Too Painful to Talk About

It’s a year later when the family gathers again—minus one. Our younger brother, Dean, is missing, but his suicide is too painful to talk about. Instead we argue over who will take over his chores. Who will open the summer house. Who will get the boat into the water. Start up the trash and recycling service. Get the internet turned on. Parcel out the weeks. Come October, who will close up. Turn off the electricity. Drain the pipes. We invite his wife to join our family reunion of sorts, but are relieved when she declines. Why she declines is too painful to talk about. Her absence is a silence we find easier to bear. Our older children know not to ask what happened to Uncle Dean when he came home from the war. The younger children stopped asking. Mom presides from a diminished state, her walker’s soft thumping sound doesn’t remind us of anything. Dad rails against the military in an abstract way. It was Dean who found Afghanistan too painful to talk about. His family alive, our family alive, and others not.

Pamela Painter is the award-winning author of five story collections. Painter's recent work is out or forthcoming in: Compressed Matter Press, Fictive Dream, Five Points, Flash Boulevard, Image, Michigan Quarterly Review andVestal Review. Fabrications: New and Selected stories was published in 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press. Her work appears on the YouTube channel CRONOGEO and has been staged by Word Theatre in LA, NYC, and London.