Free The Color Master: Stories by Aimee Bender Page B

out her sharpest key just in case, she saw from a distance a man in a wheelchair with no hair on his head, wheeling past the headstones over the small green hills. She lowered the key. The air was chilly but clear, a good day to be outside. As the man drew closer, she saw he had no eyebrows, no eyelashes, and that he looked over seventy. She watched him navigate the bumps of grass. He did not look like the kind of man who would appreciate an offer of help.
    Nearby stood other mourners, and even through the cold, she could smell the hints of the first dandelion tufts pushing their way to the surface. The man wheeled right up to Hans’s headstone and nodded at her. His face was geometrically compelling, with its triangular cheekbones and rectangular forehead. She waited for him to speak.
    The man thanked her for meeting him. He said he was Hoefler’s brother. His older brother. He inquired after herinterest and she explained that it was not professional. “I just think about him,” she said. “I’m not sure why.”
    The man in the wheelchair sniffed in assent. “Good,” he said. “Then I would like you to know a few things.” He dusted his hands on the wheels of his chair, a gesture she could tell he did often. He kept his gaze on the headstone.
    “When I was thirteen and Hans nine,” he began, in a voice louder than was necessary, “I told him my mind was stronger than his. We had been fighting often, or I had been fighting and he had been silent, and I was tired of it, so I sat him down and told him to try to hurt me with his thoughts. He was not a violent young man, and I could see he was uncomfortable, but he tended to do anything I asked, and he stared at me willingly. Even then, he had eyes very big and dark and more like a dog’s than a man’s. You recall?” He glanced up and the secretary nodded. She recalled very well, she said.
    “You were his lover?” the man asked, lips harsh.
    For the second time that month, the woman shook her head. “I was really only a distant acquaintance,” she said.
    “To be stared at by Hans,” the man continued, “made you want to feed him soup, not harm him. Hans thought for a long period of time, and finally took a breath and said he wished I would not always have the first glass of juice. I told him that was an idiotic curse. Almost embarrassing. Just who was this brother of mine, so shiftless in his negativity? I’d been the clear favorite of both our parents and I’d gotten all the extra gifts and sweets. I’d never caught Hans looking at me with any kind of hatred or envy, something I found disconcerting. He tried again, and said that perhaps one day I might lose all the hot water while I was inside the shower, covered with soap. I believe then I reached out and hit him. ‘Come on, brother!’ I said. ‘Curse me! Curse me flat out!’ ”
    The man shifted in his chair. His eyes flicked over to the woman, but not long enough to register an expression.
    “Well,” he said, “something inside the combination of my contempt and that slap did alter Hans a bit, did snap him into a new place. He had always been obedient, and he continued to stare with that wet Hans gaze, but when he finally spoke, he said, in a quieter voice, that he might wish I had no legs. I was by then already a very fine and fast runner in school. He said Mother would not like me so well without legs, which, I must add as a side note, turned out, unfortunately, to be true. ‘Good one, Hans!’ I told him, encouragingly. ‘More!’ He leaned closer and in a whisper said that he wished that all my hair would fall out, as we’d just seen a horror film in which the vampire’s eldest child, the preferred child, loses all its hair and becomes a human snake and eats its father. Also, I had the better hair, the hair all the relatives commented upon. Such lustrous hair, too good for a boy, they all said, about my eyelashes too.”
    The man in the wheelchair blinked, reptilian.
    “I was—to be