The Order of Affection
My father loved his fish. It was then, not unusual most evenings to observe him illuminated by the rectangular aquarium, the translucent coffin, massive and out of scale in the corner of our small living room.
My father’s history of service to the animal kingdom was impressive. He kept a canary named Pete for years.
Still, his devotion seemed inconsistent when considering the occasional shock of oily blues and bagged feathers splayed out on the refrigerator shelf. I used to fabricate stories about the feathers and the two shotguns shoved under the sofa like a detective reconstructing a murder. And though I was frightened by the idea of hunting and horrified by the rigid game, I was fairly comfortable with the guns. My father never spoke to me about either but found my startled reaction amusing.
I explained away his affection towards fish and birds (when he wasn't preying upon them) cats and later small dogs, for the most part, as a significant alternative to humans. These were the relationships that could bring the occasional smile to his face.
In the hours after work, when he wasn't tending the living room reservoir, my father would descend into the basement to oversee his smaller tanks, the surplus he needed to stock his titanic universe upstairs. Beneath a canopy of asbestos, the basement was where he communed with bubbling guppies and mollies. The tool closet however, was where he ate the walnuts.
Because of my life-threatening allergy to tree nuts, my father indulged his craving by customarily retreating into the shallow closet at the top of the basement stairs, over by the entrance to our kitchen. If I kept silent, I could hear him working the silver nutcracker from inside the closed door. The fact that even the tiniest trace of shell or oil was enough to suck the life out of me only partially reinforced our distance. That my father and I hardly spoke took care of the rest. But still, seeing my father willingly sequestered by my allergy was to witness one of the rare occasions when he would agree to be inconvenienced with regard to something so well within his right.
He was being careful with my life. No one could argue this intentional act of goodwill. Besides, I knew the guns weren't loaded.
When he’d cracked the last nut into a bag, my father re-emerged to turn the key, carry the spent shells out to the trash and walk back into the kitchen to flush out what was hiding under his fingernails. Afterwards, he’d wipe down the doorknobs with a towel that would later have to be laundered.
He parked, then stepped out of his car and removed a suitcase before heading towards the train. My knees trembled as I grabbed my phone and zoomed in to take a photo. I looked down. There, on the small, cracked screen was the spitting image of my brother who’d been dead for five years.
Back when the call came, I bitterly accused my husband of lying. I feared the reverberation of his words would never stop. I paced the room, trying to conjure the last time I saw Dean. My eyes searched for objects that were still real, still as I remembered them seconds earlier. At the same time, my brain was desperate to mine a picture of my brother’s final visit to my house, shifting without certainty between the kitchen and the front door. But a parting look or last word escaped me.
What did play in my mind was a clip of my brother at sixteen in our childhood kitchen slipping a hot dog from the pack and then eating it raw; my brother cracking an egg into a glass of vanilla milk to grow muscles up and down his bony arms; my mother pressing a spatula to his daily consumption of grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches; our grandmother spooning out a bowl of his favorite yogurt and dill soup with the extra rice she scooped to try and put weight on him.
We slept on twin beds in a room on the first floor of our three-family house. Dean was five years older, as a teen, still small, usually shirtless, golden skin, long brown hair, a beard, and our shared hazel gaze. A sepia dining room portrait of Jesus Christ.
In spite of our close quarters, we hadn’t grown as close as we might have. Over time I sensed this as fallout from parents worn down and made silent by anger and disappointment. Later when Dean left for college it was as if the tired rubber band holding us together finally snapped. I didn’t see him much after that.
During those years, I watched Dean appear and reappear through gatherings like a magician’s sad trick. Though I knew he was somewhere, at any given moment I never really knew where. On the occasions when our paths did cross, we learned to compensate for the awkwardness we’d come to know, by tipping our heads ever so slightly to avoid a direct gaze; as if looking straight into each other’s eyes promised to be the scariest thing in the whole world. The distance, like long, lonely stretches of road between towns, made us forget any traces of an earlier time.
But one day, I was surprised to come across a family photo taken in our old living room. There, plump and pleased, I sat smiling in my highchair next to the sofa our mother had covered in a gold, to complement the wall-to-wall, burgundy brocade. Dean was beside me laying on his stomach, his head resting on elbows in a child’s sweet posture of endearment. I think he loved me then, even if I had arrived after too many years to be a proper playmate. Still, the photo seemed to capture something wonderful that existed long before the story of our mother and father turned oppressive and impossible to distill, before Dean and I grew like parallel weeds who worried about everything and nothing, and who based our life’s decisions between trusting too much and not trusting enough. Instead of turning to each other, we turned away, abandoning our longing for connection and becoming tentative in our own lives, footprints that vanished soon after they were made.
In time, I found my footing, but I still didn’t know how to look back. Sadly, Dean and I had only begun to talk about this in the final months before he died. And with the swift realization that our time was up, news of his death and the grief that followed hit me with a two-by-four.
It was months later when I began to see my brother’s walking twins; occasionally, at first, and eventually, with enough frequency to force me into some deeper meaning.
It might have made more sense to run into Dean as the teenager I most recall, instead of the sixty-year-old man who walked like our father. I recognize his body from various angles and distances. Sometimes it’s his profile that destroys me. Once at a red light I looked over to find him sitting at the wheel of a tired Ford pick-up. A year later during my first trip to London, I locked onto him like a missile, three tables over at a champagne brunch in the hotel restaurant. And two summers ago, I could hardly believe it when he walked right by me, beer in hand and weaving through a raucous crowd at an outdoor festival. That time, I desperately trailed him until I got too close and he morphed into a stranger before my eyes.
Today at the station I spotted him from behind, a dead ringer with thinning hair at the crown, jeans too long and loose, and that sad, defeated shuffle in his step. I always swear it’s him. My brother had figured out how to mess with me from the dead. He had after all introduced me to real itching powder hidden inside my sheets, and balsa wood rockets launched within inches of our faces in the side yard. And I couldn’t count the number of times I’d fallen for his finger-snapping stick of Wrigley’s. But one night he went too far when he peeked out from behind our bedroom door wearing a rubber monster mask inspiring the same terrifying nightmare for weeks. Still, I laughed when he cracked all my eggs on Easter mornings, deploying the one blood-red dummy he'd carved from wax.
In his junior year of high school, Dean moved upstairs to the storage room across from the apartment on the third floor of our three family house. The boxy room was high above the trunks of the massive elms, whose branches filled the only window in this peculiar space. It was here that my brother cooked the lead he needed to make the weights for his scuba diving hobby. Though hobby seems too wholesome of a term since my brother’s attention to the sport was a lonely and risky endeavor.
I’d climb the three flights of stairs, quickly at first and then more cautiously once I began to breathe in the noxious cloud creeping down from his room. My brother would be hovering over a single electric burner, stretching the frayed hem of his shirt to cover his knuckles before pouring the molten lead into a row of neat metal molds. It was the chemistry that fueled his method, the certainty of the melting element that drew him to the task. Years later, Dean discovered ice climbing, like Zeus rising from the depths of the black sea draped in neon rope and spikes to scale impossible rock. By nightfall, he’d lay down his axe and secure a tiny hammock along the face of a glistening drop.
I sometimes wonder if these memories, powerfully drawn from recent sightings of Dean, are meant to remind me of what still binds us. Because I see him now as I saw him then, like an unexpected bloom of stars on a moonless night. And during every one of these breath-holding, beamed-in phenomenons I rejoice at the chance to finally offer him my warmest smile and my deepest embrace. I'll cook his favorite dinner of steamed clams and heaps of pistachios he loves shelling with his teeth. I'll pull out my best chair and hand him the icy ale I have waiting in the fridge. And I will welcome him like the prince he could never believe he was. Because in the moment when I lost Dean, love, rooted deep in childhood, peeked out like a seedling. After Dean died, a therapist introduced me to the concept of complicated grief. It wasn’t that complicated, though. I’d squandered the opportunity to really hold my brother, to show him the unconditional love he deserved to feel. Instead, I kept my distance because I feared what lurked and rose to the surface whenever we were together. I made him question and doubt and hopelessly yearn for connection. I forced him to swim at the foot of barriers I sank to avoid us revisiting childhood trauma.
But regret, I’ve come to realize, is a passive, worthless, selfish emotion. And by clutching it so tightly in its original form, I continue to focus on something I cannot change and yet still has the power to crush me. So I have to assemble something else, a way to attach sorrow to an action I can live with. There are others in my life that I still choose or have chosen to wall off.
I am walking, now running behind the man at the train station. I’m gaining on him when he suddenly turns and I stop. “Can I help you?” he asks. I look up and search his eyes for forgiveness.
When I was sixteen, my parents decided to move me into my own room. We were out of bedrooms, so I was relocated to the narrow alcove you entered when opening the front door. The space was just wide enough to accommodate a single bed frame, a wardrobe, and the radiator.
This meant that the only thing standing between my bed and the wide-open world was a glass-paneled door with a working mail slot. Eventually my father replaced the glass with plywood to keep the world from streaming in. But he forgot about the mail slot.
I viewed my quarters with a mixture of excitement and fear. But being packed up from the inner reaches of the apartment to sleep in the outer vestibule was a bold move. There were nights when I felt less certain, tucked under and tuned in to the sounds of the street on the other side of the front door. From where I lay, the mail slot was the first and last thing to greet me each day. So, I worked out ways to frame it in my mind, to normalize it like a window. But the visibility it encouraged unnerved me, until over time, I began to reimagine its power as my third eye, a pathway to my emotions, the vehicle to exchange my dreams with the world and feel them carried on the back of the cool, evening air. The mail slot and the access it implied would eventually beg me to open the door and venture out at will.
Night arrived- releasing a cluster of hours. I sat up and turned my attention to the other side of the door while from somewhere across the apartment, my father’s rhythmic snores reverberated like the rasp of a bear.
My awareness then shifted to the dead bolt that I suddenly discovered was inside of my right palm. I felt the mechanism release. I turned the doorknob and pushed. The splendor of the front porch beckoned me under streetlights filling in for stars. Then I took my first walk into the darkness that seemed to go on forever.
To friends, peering through the mail slot had now become irresistible.
The following night, he was delivered to my door like a package. After the knock, I listened for the little slot to swing open. But not wanting to be seen, I dropped to all fours and crawled into the adjacent living room. From my post behind an armchair, I peeked through the one window facing the porch and traced the outline of his famous leather jacket. Inside my heart, fell the rush of August rain. And although I can’t quite recall how I got outside, I do remember the kiss, which felt spectacular and sincere and which I am certain is what he came for.
© 2026 Marietta Morelli