for greg. thank you to many people for their help with this as i gnawed on the bones: salad, maria, & star. it's always these little things that i stress the most over. an extra shout out to cly, whose rozanov family-posting always delights me.

++ while the current eurasian junior hockey league (Молодежная Хоккейная Лига) which dynamo belongs to was founded in 2009, i am ignoring that here because i can.

Someone says to you: parents love all their children equally. You remember this.

*

But the first thing they’ll tell you is that you look like your father.

When you are five and your brother is born ruddy and golden, everyone says, reverently, that he takes after his mother, and you’ll realize one of these is better than the other. You’ll ask to hold the baby because you’ve never seen a newborn, and your mother stares down at you, at your outstretched arms and eager eyes and your longing and says it wouldn’t be safe. Tomorrow you ask again and she says not tonight. Your father makes you sit in your room during dinner because you ask a third time. When it’s night, you crack the door to your parents’ bedroom open because the baby sleeps in there, and now you have your own room. Every night, you turn the light on even though you’re not allowed. You peel your little brother out from his swaddle and hold him in your arms, and you think about how soft his head is and how he smells like your mother. She wakes to you holding him and screams.

*

Your brother was not screaming. He didn’t even cry. That’s your mother’s habit. And this is how your father refers to it: her habit. Her downtroddenness and shouting and angry sobbing into her hands and her broken porcelain plates and her uprooted flowerpots and her handpainted bowls of soup turned upside-down onto the floor and her hard grip on your arm and her gentle cradle around your brother as if he is a tiny little thing of warmth and comfort and you think you want to hold him again, if only to see if it’s true: that he is easy to love.

*

There are many pictures at home of other people holding you. Some of them are strangers now.

*

He wears your hand-me-downs only one year, at age seven: a pale blue t-shirt, shorts with a white stripe down the side, a butter-yellow sweatshirt. You watch him grow out of your skin. But you think maybe your hangdog eyes are the same, and the curve of your upper lip when you frown. He learns how to be a boy, how to exact meanness upon the world instead of taking it, through you—because something has to fill his growing body. Because the thing about quiet homes is that you learn which floorboards are loose. Every time you open your mouth, your tongue creaks. Your brother’s body picks out every uneven, wooden plank and slams his heel on it, and you scream.

*

It’s your mother who takes you to the outdoor rink and shows you how to tie up your skates. She smoothes out the back of your FETISOV jersey. One day, it’ll say ROZANOV. You will be in the stands watching your little brother take the ice in Sochi. You do not tell him you’re there. Somewhere behind the bench, your father wears a suit as he watches your brother bear his name wrong. He leaves the game early. You stay to watch them lose. Many years after this, your brother is in your house, and he invades your closet as a brother does, to find, in Russia’s glorious colors, that old jersey, and you meet his eye, and then he closes the door and asks if your family wants to have dinner. You call the nicest restaurant in town on his dime.

*

Your little brother takes the butt of a stick to his incisor—he whistles air through the gap. He doesn’t even make it back to the bench before your mother demands a dentist. But they’re milk teeth, so there’s no point.

A few months later, you pry one of those perfectly-white teeth out on purpose because sometimes older brothers do nice things. You tie a string around one tooth with your hands, dirt under the nails, and he has to hold his mouth open real wide until you yank so hard he gasps. And there is the tooth, and your brother’s smile, and so much blood it runs straight off his chin onto the polished floor. And well, now it’s your fault there’s all this mess. Your brother gets a flat bill under the pillow and he cuts it in half with scissors thinking you can split it.

*

Some years after that, your brother fucks your girlfriend, and then he fucks that girlfriend’s friend, too. In your shared bathroom you find a condom, neatly tied, full of come.

*

Your mother does not want to take your little brother to the hairdresser, but they go, and they cut a little bit off the ends, and she kisses the top of his head and he squirms out of her arms and runs for the backyard, and she stares at him tumbling onto the grass as you watch her. When she turns to find you there, she says, “You had hair just like that when you were little,” and you wonder at what age you grew out of being little. You are ten, and you are as tall as her.

*

You’re allowed to hate your brother. The world will understand if you hate him because he is a generational talent and pretty and well-fucked and well-liked—but not if it’s because he is your brother. There are only so many hours in a family’s day. You are five. Someone puts two dogs in a cage and hopes they don’t kill each other. You are thirty; you realize there is no key and no dogs and you call your brother and say, I need money. What you meant to say is: I have been thinking about dying and all the ways it comes to us, and then I thought of you dead, and it scared me, if only for a moment, to realize that even you could die, and that if you were to die then I would truly be alone in this world, even with my daughter, and my wife, I would feel a deep aching hole in my stomach between the liver and the heart, where you punched me for the first time, and it rattled all through my body until I shook so hard I broke your nose. Twenty thousand dollars, Ilya. Your heavy American dollars—I saw photos of your new house. So big you pay someone to clean it for you. I bent the knee to lace your skates when you were four. You owe me.

*

You spend the years after your mom’s suicide wondering if she really didn’t love you. You don’t think your brother thought about this twice.

*

On your little brother’s navy sheets, that full condom is a white smear. You entertained cutting it in half with scissors. He stands in the doorway to his bedroom, to face you like a man.

Your little brother is a young boy. Your perfect brother, wearing your ex-girlfriend’s babypink t-shirt which is tight in the pits and loose in the chest, smiles at you as he says, “She wanted to see if my cock was bigger,” and you learn that it’s just as easy to knock his teeth out at this age, still grinning wide and open, like you’re sharing a private joke.

*

Again, your little brother wore your hand-me-downs when he was seven. One of those shirts had been your favorite until you grew too embarrassed to wear it: an older boy’s MHC Dynamo Moscow shirt that was passed to you. Sometimes older brothers do nice things for their little brothers’ friends. Like how you avoided calling Sasha a faggot, but only before you caught them kissing; you caught them hands down the front of each other’s pants; breathing eagerly into each other’s mouths; what you think about then is if your girlfriend was as starry-eyed when your brother fucked her. You think of this when Sasha sits in your family kitchen wearing that same shirt, this one brand new, because your brother is good enough to make Dynamo and you quit before you even made it to the JHL.

*

After the baby, no one takes you to the hairdresser for two years. Your hair is very long and very blond, and when your mother walks in with you, hand in hand, someone tells her that her daughter is a very pretty little girl, and she turns the both of you around. She buys you ice cream and she looks at you, and all of this looking makes you squeamish, but it’s the longest day you’ve had together in weeks. Your father drives you back to the hair salon the next day, and you come home with it buzzed so short your hair is white in the sunlight, and a kid at hockey practice can see the weird dip at the top of your head.

*

You watch your little brother win a shiny silver cup on American ice. He is smiling so wide you see the gap in his teeth and you remember your hands in his hair, his blood when he spat it onto your chin. You turn the TV off because how can he be happy somewhere else? You were meant to be in the cradle together. The dog-cage. These are your floor scraps, your rotten meats. Your face to the blistering pavement, you remember, hot summer, the one time you got to be an older brother who teaches things, instead of running, lungs-aching, just to touch your little brother’s shadow:

You are fifteen and he is ten. This is when you are still spindly with puberty and your brother is a solar flare in your vision and you cannot look straight at him. You will wreck your body trying to follow.

“Drink,” you say. “Drink, or you’re a pussy.”

And your little brother lives in locker rooms that you never smell except on his skin. Your little brother who would rather die than be a pussy.

You remember this night above all others. How your brother was a child for once and how you were ripe with anger. How it was sweet that he got drunk. How he opened his mouth and creaked like the floor and that quiet home stirred up against him. And you felt bad, you did. You felt so bad you vomited the rest of that bottle into the bathroom sink.

*

Your hair grows out brown.

*

Out of all the men in the world, your wife loves you. That baby is an accident. At the hospital, someone calls you father. The morning after, when your wife is feeding her, you get in your car and think about driving into oncoming traffic, and you even turn the radio on. That sort of accident. Then you turn around and walk back inside the hospital and you let your daughter know that you love her. She will have no siblings, but she will beg for them. You tell no one when you get snipped, not even your wife. Our happy accident. Our one-time miracle.

In two years, your brother sees her twice. You have to show your brother how to hold her properly because no one taught you and so no one taught him, either. He says I have money for her and you say it’s not enough, but your brother doesn’t look at you when you speak, just at your daughter and her dune-hair and hangdog eyes, and suddenly you want to scream. No one tells you this, but you are a lot like your mother.

*

You didn’t quit. Hockey is time-expensive. Your father is a busy man. Your mother can only attend one game at a time. Your brother is so very, very good. You might’ve turned out decent.

*

Both of you smoke Marlboros. It is easy work to start a conversation when there is only one pack between you. A year after your father’s funeral, during an already shorter-than-normal summer visit, your little brother neither apologizes for his absence nor does he promise to be there for you in the future. He does give you this: “I am not coming back here next summer. I have to see someone.”

You ask, “Which minister’s wife did you fuck? Running away like this.”

And he stares at you, so tired and dark around the eyes, and says, “You were the one always calling me a faggot, weren’t you?”

You laugh. Will you see your brother again?

*

You are so grateful you had a daughter. You touch the top of her head and then you kiss that same spot.

*

You have never lived a life without your father. You knew your mother five years longer than your little brother ever did, and still he got to find her. But it should’ve been you. You, finding her, and closing the door. Turning around with your hand still on the doorjab. You should’ve gotten to win at that, at least.

You have forgotten how to live a life without your brother, and every time you see him, you have to remember what he looked like from behind, his choked gasp and raised shoulders and knotted hands and her bedroom light cast at his edges.

*

But you do win, it’s just that you forget this, as older brothers do:

first place in the race between your bedrooms and the backyard swing, never losing at rock-paper-scissors because your little brother’s eye twitches when he uses paper, first place at the essay writing competition for a paper your family does not know you have written, having more juice poured into your cup because you’re taller, your little brother begging for a bump of coke and your benevolent hand offering, that wrestling game in the mud after the rain and you made your brother laugh first and that might have been the last easy laugh between you, the cut severing your half of the paper bill he paid you, your last hockey game, your father’s hand on your shoulder, twenty thousand dollars, the family home in your name.

You are there when your father is in hospice. You call your little brother. You call your little brother. You call your little brother. You call your little brother. You call your little brother.

*

Your daughter looks like you. The nose, especially. When your wife tells you this, she is smiling. You think about calling your little brother. It’s in the middle of the night in America, so you don’t.

*

You hold your phone to your ear, staring down at your father, and you wonder how the stale hospital shapes you from behind. Your little brother picks up his phone.

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