Poesy and Prose

Kin, of a Kind

Prompt - Sensory Experience - Write about something from your past that induces all your senses. 

There's something about my brother that makes everyone in our family have an aversion to him, but anyone who doesn't know him, inexplicably attracted. It's all about first impressions.

People may say they don't judge on-sight, but that's false, everyone will judge, they just won't always act on those particular judgements. My brother...he's the type of guy who a cashier peers over the counter to keep a close eye on, but when his beard's trimmed to a prickly stubble, and he's wearing his favorite hat, he's the type they slyly pen their number onto his receipt for.

He has a mixture of smells that cling to him: weed, cigareette smoke from his buddies, and the undertone of plether. That mixed with the camo jacket and hat he usually dones, make him look and smell like someone copied a picture of a lean, gunslinging hunter and pasted it into reality.

When he talks in that sweet, manipulative way he has, his voice comes out slick and slow, a deep slurred kind of speech that seems to be stringed together perfectly. Of course, he can easily get away with things, because nobody except his family knows what he's really like. Look passed the charming shell he possesses, and you'll find a half-rotted corpse that leaves the taste of bile on your tongue.

Now, I don't hate him, in fact I've never been one to hate anybody, but I don't appreciate his personality. When we were younger, and he hadn't yet constructed his shiny alabaster casing, his inside was his outside. And his inside was mean.

The hobbies he had consisted of setting ants aflame and touching them to watch them rip each other to pieces, capturing mice and setting them free only after he'd torn off their tails, and drowning a plenthora of tiny creatures by the boat docks. He would drag me along to whatever place he was going, so I was the first to learn of his true nature, a nature that had my nose smelling of singed fur for months. My ears were filled with the sounds of bug intestines being cannbilized, the squeal of poor little mammals with no chance against an apex predator, and the infinite lapping of the river as it claimed whichever victim my brother offered next.

I still sometimes taste iron in my mouth from the habit of biting the iside of my cheeks, which I developed to keep myself from showing my vulnerabilities. Elysium be damned if I show weakness with my brother right next to me.