The burning child

The day my brother set himself on fire began like any other. The sun shone all night long, the birds did their birdy routines and I awoke in my bed without having slept a full night's sleep nor having eaten much of anything the day before. Not because I was being systematically starved but because I had no appetite for most of the country cuisine and used to binge up on days when something palatable presented itself or otherwise stock up on strawberry jam sandwiches after the others had eaten. 

My mother and her husband, Farmer Orren, had left me in charge of the house chores and my two younger brothers that day while they visited the nearest mid-sized village a good few hours drive away. I was twelve, going on thirteen, a skinny pale pimpled snotling who stammered occasionally, my brothers were 8 and 5.  

My youngest brother was autistic to the point where he did not communicate much to the outside world beyond grunts, hollow sounds and signs. I used to be the one that could connect the closest with him, not with words but I somehow sensed what he was thinking and was able to act as his communication gateway to some degree. A man-sized fence had been built around the back yard to enable him to play unsupervised outdoors, otherwise he would have required a whole headcount to watch him all the time. 

I used to ride around the countryside that summer on the bike my uncle bought me the summer before, most of the time with the 5-year old clinging to my back on the gravel roads that connected the farms with the outside world. Fear wasn't a word that was familiar to him, not fear of death or mutilation at least. Safety helmets or children's seats were a distant future and everyone was grateful I took him off their hands. 

Sometimes I secretly wonder if they were subconsciously hoping he'd fall off and be gone during one of our trips or maybe they just didn't want to think about it as long as nothing happened. Few people care about accidents until they occur.  Me, I was secretly waiting for him to wake up and snap out of it, what's the point of spending your life as a vegetable? He looked normal, why couldn't he just be normal? 

I often tickled him as an infant, until my big sister told me you shouldn't do that because tickled babies never learn how to talk. She was just trying to protect him from my overly enthusiastic attention but I remembered this as the years passed and he never spoke a coherent syllable. 

My other brother was a frisky 8-year old that could do anything, he rode horses bareback, made friends easily and was generally a likeable guy. In other words; the complete opposite of me. 

I presented him with a choice: 

1. Do the dishes
   *or*
2. Take out the trash.

Needless to say he chose option #2, taking out the trash meant dumping it in the assigned garbage pit and setting fire to it and was much more fun than washing dishes for an 8-year old.

In my minds eye I believed he had done this countless times before but in retrospect perhaps this was his first time. There had been a previous incident when he and his best friend had been playing with bullets and tossed them into the fire that I was in charge of. I shoved them away, heard something pop, turned around and felt a sharp sting in my left upper arm and something warm starting to flow. One of the cartridges had exploded and the shrapnel had hit me. Technically, my brother shot me when he was 7 and I still have the scars to prove it.

I watched him sally out the door, resigned myself to doing the dishes and tried to think of something interesting to pass the time. My thoughts were interrupted by a painful howl with my name in it coming from the direction of the garbage pit. 

I ran outside and saw my brother running towards me with a trail of flame following him. An icy calm came over me and I jumped over the fence and sprinted towards him. Somehow I patted out the flames with my unfeeling hands, dragged him crying into the bathroom where I removed most of his clothing down to his undergarments and forced him to sit in the bathtub while I drenched his red swollen backside with icy cold water from the showerhead while he whimpered and sobbed, clearly in pain and shock. The smell of burned flesh was overwhelming but didn't register in my brain. Afterwards I remember it only vaguely but to this day I have never been able to eat the fat part of any meat from the barbecue as it associates with the burning fat on my brother's back. 

After a few minutes of cooling down the crying burn victim I ran to the phone in the living room and called up his grandparents from the next farm who promptly came and picked him up and drove him to the nearest hospital, 32 km away. That was the last I saw of him and my mother for the next 6 months. 

I felt empty inside, I had saved my brothers life after endangering him through lack of attention but it should have been me burning. 

Everything changed after this, nothing would ever be the same.