It was sunset when I finally reached my brother and his little coterie of tree goblins. I was so winded from the trek uphill that I collapsed from sheer exhaustion. I could barely hear the electric gossip among the woodland fauna overhead. Shirt matted to my chest with sweat, I stared up through the gum trees at the raspberry sherbet sky and cursed Foreverland. Hundreds of “star buggies” (the tree goblins’ term, not mine) celebrated dusk approaching with jittery dances in erratic orbits. I slapped the ones that landed on my face away, wiped the guts off on my jeans. Night was coming and I was still no closer to bringing my brother home.

I stood up clumsily and picked off the gum tree balls clinging to my damp shirt. One of the tree goblins slid a gnarled gray finger to his lips in a gesture of silence. I flipped him a different finger to express my appreciation for his gesture.

The mountain’s breeze, choked into a whisper by the forest behind me, tickled my ears. At the edge of a nearby clearing, my brother scouted a smattering of tents below, one stockinged leg propped up on a boulder. He was squinting through an eyeglass when I finally had enough energy to approach him.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Maleek,” I said.

Maleek lowered the eyeglass and faced me. He was wearing black ankle-banded trousers, a white shirt with billowy sleeves, and a half-laced-up collar. His mid-length twisties had grown into shoulder-length locs ornamented with rings of every kind of gemstone.

“The castle library, the courtyard, even that damned dungeon,” I spat. “—I searched everywhere for you. We need to talk.”

“If you truly sought Prince Maleek, then why did you look everywhere he wasn’t?”

This clever little rejoinder came from the goblin to Maleek's right, dressed in a plaid sweater vest. His yellow-eyed companions chortled.

“I’m about to look for my foot up your ass,” I said.

The goblins flinched, not from offense but from confusion. Any slur or vulgarity from the real world had this effect on Foreverland’s denizens, and I had begun to relish it. They might seem all cute, pointy ears and beseeching yellow eyes, but those gator-skinned assholes had been masterfully sabotaging my efforts to bring Maleek home all weekend.

The goblin mentioned something about the “the Hobgoblin King” and a “talisman” and soon they’d forgotten I was there. As one goblin suggested how best to infiltrate the camp below, I sneered at his gray hand on Maleek’s back. It wasn’t the manicured hand of a girlfriend ushering my baby brother through a noisy restaurant to meet her parents, or a tailor’s hand graciously directing my brother to turn about for further measurements for a graduation suit— hell—it wasn’t even the dexterous hand of a piano player pushing my brother forward for photos with the quartet my father had made him join all those years ago. No, it was the withered, liver-spotted hand— more of a claw, really— of a fantastical creature, ostensibly pushing my baby brother deeper into a fantasy land of redundancy and purposeless illusions.

“You know,” I interrupted, eyeing that goblin’s black-and-orange checkered sweater vest. “Something that’s bugged me for years— how do you goblins have the wherewithal to cover your chest, but none whatsoever to cover your lower half? Don’t you scare away little goblin children, or something?”

The goblins fixed me with another bemused stare.

“It’s 2007. How about you invest in some Sean John pants. FUBU. Hell, even a powder-blue velour tracksuit with the word ‘juicy’ on the ass would be better than—” I squinted at the goblin’s unclothed midsection— “What fashion statement are we going for here, dumpster troll?”

Before my brother could chastise me, an arrow whistled between us.

“Down, my prince!” the half-dressed goblin screeched, diving for Maleek. More arrows whipped past, slicing through bark and biting into wood. Maleek dropped behind a tree in a sway of locs. I did the same, my heart kicking like a jazz drummer letting loose during an encore solo.

“There are too many of them, my prince!” another goblin shouted.

“Too many arrows, or archers?” Maleek shouted back. He was grinning a wild grin. I wasn’t. I knew from experience that arrows don’t do through-and-throughs or subtlety. Wherever arrows bite, they plant a flag and leave a scar.

Moments after the arrows stopped, I could still hear our panicked breaths. Right as the sweater vest goblin stood up, Maleek yanked him down hard.

“Either the hobgoblins pause to flank us or pause to clothe their arrows,” he snapped. “Either way, stay down.”

“They’d prepare fire arrows?” the goblin echoed, his luminous yellow eyes widening with fear. “But fire here would burn everything all the way down to Treegoblintown!”

“Fear not,” my brother said through gritted teeth.

I leaned past the tree providing me cover to say something, but before I could, Maleek curled over, wheezing. His labored breathing deepened into guttural, violent grunts. At first I thought he’d been struck, but then I saw air shimmying off him in hot pearlescent waves, like heat radiating off asphalt in the middle of August. Even when Maleek, our old neighbor Ashanti, and I had fought the Wizard King all those years ago, I’d never seen magic like this. When the striating muscles of white light had reached their peak, the foliage around Maleek’s body burst into flames. I shielded my eyes from the light blast with my forearm but when I lowered it, my brother was gone.

“Christ,” I swore, sitting up behind a tree. “He can teleport now?”

“Not exactly,” came Maleek’s voice from everywhere and nowhere. “It’s invisibility, dear brother.”

I rolled over and squinted in the direction of Maleek’s voice. It was like looking through thick, weathered glass: everything behind him looked mildly distorted.

“Turns out, dear brother, the secrets of the infamous white magic guild are for the taking— if you can drink a guild member under the table.”

“You’re drinking here now?” I gasped. “Have you lost your mind? You know what that does to us.”

In response, a bough several yards up ahead of me shook, its licorice green leaves drifting to the ground. Another bough shook. Then another, and then Maleek was gone. I’d lost my brother again.

*     *     *
That night, high up in the canopy of Treegoblintown, the tree goblins held a massive feast celebrating “Prince” Maleek’s retrieval from the Hobgoblin King’s talisman. From Maleek’s table I watched tree goblins crash goblets in jovial toasts and burst into the chorus of random songs. Light flickered madly as beer suds sloshed from the inebriated choir’s mugs into the oil lamps on the tables. Maleek and his yellow-eyed coterie waltzed about the wooden hall, shaking hands while I sat alone in a tiny chair before a seductive plate of food I dared not sample. I wondered how I could have ever loved a place so wild. No part of Treegoblintown was designed for the feet, temperament, or knees of a tall man in his late twenties with college football injuries. No two stairs were the same height or width. Some floors, like the one in the banquet hall, were so warped that if you placed a ball in the corner of the room, you could finish your meal before the ball finally stopped rolling. Zip lines and clotheslines hung everywhere, threatening to trip up anyone, tree goblin or human.

When my brother returned to our table, I let loose. I called him “childish, selfish, and delusional” for indulging in this fantasy for this long. I reminded him of the progress he could be making back home.

“So you say,” he said. “Yet, you never speak of your or Ashanti’s life. Could it be because there’s nothing to talk about? That there’s no life in your lives?”

True, the last couple years hadn’t gone as planned for either of us. Ashanti was single and still working as a verbal punching bag at a dying retail chain and rewrote her GyrlsWithPockets Fashion Line business plan on the weekends. As for me, l was a law school dropout, an underemployed office manager with enough student debt to rival that of a small Caribbean country.

While I thought of a response, Maleek brought his spoon to his glass for what would be a long, nap-inducing toast.

“… And a special thanks,” Maleek said, “to my eldest and only sibling, Andre, who’s always looked out for me.” His face soured. “… Even as he tries to take me away from you all now. Know that he’s only doing what he thinks is best.”

The glare of no less than two hundred angry yellow eyes burned my face and ears. I flashed a half-smile to the goblin crowd.

After Maleek’s toast, every goblin in the banquet hall grabbed me (in a less than figurative manner sometimes) to reprimand me for attempting to “repatriate our greatest ally against hobgoblin tyranny.”

When I finally tracked Maleek to the nondescript treetop chamber where he’d presumably been sleeping, I was livid. I shut the door behind me and bolted it closed. Maleek turned, obviously shocked. He demanded to know how I got up there.

I scoffed. “Have you forgotten who taught you how to climb a tree?” Maleek’s face remained puzzled.

Apparently, he had.

“You’ve lost your mind,” I said, shaking a finger at him. Floorboards creaked as I walked up to him. “All this Foreverland food is rotting your brain; you know it destroys memories, yet you feast like you don’t even care if you get home or not.”

“I’ve already told you this is my home.” Maleek's smile was swallowed by an expression I’d hoped to see more of: recognition, albeit faint. The lamps around the room cast shadows that made his smile appear gaunt. “And besides—”

“Maleek, Ma is dead.”

The twitch of recognition I’d seen before was a full-face spasm now. He rubbed the balls of his hands into his eye sockets.

“Ma is …” He rubbed his face harder. “No, you’re lying. It’s another lie.”

“She passed in her sleep. It was probably better that way. The dementia …” my voice trailed off. The silence would give her more dignity than my description of her last few months ever could. Below us, a fiddle whined, accompanied by idle chatter.

“That … is truly regrettable,” Maleek said, his tone flat. Whatever familiarity I’d seen in his eyes had gone as quickly as it had come. “I’m sure you must be devastated.”

Before I’d returned to Foreverland, I had given some thought to how Maleek would respond to our mother’s death. I had planned for anger, despair, fear, guilt, maybe even a little vitriol, but not indifference. I don’t remember what he said after that, but I do remember having to connect the dots for him. Our mother had filed a missing persons report on him with Sacramento PD. I was in dire financial straits at a time when I needed to take over our mother’s mortgage.

“We emptied your room, Maleek. Your clothes, yearbooks, that stupid Beanie Baby collection, it’s all with the Salvation Army now.”

“And this concerns me … how?”

“Goddamnit.” I grabbed Maleek by the arms and spoke through gritted teeth. “Ma’s house has been in probate, which means it will be sold. Selling the house means no furniture. No furniture means no mirror above the bathroom sink, Mal. No mirror? No portal. You’ll be stuck here forever.”

“I’ve already told you,” Maleek said, explosively shrugging off my grip, his eyes as dark as the obsidian locs that framed his now stern face. “My home is here.”

“How, when we don’t know what this place is?” I said, throwing my hands up. “Foreverland isn’t even its name. It’s just what Ashanti called it after you discovered it.”

“Foreverland is as real as your world. Its denizens dream, live, and die just like anyone else. They have volition just as strong as yours— or do you need some time with a certain rogue to remind you of that?”

Heat rushed to my face at the mention of Myrona, an old Foreverland flame.

“Maleek, I’m leaving with you now,” I said, exhaling anger. “And I’m past done asking.”

I folded up my sleeves. Reaching into the satchel I’d brought with me, I produced my only means of prying my delusional brother from this fantasy. Maleek looked down at the rope coiled in my hand.

“The Lasso of Kturoman?” Maleek laughed. “Do you even remember how to use that relic?”

I wrapped the magic rope around both of my hands, now balled into fists, and pulled it taut. The rope snapped, then crackled with ancient arcane energy. Maleek’s face grew serious again in the dark, cerulean light.

“You and Ashanti. So sure you know what’s best for me. So sanctimonious.”

Maleek took off his shirt, revealing no less than four different white magic tattoos. My mouth went dry. As if drinking and eating wasn’t bad enough, he’d let them inject Foreverland liquids directly into his skin. This fight was not going to be like the slap-arounds I used to give when he didn’t do his dishes or give me the remote. Nonetheless, I still had two inches and thirty pounds on him; I knew it would be enough.

“You know,” Maleek said, bouncing on his heels. “I always knew I’d have to defend myself against someone attempting to drag me back.” He grinned. “And I had always hoped it would be you.”

*     *     *
On a routine excursion in Foreverland when I was sixteen, a poisoned arrow to the chest had left me at the mercy of a tree goblin village elder and his potions. After a night of nightmarish fits and vomiting, I regained my strength. I thanked the elder before I left, but was shocked when, upon reaching the golden meadows that held our portal home, I saw no sign of it. Even the sparks around the golden portal, which hissed like a basket of angry cobras, were lost to my ears. This was how we discovered how Foreverland liquids affect our minds.

Ironically, things got worse after Ashanti found me and pulled me through the portal. The strange time distortion between the two realms meant that I’d only been missing for two days, but the Foreverland potions had done their damage. The face of the portal hadn’t been the only thing lost to me: six months of AP class lectures, homework, even my locker combination, virtually all memory for a half year was gone. When my father saw my final exam grades, he exploded.

Up until then our parents had tolerated our spontaneous disappearances and aloofness, probably by chalking it up to childish irresponsibility, but after I’d failed that term my father surmised that his eldest (his lawyer) had succumbed to recreational drug use. Andre Cartwright Sr.’s response was immediate and pervasive. He stormed up to my room with the kitchen trashcan. With a rage that had grown increasingly common in my teenage years, he tossed my CDs in the trash. The Gin Blossoms. Outkast. Brandy. If he thought drugs inspired it, I heard it crash into the large aluminum bin.

“Jagged Little Pill?” he growled, holding up an Alanis Morrisette album. “Is that what you're on?” I flinched as the CD crashed into the mound of waifish female guitarists and young rappers.

Ashanti told me later that even though they lived across the street, her family heard everything: my father’s hollering, the crash of the plastic cases against the trash can, Maleek’s sobs, begging everyone to just be happy that I was back.

My mother, for her part, leaned in the doorway, arms crossed, her expression neither condoning nor condemning; she knew not to engage my father in such a state, but I was a teenager who felt unjustly persecuted.

“I’ll have no addicts under my roof, boy!” my father growled as another CD crashed into the trashcan.

“Oh?” I remember saying, feigning confusion. “Did you already throw out those heroin addicts in your vinyl collection, or are we headed downstairs after this?”

I don’t think anyone, my father included, expected the open hand that blurred around and sent me crashing into my dresser. For a solid minute, I actually saw stars: large colorless phosphenes that flickered light.

What came after— the mandated family meetings on Friday nights, the forced matriculation at community college while my friends enjoyed their summers at fun camps— I blamed on Foreverland and vowed to never return.

Years later, my mother tried to explain the powerful fear that drove my father to keep his kids on the “straight and narrow.” He was preparing to send his son out into a hostile America, she said, a country that devoured Black bodies and chewed up Black dreams.

I thought it was pointless rationalizing until the deaths of Kendra Jameses and Amadou Diallos. For Maleek to have seen the same things that I saw made his return to Foreverland that much more of a betrayal. His willingness to live in an imaginary world disrespected our parents’ sacrifices and was why I had to bring him back by any means necessary, even if it was against his will.

*     *     *
The afternoon after my fight with Maleek I woke in half a body cast somewhere in Treegoblintown. I hadn’t just failed at retrieving my baby brother; I was shedding tears in a fantastical tree clinic staffed with goblins after being walloped by my kid brother. I laughed in spite of myself.

I thought about the world my brother was leaving behind as I lay shirtless on a cot two sizes too small for me. I clutched my side as I attempted to sit up and let out a piteous whimper instead. It felt like someone had sown broken glass just below my lungs. I shifted, groaning as broken bone cut into more flesh. Massive tree leaves were plastered just above my torso with a thick sap.

Goblin gauze. Another one of Ashanti’s phrases. We’d needed the magical leaves more than once, but never from fighting each other. It posed no severe threat to my ability to grasp the real world, but angry tears welled in the corners of my eyes.

The room remained empty except for a goblin who came and went, wearing, of all things, a white lab coat. A goblin in a lab coat. That was how far down the rung I’d been kicked.

That night, I hobbled over to the windowsill and spied on a drinking hall’s festivities from my treehouse room window. With all the celebration going on, I surmised the rest of Treegoblintown must have caught wind of Maleek’s recent victory over the Hobgoblin King.

“The best view of any banquet is always from the guest of honor’s table, Andre.”

I spun around as fast as my injuries would let me. Though it had been years, I recognized the plum leather jacket and pattern leather buckles immediately. Though most rogues have those haunting violet irises and a penchant for theft, I was relieved to speak with a humanoid clothed like an adult.

“What are you doing here, Myrona?” I asked.

“I was in the neighborhood, pawning some troll relics,” she said. “Now, are you going to continue to gape at me or offer me some of that gob-weed?”

Though her charm hadn’t changed, Myrona looked different. She’d removed the gold stud piercing from her left nostril and a stream of silver hair framed her tawny face. I must have recoiled when I saw it because she pointed right to it.

“Don’t act so surprised,” she said. “I am, after all, as mortal as you are.”

“I thought things didn’t change here,” I muttered.

“Funny,” Myrona said. “That’s what your brother says about your realm.”

“Pithy,” I grumbled.

“We change,” Myrona said, gesturing to the shock of grey in her hair. “You don’t. For instance, you still refuse all sustenance—even gob-weed— regardless of the amount of pain you’re in.”

I retreated to my cot, grumbling to myself. Somewhere below us, the end of a stage dance kicked up a rancorous applause: the real festivities had started.

Myrona sat next to me. She leaned over me, her dark purple eyes probing mine, her expression souring.

“Andre,” she rested a hand on my thigh. “Why has Maleek locked you in this room?”

“I’m stuck here?”

She held up an iron key, grinning.

“Well, were stuck here,” she corrected, twirling the keys around her index finger. “Got it off the goblin guarding your room.” When she saw I was dumbstruck, she chuckled. “Andre, love, you know I could steal the tusk off an elephant.”

“Like I said, some things never change.”

Her eyes slid down to the leaves stuck to my abdomen. Her attention there brought my pain to the forefront of my mind.

“You and Maleek have always had your issues, but I don't ever remember it ever being this bad. Now, what happened?”

I would have denied it then, but in that moment, you could have lit a match simply by holding it between us. There was a stillness in that space that can’t be replicated anywhere in the modern world. I looked into those cool, indigo eyes, eyes that held no judgment, no anger, just concern.

I told her everything.

*     *     *
Laughter rang out of Myrona, sonorous and accusative. It filled my nondescript room with a warmth and familiarity I hadn’t known I’d missed.

“You’re crazy,” Myrona said, as she tried and failed to regain her composure. “Attacking a white magic user with the Lasso of Kturoman— even a novice like Maleek—was brash. He could have killed you. I can’t believe you acted so recklessly.”

“Yeah?” I groaned as I pushed myself up. “Well, if you had a baby brother—” she raised a silencing finger to indicate she wasn’t finished.

“—But Andre, I understand even less why Maleek has forsaken your realm and mother’s palace.”

“House,” I corrected.

“A house is a four-by-four building with a ceiling and bathing room, no toilet required,” Myrona corrected. “But you—you sleep on cushions in towers you did not build.” Myrona shook her head. “Silver fountains in every other room. Lamps burn in wooden roofs that never catch fire. Ceilings blow winds in defiance of the weather itself. Lightning crackles inside the walls—” she glared at me. “At worst that’s a palace and at best? A wizard’s tower.”

I scoffed. “You don’t understand—”

“I understand actions of the heart,” Myrona said with a dismissive wave. “That your brother would sacrifice a king’s life to dwell among us … Andre, doesn’t that mean that his heart is indeed here?”

“By staying here, he’s stealing a cousin, nephew, and uncle from a family. He’s robbing a community. He has a heart for helping people? Good. California’s got plenty of soup kitchens and homeless shelters, trust me.”

“And what about you?” Myrona asked, her hand sliding over mine. “Where’s your heart?”

My face burned with emotion and I pulled my hand away. A confluence of old emotions I thought had died long ago burned my chest hotter than any anger, radiating to all my extremities. I told myself that it wasn’t real, that she wasn’t real.

“Look, I don’t expect the Thief of Lakarsha to understand this,” I snapped. “But people depend on us. Family needs us.”

“How much help do they need if water flows up inside of walls and children run around with magical flat apple boxes?”

“What?” I asked. “Flat apple boxes?”

“Yes, flat apple,” she parroted condescendingly, as though I had been the one butchering the names of modern inventions. “It’s a white, flat, magic box that reanimates the spirits of its owner’s favorite bards—”

“White apple magicbox?” I shook my head in confusion. Then, I narrowed my gaze at Myrona. “Wait, I never said anything about iPods.”

“Why, sure you did—”

Her supposedly random visit at a time of vulnerability suddenly seemed far less serendipitous.

“—Maleek told you to come here, didn’t he?” I said, struggling to sit up. “You’re working for him.”

“Work? For someone besides myself?” Myrona scoffed. “I’ve never acted on anyone’s interests but my own.”

Contempt darkened her eyes to something between plum and brown. Soon, the amorousness gave way to a new heat: anger. Myrona had always been manipulative, but colluding with my brother was unforgivable.

“Out,” I said, pointing at the door.

“Andre—”

“I said leave!” I shouted as loudly as my broken body would let me.

She stood and regarded me with surprise.

“Fine,” she said, in a deceptively cool tone. She slammed the key on the small table next to me and turned for the door.

“But we’ll see each other real soon.”

I had no patience for Myrona’s doublespeak and duplicity. I didn’t know why Maleek had sent her to my room and I no longer cared. If he wanted to play dirty, so could I.

*     *     *
Once I was back in the real world, I met Ashanti at a burger joint in downtown Sacramento. Though the restaurant was next to some fancy boutiques, downtown construction that had been going on forever made the place nearly inaccessible by car or foot. It was one of Sacramento’s hotter days, so we traded drinks and burgers for iced smoothies and sandwiches. The industrial grunge of the half-finished buildings across the street was a welcoming replacement for Foreverland’s redundant greenery.

Despite the weather, Ashanti still wore men’s sweats. Her micro-braids hung just a foot from her waistline. Ashanti frowned as I hobbled to the table.

“Oh God, what happened?” she asked, her tone more accusative than concerned. She only grew more disdainful as I updated her on recent events and my new plan to rescue Maleek.

“This isn’t about Maleek,” she said abruptly. “This is about you being a control freak. You were so used to shouting Maleek around, but now you can’t and you don’t know what to do.”

I scoffed as Ashanti sipped her smoothie, something optimistically purple with lots of berries and a childish name. A server, young, casual, delightfully not goblin, approached our table and asked if we were ready to order. I told her that we’d grab her when we were ready. Ashanti watched her leave before her eyes cut to me.

“Let’s say this crazy plan of yours works,” she said. “Let’s say that Maleek doesn’t notice that you swapped his water for water from this world the whole time. Let’s say Maleek doesn’t discover all the bottles of real water you’ve hidden around him as you replace his bottle each night. We know Foreverland water saps your memory and kills access to the portal, but we don’t know if it works the other way around, do we? But if it’s successful—and Dre, that’s a huge if—you manage to drag Maleek back here, you will have a lot of explaining to do—”

“I’ll catch him up on the years he’s forgotten—”

“What about the time that he has missed?” She leaned over the table, whispering, though I doubt anyone would have heard us over the ruckus from the booth behind us.

“You’re going to have to explain how that imbecile who lost the popular vote became president. You’re going to have to explain two simultaneous American invasions, Dre. Two.”

“Please,” I said, dismissively. “Maleek was not political.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Ashanti said, with a dismissive wave. “You’ll still have to explain the Cedar Fires, Hurricane Katrina, that God-awful tsunami that killed all those people in Indonesia—Christ, he’s going to think it’s the end times.”

“Let me worry about one thing at a time, please.”

“Luther Vandross—dead. Rosa Parks and Lionel Hampton, dead. Christopher Reeve—Jesus Christ, Andre—Superman! Dead. Your mother …”

Her voice trailed off. Behind us, the table of unruly children with far more energy than home training burst into laughter.

“Well, if this world is so bad, then why aren’t you swashbuckling it up with Prince Maleek?”

“Sure, I’ve thought of it,” Ashanti said. “But it’s precisely because this world sucks that I’m sticking around. My clothing line might never make the world a more comfortable place for women. But if I just give up and leave I’m just helping the status quo stay just that."

“That's what I tell Maleek.”

“Maleek is different. Always has been.”

“Yeah, he’s my brother.”

“That never stopped you from neglecting him before,” Ashanti said. “Always called him weak … demeaned him.”

A toddler, probably from the same boisterous table behind us, ran past us clenching a solitary fry in his hand. He fell, got up, grabbed the half-eaten fry that’d slipped out of his hand onto the floor smeared with who-knows-what, took a bite, and continued running as he chewed.

“Do you know why Maleek didn’t tell you when he’d discovered Foreverland?” Ashanti asked.

“He was scared I’d rat you out to our parents.”

“No, Dre,” Ashanti said. “It’s because Maleek didn’t want to ruin the only escape from the bullies in his life—including you.”

For the third time in as many days, I was speechless. Me? A bully? I laughed. Ridiculous. Halfway into my explanation on why she was wrong, Ashanti rose, fumbling around her pockets, grumbling to herself.

“This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come.”

She pulled out a ten and insisted on paying for her drink. I stood quickly, trying to pacify her in calming tones, but was still reeling from what she’d insinuated. Surely she didn’t think I was the reason Maleek had retreated into Foreverland.

“You know, you two inherited a lot of good from your parents, but neither of you have ever behaved well when you feel slighted.”

“Hold on Ashanti—”

“—Give Myrona my best if you must return to Foreverland, but Andre?”

She fixed me with a steely gaze.

“Stay away from Maleek.”

*     *     *
The upstairs bathroom of my mother’s house had ebony doorframes and lavender-striped walls. Above the toilet was a picture of Cannonball Adderley, saxophone in his pudgy hands, eyes closed, his face clenched in an expression that looked as though he was holding his breath rather than blowing it into the shapely brass instrument that obscured the bottom half of the picture. A painting of legendary conductor Dizzy Gillespie hung in the bathroom downstairs. Like my father, my mom loved all the jazz brass titans, not just the hard bop legends like Adderley and Gillespie. She saw something poetic in a black man breathing life into a quintessentially American instrument. “Just as we breathed life into the American economy, into the American revolution,” she loved to say. A public school English teacher for forty-one years, the barrage of facts never stopped even as dementia destroyed her mental faculties.

“Did you know that Monk Montgomery was the first musician to tour with the bass guitar, Andre? That and the saxophone are the only true musical instruments invented by Americans.”

Dementia is funny that way. She addressed me with one of my father’s nicknames more times than I could count, or didn’t recognize me, and then quite arbitrarily, she’d astonish me with these moments of astounding clarity.

Her biggest episode of recollection happened at a brunch at a casual dining Italian spot, of all places. In the middle of a banal conversation, she looked up from her angel hair pasta as she’d done so many times, but this time familiarity burned through the haze. For the first time, I felt as though she was really looking at me, instead of at an illusion.

“Take care of Maleek,” she said. “Despite what everyone thinks, he’s not as strong as he believes.”

This was over a year after Maleek stopped appearing even for obligatory family functions. Rumors of drug usage swirling in family circles had widened into maelstroms, yet this was the most significant clue I’d ever gotten as to the level of my parents’ suspicion about where their children had really disappeared off to. She hadn’t said …pray for your brother” or …forgive your brother” as she was wont to do, but rather, …look after him” as though I knew where he was. Perhaps she had known all along, though it’d be impossible to figure out how. It certainly didn’t take much to paint my brother as an addict: musically inclined, idealistic, aloof. He always had a vacuous look at family get-togethers, as though he’d been woken mere moments earlier to a room of strangers.

“He was a preemie, you know,” my mother continued. “Your father insisted we were too old for one more.” She shook her head. “Babies like that never truly adapt to a world as cruel as this one. It’s why we were harder on you; we knew he’d need you.”

It was hard not to roll my eyes; it’s every parent’s nature to overestimate their children’s influence, just as it is natural for new parents to marvel over their macaroni necklaces and hang up their crayon scratchings on the fridge.

“You know your father and I fought over the name, but settled on “Maleek”: it’s Arabic for king. We knew what awful things people were going to call our son, and we just wanted to make sure that he’d be called great things, too.”

This level of introspection baffled me. Even before the dementia, she had never been that transparent, especially with decisions involving my father.

I ordered more raspberry lemonade for myself, breadsticks for her, and caught up with the woman I hadn’t seen in years. She told me how much she missed Dad, asked if I’d updated my voter registration, and reprimanded me after I told her that “voting doesn’t matter.” It felt surreal at first, but I quickly grew accustomed to having my mother back, a woman who smiled often but laughed rarely, knew all the lyrics to every Motown song on the radio but never sang them; a woman who, despite marrying a disciplinarian and earning a reputation at the local high school for being a no-nonsense AP Lit teacher, lost all inhibition around candy corn. I got too comfortable too quickly, and after I excused myself for the bathroom, I returned to an empty booth.

She died a week later.

In her upstairs bathroom, I gripped the sides of the sink and stared at the mirror that had stolen so much of our childhood, this thing that had cursed us. I made a vow to my dead mother that I wouldn’t return through that mirror until it was with my brother.

*     *     *
I found Maleek some distance away from Treegoblintown on the bank of a river, hunched over a net of flapping fish. Weeping willows shaded the bank and I almost missed him in the overgrowth of cattails. When he saw me, his eyes narrowed and he stood.

“Truce,” I said, throwing my hands up. “I don’t want to fight, Mal, I just want to share the last days I can with my baby brother in peace. “Look,” I said, holding up a thermos. “I even brought you a present. It’s a thermos.”

“I know what a thermos is, Andre,” he said.

He stepped out of the tree’s immense shade and eyed the powder blue canister I gave him with suspicion.

I explained how the double-walled, vacuum-insulated technology kept all liquids cold or hot for twelve hours. Rotating it in his hand, his shrewd eyes rolled from my little Trojan horse to me. He twisted off the lid and peered inside its stainless-steel stomach. Frowning, Maleek pulled out a small white packet and waved it around. I explained how manufacturers stuck silica gel packets into nearly everything to prevent moisture from damaging goods. He tore the bag open with his teeth, seeming more concerned with the small turquoise beads spilling out than my explanation.

“You’ve never given me a gift,” he said flatly.

I shrugged. “All the more reason to take advantage of my last opportunity.”

This didn’t seem to sell it. Maleek continued turning the blue container this way and that. I held out my own thermos.

“Look, I’ve got my own, see? It’s magenta.”

As difficult as it had been to convince my brother I’d meant no malice, it was far more difficult to switch his thermos at night. We shared quarters in the same goblin treehouse, so I had to hide a backpack of thermoses with real world water in a ditch a fifteen-minute walk from his chambers. That meant every night, I had to walk half an hour in the dark to switch out his thermos with one of the identical thermoses filled with real tap water.

Gradually, the real-world water began to take effect. He grinned with faint recollection when I recounted his favorite aunt making self-deprecating jokes after burning a sweet potato pie the previous November. On one of our river adventures, I called a beaver we saw paddling “Daggett.” He laughed so hard at the obscure Nickelodeon ’90s reference, I thought he’d fall off the boat. Maybe it was the crisp air or maybe it was the real-world water, but his spirits were noticeably lighter.

Once after a water rafting excursion, as we sat swinging our legs off a riverside boulder, I asked Maleek if he missed anything from home. His list was staggering.

“Sloppy taqueria burritos, lo mein, fried rice—anything with soy sauce, actually. Oh! And mosquito repellent—not a food, but it’d make outings to Lake Lipidipi far more enjoyable.”

He paused, his eyes moving searchingly. The fidgeting, the furrowed brow, the wince, it was cognitive whiplash from a person returning to themselves too quickly. Similar expressions preempted my mother’s brief reprieves from the fog of dementia. It finally felt like I was getting somewhere.

And then I ran out of real water.

Whatever recollection he had accrued would have to be enough to help me persuade him to return home.

The morning after we returned to Treegoblintown from the river, I asked him one last time to return with me. He rolled out of his bed and began to get dressed.

Maleek spoke, his voice as cool as the river we’d canoed down a couple days prior.

“The other day I had an insatiable desire for some New York style cheesecake.” He shook his head. “Probably couldn’t have even told you what it was before you last left. But since you’ve been back, it’s all I can think about.” He pulled up his pants and fastened his belt. “I don’t suppose that’s a coincidence.”

When he faced me, his eyes were clear, focused, and laden with grief.

I sat up on my haunches and eyed my brother as he began putting the pieces together.

“Do you really think these pervasive thoughts are going to help you win me over?”

Fists balled, he took a tentative step toward me, and then another much slower one.

“What …” he said, his voice hoarse. His legs quivered as they locked themselves in place. Already the magic was working its way up from his hips.

“Take a look at your belt,” I said.

Arms visibly shaking, he twisted the belt upward in their loops, and frowned at the strands of rope stuck to the insides of his belt.

“Is that from …”

“The Lasso of Kturroman?” I asked, finishing his sentence. “Yes.”

He rolled his eyes. “You are so unoriginal.” He glared at me, completely bound by the rope’s magic. I let him tire himself out before I held up a scarf.

“Now, are you going to come quietly, or do we need this?”

*     *     *
We reached the prairie where the portal was at sunset. Winds rustled the long golden grass around us and when they stopped, I heard nothing: not the hoarse roar of traffic, not a bullfrog’s croak, not even the chirp of a cricket. The silence was almost stifling.

I unloaded Maleek from the carriage, shouldering him like a rolled-up carpet, and winced at the stench of livestock. I’d done my best to steal a faster cart back in Treegoblintown, but the only empty I could find was the farmer’s cart.

After laying Maleek beside the cart, I pulled out the eyeglass I’d taken off him and began looking around for the portal. Its edges were as golden as the prairie in which we stood, so the trick was to catch sight of the portal’s top half against the blue sky. Unfortunately, I’d arrived a lot later than anticipated, and the sunset colors bleeding into the sky from the horizon did me no favors.

“She’s really dead, isn’t she?”

I lowered the eyeglass and glanced back at my brother. Straw stuck out of his locs, and under them, a face like that of a son of a recently deposed king waiting his turn at the executioner’s sword.

“Yeah,” I said, quietly. “Ma’s gone.”

My brother buried his head in his arms and wept.

Perhaps too late I saw how cruel my plan seemed. To unlock a lifetime of Christmases and family gatherings and board game tantrums and chicken-noodle remedies and Take-Your-Son-To-Work Days only to tell him that he’s an orphan? It was a hell of a thing to do.

Maleek had managed to pull his knees to his chest and was resting his arms on his knees. The magic lasso’s hold was beginning to wear off.

“I know it’s all hitting you at once, but you’ll feel differently once you’re back home, Mal.”

“Oh, dearest brother,” Maleek said, pity slowing his cadence. “It is not I who will return home today.”

I returned to the eyeglass with an unshakable feeling that his retort and my sudden inability to find the portal were related. He continued speaking, babbling mostly, his mind warped by dueling realities hostilely juxtaposed.

“We all deserved more than a hamster wheel of bills, mind-numbing entertainment and afterlife promises. Even Dad. He deserved more.”

Hearing him mention our father greatly disquieted me, almost as much as the finality in Maleek’s tone. I could not remember an instance of my stomach turning so abruptly. In fact, I couldn’t remember an instance of me even being sick at all. Ever.

I lowered the eyeglass and turned to Maleek.

“Mal, what have you done?”

He looked at me with world-weary eyes, and a wry grin appeared under the spill of ebony locs.

“I assure you, brother, I didn’t do anything.”

If he hadn’t switched my water while I was switching his, then who’d done it? I kept my thermos on me at all times, even using the satchel that held it as a pillow while I slept. The thought of one of those simpleton tree goblins deftly pulling my thermos from under me as I slept to swipe out its contents was so risible that I scoffed.

Night came. The magic of the lasso had completely worn off, but my brother made no attempt to subdue me even though my back was to him. Arcs of radiant cosmic energy streaked indigo across the sky. The sky’s palette complimented the golden aura of the portal, yet I still couldn’t find it, couldn’t even hear the goldenrod crackling sparks.

“It’s around here somewhere,” I said to myself.

I only had to stay patient and vigilant. I’d find it soon enough.