the praying eyes of mortals.