The storm gnawed at the farmhouse, its wind clawing through cracks in the warped window frames like a feral animal. Elias stood in the doorway, rainwater pooling at his scuffed boots, his breath ragged as if he’d run for miles. The rifle leaned against the wall ahead of him, its barrel glinting under the flickering kitchen bulb, a sentinel of guilt. Blood streaked the walnut stock, still wet, still accusing. Beneath it, a dark stain seeped across the floorboards, swallowing the edges of a moth-eaten rug their mother had woven decades ago.

Micah’s blood, he thought, though he’d scrubbed the room raw for days. The stain persisted, a Rorschach blot of memory.

Weeks Earlier

“You’re not listening, Eli,” Micah said, tossing a beer can into the pickup bed. The sunset bled orange over the fields, matching the garish wallpaper their mother had chosen in a fit of 1970s optimism. “This land’s all we got left. You really wanna sell it to some corporate vultures?”

Elias rubbed the phantom ache in his missing fingers—the index and middle, left in Kandahar. “It’s dirt and ghosts, Micah. Let it go.”

Micah laughed, sharp and bright as a shard of glass. “Says the guy who still sleeps with his service pistol.” He shouldered his rifle, the same that their father had taught them to shoot. “C’mon. Deer’s moving at dusk. Might cheer you up.”

The woods swallowed them whole. Elias’s hands trembled, the trees morphing into skeletal shadows, the rustle of leaves into whispers of bomb…, bomb…, bomb... Micah strode ahead, fearless, reckless—alive in a way Elias hadn’t been since the desert. His brother’s boots crushed dried leaves, each crunch a grenade pin dropping in Elias’s mind.

“You’re jumpier than a cat,” Micah called over his shoulder, grinning.

“Just keep your voice down,” Elias muttered, though the woods were too quiet, too still.

A branch snapped.

Elias spun, muscle memory overriding reason. The shot echoed, a thunderclap that sent crows screaming into the twilight.

Micah crumpled, a red flower blooming on his flannel shirt.

Present Day

Elias scrubbed the rifle again, steel wool scraping his palms raw. The blood wouldn’t lift. Neither would Micah’s voice.

“It’s just a graze, Eli. Quit fussing.”

But it hadn’t been. The infection had festered, turning Micah’s skin the color of spoiled milk. The fever had cooked his brain, left him babbling about their childhood—fishing trips, the time they’d set the barn on fire with fireworks, their mother’s funeral. By the time Elias carried him to the truck, Micah’s skin was furnace-hot, his words slurring: “Should’ve… sold the land… for you…”

Now, headlights pierced the farmhouse gloom. Sheriff Mara’s cruiser crunched up the gravel drive, its spotlight pinning Elias to the wall like a moth.

He hid the rifle behind the couch, its shadow stretching long and skeletal across the floor.

The Confession

Mara’s knock was gentle, familiar. They’d skipped stones on the creek as kids, her freckled face scowling when he’d always won. Now her badge gleamed cold, a shield between them.

“Micah’s missed two town meetings,” she said, eyes scanning the room—the bloodstain, the empty whiskey bottles, the couch askew. “Neighbors heard a shot.”

“Hunting accident,” Elias rasped. “Buried him out by the pines.”

“Show me.”

He couldn’t. Micah’s grave was a shallow thing, dug between panic and midnight delirium, marked only by a pile of stones Elias had kicked apart in a rage. Instead, he slumped at the kitchen table, words spilling like the storm’s wrath: the twig-snap, the trigger-pull, the three days Micah burned alive in the back bedroom, begging for a doctor Elias couldn’t call.

“I wanted to,” he whispered, staring at his mangled hand. “But the land… the money… I thought if we held out, we could—”

Mara opened the drawer where Micah kept his hunting licenses and spare bullets. A half-empty whiskey bottle rolled, clinking against something flat and folded.

A letter.

“Eli—Found a buyer. They’ll pay triple if we wait till spring. Don’t worry ’bout the therapy bills. I’ll fix this. It’s not your fault. —M”

The date: the morning of the hunt.

The Storm Breaks

Elias stumbled into the downpour, the letter clutched to his chest like a prayer. Micah had known. About the nightmares, the meds Elias couldn’t afford, the way he’d started eyeing his service pistol like an old friend. The land wasn’t a noose—it was a lifeline Micah had woven in secret.

The sheriff’s radio crackled. “You coming in, Elias?”

He looked back at the farmhouse. The orange wallpaper curled like a dried scab, revealing childish letters etched into the plaster: E + M forever, carved the summer they’d vowed to run away together at twelve and nine. Micah’s pocketknife still lay buried in the wall, rusted shut.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m done.”

In front of him, the rifle clattered to the floor, its final shot unfired. The storm screamed through open windows, tearing at the wallpaper until E + M stood alone, a monument in the ruin.