Free Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea by Jonathan David Kranz

when he learned that Ethan had found a job at the Sizzleator, found it without asking, without discussing it, without drawing upon Chuck Waters’s knowledge of, and contacts on, the boardwalk. “You just walked up and asked for a job, just like that?” Chuck had asked.
    â€œYeah,” Ethan had said. “More or less.”
    â€œThe rules have changed,” Chuck said. “At least out there.” That was when he got the idea that the basement really needed to be straightened up and Ethan would be the right man to do it.
    â€œWhy now?” Ethan had asked his mother during their daily call. He thought she would back him up, have a few words with his father, insist on being fair.
    But all she said was, “It’s long overdue.”
    Finally, something they can agree on, Ethan thought bitterly. What was it they had been fighting about before she went upstairs? Before his father got up from the kitchen table and crossed the television without so much as a glance at Ethan? Before he strode to the Christmas tree and, after a brief pause eyeball-to-eyeball with a crystal Santa, thrust his arms through the branches, strangled the trunk, and lifted the tree from the floor?
    There were times, Ethan understood, when it was best not to ask questions; they coincided with the times he most wanted to ask them. His father’s throwing the tree down the stairs was one of them.
    This he did remember: that it was long after Christmas, even after Valentine’s Day — there were already Easter decorations in the stores. Now, standing at the door to the basement looking down, fighting back questions about the point of all this and its injustice — questions that would only make his work harder and longer — Ethan allowed his eyes to adjust. Downstairs, one bare bulb fought a losing battle against the darkness surrounding it. For reasons Ethan couldn’t begin to fathom, his father refused to put anything greater than forty watts in the light socket. He drew a deep breath through his nose, testing the cool air, the musty smell of mildewed tent canvas, rusting iron tools, and abandoned seedbeds.
    Straddling the Christmas tree, Ethan began unwinding the light strings, wrapping them around his palm and elbow the way he had seen his father’s crew wind up extension cords at Happy World. He set the coils aside and retrieved empty boxes for the ornaments. Ethan tucked the ones that had survived the fall carefully into their boxes. After removing all the ornaments he could see, he rolled the tree, like a patient in a hospital bed, to reach the ones underneath. Shards of broken ornaments glittered on the rough basement floor, as if the tree had bled broken glass.
    Ethan disassembled the tree, folding the limbs against the trunk, straitjacketing the wiry arms of coarse plastic needles. Before, this had been a joint effort of “the boys,” and doing it together had blunted the melancholy of the season’s end, the three of them fussing and joking over what belonged where, who had which box, and how on earth everything would fit back into the boxes. Jason was the most methodical of the three and had an almost preternatural gift for packing each box like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, the newspaper-wrapped ornaments nestled together without gaps. Meticulous work Mr. Waters greatly admired.
    When they carried the boxes downstairs, Mr. Waters would get distracted by all the reminders of unfinished business that had found their way downstairs: the blender he had planned to fix, the flower boxes he was going to paint and install under the street-facing windows. Ethan, who rarely went into the basement, treated it as an opportunity to explore the unfamiliar. Poking through boxes and bench tools, he caught hell from both his father and brother, who would bark him away from the boiler valves and demand that he put down the reciprocating saw he held aloft like a madman chasing teens through the