My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid

of theft and murder (“Dem tief, dem a dam tief”), but presented in such a way as to make the account seem inevitable and even fun: he liked the costumes of it, he liked the endings, the outcomes; he liked the people who won, even though he was among the things that had been won. But his life was real, not yet a part of history; his reality was that he was dead but still alive; his reality was that he had a disease called AIDS. And no matter what anyone says, or for that matter what anyone has discovered so far, it seems to me that to be so intimately acquainted with the organism that is the HIV virus is to be acquainted with death. We are all acquainted with death; each moment, each gesture, holds in it a set of events that can easily slide into realities that are unknown, unexpected, to the point of shock; we do not really expect these moments; they arrive and are resisted, denied, and then finally, inexorably, accepted; to have the HIV virus is to have crossed the line between life and death. On one side, there is life, and the thin shadow of death hovers over it; and on the other, there is death with a small patch of life attached to it. This latter is the life of AIDS; this was how I saw my brother as he lay in his bed dying.
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    I was in Miami, a city at the far southern end of North America, and ordinarily the word “Miami,” representing this city, is familiar enough so that I can say it and know what I mean, and I can say it and believe that the person hearing it knows what I mean, but when I am writing all this about my brother, suddenly this place and the thing I am about to say seem foreign, strange. I was in Miami, and if someone asked me a question in regard to my family, I would make frank replies about my family and about my mother. It must have been wonderful in Miami then, but I will never really know, I can only repeat what other people said; they said that it was wonderful in Miami and they were glad to be there, or they wanted to be there. But I myself was in Miami, and I found Miami not to be in the tropical zone that I was from, and yet not in the temperate zone where I now live; Miami was in between, but its in-betweenness did not make me long for it. I missed the place I now live in, I missed snow, I missed my own house that was surrounded by snow, I missed my children, who were asleep or just walking about in the house surrounded by snow, I missed my husband, the father of my children, and they were all in the house surrounded by snow. I wanted to go home. One midday I left Miami, and when I left, it was warm and clear and the trip from Miami to Vermont should not have taken more than eight hours, but Miami is south and the farther north I got, the more temperate the weather turned and there were snowstorms which made air travel difficult and I arrived at my home in Vermont fourteen and one-half hours after I left Miami. In Miami I had taken a walk through the Fairchild Botanical Gardens, and while there I had bought two rhododendrons from New Guinea at the gift shop. The rhododendrons were in five-gallon pots and they were very awkward to carry on airplanes and through airport terminals. Perhaps I looked like a very sensible woman carrying two large plants covered with trumpet-shaped brilliant orange blooms in the middle of an airport and in the middle of January, because everyone I met was very kind and helped me with my plants and my various other traveling paraphernalia. I was so happy to reach my home, that is, the home I have now made for myself, the home of my adult life.
    My two children were asleep in my son’s bed. When I am away from home they like sleeping together. When I saw them asleep, breathing normally, their features still, they looked so beautiful, not doing anything that I felt was a danger to them or annoying to me, so that I did not have to call their name out loud, as if their name itself were a warning (“HAROLD,”