"A Most Unusual Sleeping Companion"

Jack collects antiques. He didn’t always. It happened, like all good things in our family, by way of our dad. One of dad’s colleagues taught abroad in South Africa and brought back a Zulu tribal spear. Dad bought the spear from the man. It was shortly after he’d met mom, before they were engaged. He was meant to teach abroad in South Africa too but as dad said he was “too smitten” to leave our mom’s side and so he cancelled his plans. I think that spear was a kind of booby prize for not getting the trip he wanted. Sometimes, I’d catch him in his office, his broad fingers stroking the spear and wonder if he knew that catering to mom began the moment she said hello. But then mom would pop her head into the room and he’d forget about the wooden antique, about his unrealized dream.


After dad’s car accident, after we knew that dad was never going to walk through the front door again, Jack began to sleep with the spear. Out of all the boxes we had to pack up and send off to New York, dad’s spear was one thing we weren’t worried about losing. After great deliberation with security, Jack held the spear the entire plane trip to Long Island. At first I was jealous. There was nothing of dad for me to hold onto, to say “this is my father.” But it’s been over a year now and the sight of my almost eleven year old brother snuggling under the covers with a stabbing spear is pretty creepy. Sometimes, the thing falls onto the floor and Jack will freak all of us with his ranting until, breathlessly, he’ll spot it on the orange carpet and say “Oh, thank G-d, thank G-d, I thought I lost it. I thought it was gone.”


Jack’s love for the violent antique spilled over into other things considered even remotely collectible. If it is from the past, it is valuable to my brother. I think it is his way of grabbing time by the hands. But time keeps ticking and with it, a truckload of chatchkas that slowly try to make their way to my half of our hamster cage of a bedroom.


Now he sits amidst a scattered heap of memorabilia, a huge atlas of Long Island from 1894 in his small hands. I close my eyes to try and think of the nicest way to tell mom about the car, but every other minute Jack bursts out another ancient fact about this weird place.


“Hey, listen to this. Did you know that the school budget for Amityville was forty-one-hundred dollars back then?”


“Mr. Midget, do you not see the Addams Family?” I ask, referring to the long curtain that separates our beds. The curtain idea was my genius, the choice of curtains, Jack’s bad taste.


“I’m still growing so you can’t call me that because it hasn’t been proven yet so it isn’t true.” He flips through the pages and starts mumbling what he’s reading and I know it’s only a matter of time before he forgets about the curtain again.


“Whatever,” I sigh and head straight for the den.