The slow, bloody sunset had long been swallowed by the indigo gloom of evening by the time the three figures trudged up the path to the lonely house on the outskirts of the village. Zamina, the eldest sister, walked with a rigid, defensive posture, her two younger brothers—Wisterdom, aged twelve, and the ten-year-old—clustered silently behind her like frightened ducklings. The air was sharp with the promise of a frost, and their breath plumed before them, ghostly in the deepening dark. The house, usually a faint beacon of warm, golden light from its kitchen window, stood stark and curiously illuminated. Every window on the ground floor blazed, the panes like sheets of polished obsidian reflecting the encroaching night, and through them, the thin cotton curtains streamed and fluttered like trapped spirits, sucked outward by some internal draught or fervor.
This was the first wrong note. Zamina felt a cold knot tighten in her stomach, distinct from the chill in the air. Their elder brother had been due back from his business trip in the city that very day. He had left before dawn, with explicit, gravely serious instructions for Zamina: "Look after them. Keep them close. Keep the house. I will be back by nightfall." The memory of his stern face, so unnervingly like their father's, flashed before her. She had nodded, the weight of the responsibility settling on her nineteen-year-old shoulders. Now, the evidence of her failure was manifest in the blazing, untidy house and in the small, shivering form of their eight-year-old brother, who was not safely within, but outside in the gathering cold.
Their elder brother's age was two years older than Zamina.
As they neared, the scene resolved into painful clarity. There, in the dirt yard before the front step, a small knot of neighborhood women huddled around a crackling, hastily built fire of twigs and dried dung. In the center of this feminine ring, dwarfed by their full skirts and clucking voices, sat the youngest boy. He wore only a thin, faded cotton shirt and a pair of shorts that ended high above his bony knees. The firelight danced over his face, which was pale and smudged with dirt, his eyes wide and liquid with a terror he was too cold to even express properly. He was trembling violently, his small hands held out to the meager flames, and every few seconds a great, ragged shiver would seize his entire frame. One of the aunties had draped a shawl over his shoulders, but it kept slipping, and he was too numb to pull it back up.
Wisterdom's heart, already heavy with the fatigue of their long, silent walk home, gave a sickening lurch. He loved his two younger brothers with a ferocity that was the central, guiding truth of his young life. Seeing the youngest—his round cheeks usually bright with mischief—reduced to this silent, shuddering state, ignited a spark of protective fury in his own chest. But it was a feeble spark, quickly smothered by a wave of dread. He glanced at Zamina. Her jaw was set, a muscle twitching in her cheek. She had seen.
The front door was not just unlocked; it was standing open, banging intermittently against the frame in the cold wind that had begun to sweep down from the pine forests. The curtains, flowing outward, confirmed the cross-breeze tearing through the home. From within, a shadow moved—a tall, broad-shouldered silhouette that blotted out the light from the hallway for a moment before solidifying in the doorway.
Their elder brother had returned.
He was not the brother who had left that morning, full of brisk purpose. This was a man transformed by a slow-burning, gathering tempest. He stood on the threshold, backlit by the harsh lamplight, his face in shadow. But his posture was eloquent: shoulders rigid, fists clenched at his sides, his very stillness more threatening than any movement. His gaze swept over Zamina, over the two boys behind her, and finally, most painfully, settled on the small figure by the fire. The women's chatter died instantly. They melted away, back towards their own homes, casting pitying and curious glances over their shoulders, leaving the little boy alone, exposed.
The silence that followed was profound, broken only by the moan of the wind, the bang of the door, and the crackle of the fire. It was a silence thick enough to choke on.
Then their elder brother spoke. His voice was low, a grating rumble that carried perfectly in the still, cold air. "Where," he began, each word dropping like a stone into a still pool, "have you been?"
Zamina, the cold-hearted one, as the villagers and her own family whispered—the one who had inherited their father's flinty exterior—drew herself up. The fear in her stomach was instantly petrified into defiance. "Walking. The boys needed air. The day was long."
"Air." their elder brother repeated the word as if it were poison. He took one step down from the threshold, his eyes never leaving her. "I gave you one task, Zamina. One. To keep the house and keep them safe." His arm shot out, a commanding finger pointing at the youngest, who flinched as if struck. "Look at him! He is eight years old, Zamina! Left to wander alone, dressed in rags, begging warmth from strangers like a… like a stray pup!" His voice began to rise, climbing from the low rumble into a sharper, more penetrating register. "And the house! Look at it! A thoroughfare for the wind and every prying eye in the county! Did you think at all? Or does our father's coldness in you extend to outright negligence?"
His love for the youngest—a soft, doting affection he showed to no one else—had curdled into a pure, incandescent rage. It was a transformative anger, a family heirloom passed down from their father, a man whose disappointment never simmered, it exploded.
Zamina's own temper, the mirror of his, ignited. "Do not speak to me of negligence!" she roared back, her voice losing its girlish quality, becoming a harsh shriek. "I have raised them while you and father chase coins! I have wiped their tears and fed them! So I took them for a walk! He wandered off—children do! Is he frostbitten? Is he dead? No! He found company, which is more than you offer with your scowls and your lists of duties!"
The quarrel did not escalate; it detonated. There was no gradual build. It was as if the tension of the day, the unspoken worries of their precarious life, the weight of their absent parents' expectations, all found a single, catastrophic fault line and tore it wide open. Their voices collided in the yard, a cacophony of accusation and venom. Their elder brother, towering and furious, a volcano in its first, terrifying eruption. Zamina, fierce and unyielding, a lightning storm meeting him strike for strike.
Elder brother's Burden:
The rage that erupted from their elder brother was not born solely from an open door and a cold child. It was the final, snapping thread of a stress that had been winding tighter for weeks. His trip to the city had been a failure. The merchant he was to meet had dismissed him with a wave, calling their family's goods "country trifles." The coins he had hoped to bring back were pitifully few. The entire journey, jolting in the back of a cart, he had rehearsed his father's likely disapproval. His only solace was the thought of returning to order—a clean, quiet house, his siblings safe, a small proof that he could control something. Instead, he found chaos. The blazing windows looked like a beacon of his incompetence. The sight of his favorite brother, the joyful eight-year-old, shivering pathetically among strangers, was not just neglect; it felt like a mockery of all his efforts. His love for the boy was real and deep, which made the betrayal of Zamina's carelessness feel like a physical wound. His anger was a fortress, and inside it, he was crumbling.
Zamina's Cage:
Zamina's defiance was a prison of her own making, and she knew it. When she roared back at her elder brother, it was the scream of someone trapped. She was nineteen. She saw other girls in the village, their lives slowly opening like flowers, talking of sweethearts and futures. Her life was a closed loop: the kitchen, the market, the scolding of little boys, the dusting of her father's empty chair. Her elder brother's instructions that morning had been the final lock on the door. "Look after them." As if she ever did anything else. The walk had been an act of desperate freedom, a rebellion against the walls of the house. Yes, she had lost track of the youngest for a moment—he was quick, and she was lost in her own bitter thoughts. The cold fear she'd felt when she realized he was gone had instantly hardened into defensive fury. Elder brother's accusation of being "cold-hearted like father" was the cruelest cut of all, because in her quietest moments, she feared it was true. Her tears later were not just of anger, but of a terrifying recognition: this might be her life forever, a perpetual, loveless duty. Her shouting was the sound of her rattling the bars.
The sound was physical. It seemed to shake the very foundations of the house. It rolled out over the scrubland, startling birds from the roosts in the trees. To Wisterdom, clutching his ten-year-old brother's hand, it was an earthquake. The ground beneath his feet felt unstable. He wanted to cover his ears, to block out the horrible, personal details they were now slinging at each other—old grievances, secret shames, words that could never be unsaid. The ten-year-old began to cry softly, confused whimpers lost in the din. The youngest at the fire had buried his face in his knees, his shoulders shaking with more than cold.
Wisterdom's terror was absolute, a cold fluid replacing the blood in his veins. His eyes darted from the terrifying tableau of his elder siblings to the weeping face of his middle brother, to the huddled form of the youngest. In that moment of sheer panic, his mind latched onto an incongruous memory from that very morning: Zamina, before Alden had left, standing at the kitchen sink. He'd walked in and seen her shoulders trembling, her face turned away. A single, muffled sniff. He had pretended not to notice. Now, the image flooded him with a confusing rush of pity and blame.
The neighbors did not reappear, but their presence was felt. Curtains twitched in nearby windows. Shadows lingered in doorways. In a world where everyone scraped by, where misfortune was a common currency, the spectacle of another family's unraveling was a grim diversion. Sympathy was often a thin veneer over a core of grim satisfaction—at least our house is in order tonight. Wisterdom felt their hidden eyes, and the shame was hotter than any anger.
Their elder brother, with a final, searing curse at Zamina, stormed back into the house. He snatched up the youngest boy from the fire with a rough, almost violent tenderness, wrapping him in a thick blanket and carrying him inside. The child, too terrified to make a sound, simply stared over elder brother's shoulder with huge, lost eyes. Zamina, after a moment of standing alone in the dark yard like a statue, her chest heaving, turned and marched not into the house, but around to the side, disappearing towards her own room's external door. She wanted no part of the world inside.
The three younger brothers were shepherded into the chaos. The front room was in disarray—a chair was overturned, papers from their elder brother's travel satchel were scattered across the table, and the cold wind still whipped through, setting the lamps guttering. The atmosphere was thick with the aftermath of the vocal storm, the air itself charged and bitter.
Dinner was a brutal affair. Their elder brother, his anger having no other outlet, clattered pots and pans in the kitchen, shouting directives and criticisms over his shoulder. "Sit!" "Wash your hands!" "Is this how you set a table?" The meal was a simple stew, but it tasted of ash and bitterness. The three boys sat on one side of the rough-hewn table, heads bowed. They wept as they ate, the hot tears dripping silently into their bowls. They did not dare look at each other, for fear a shared glance would invite more fury. They did not speak. They mechanically lifted spoons to mouths, the only sounds were their sniffles, the clink of cutlery, and elder brother's harsh breathing as he ate at the head of the table, his face a mask of unrelenting wrath.
Wisterdom chewed, but he also observed. The eight-year-old was simply lost, a vessel of misery. The youngest, wrapped in a blanket, was in a state of shock, his eyes vacant. But Wisterdom, at twelve, was stitching the narrative together. He saw the wreckage of the house, the symbolic meaning of the open windows, the profound, disproportionate scale of elder brother's rage. This was about more than a child left cold. This was about control, about the unbearable pressure of holding a fragile family together in their parents' frequent absences. It was about a brother trying and failing to be a father, and a sister refusing to be a mother. And they, the little ones, were the ground upon which this battle was fought.
After the wretched meal, their brother's anger still showed no sign of abating. It was a fire that fed on itself. "To bed!" he commanded, his voice hoarse from yelling. "Now! Not a word from any of you! Let this be a lesson in obedience and duty you will never forget!" He paced the hallway as they fled to the small room they shared, his footsteps heavy and threatening, a prowling animal just outside the thin door.
In their cold, dark bedroom, the three boys huddled together in one bed for comfort. The younger two, exhausted by fear and tears, eventually succumbed to a fitful, twitching sleep. But Wisterdom lay awake, listening. The house was not quiet. From behind Zamina's door, he could hear the low, relentless sound of her weeping, a stark contrast to her earlier fury. From the main room, he could hear his elder brother pacing, muttering to himself, the occasional thump of a fist on a table.
The chaos, however, was not contained. Their family was not without connections. One of their father's attendants, a loyal man who lived in the village, had heard the echoes of the quarrel. Recognizing the potential for true disaster, he had saddled a horse and rode through the night to the neighboring town where the parents were concluding their business.
The Frantic Journey:
Miles away, the news reached their parents like a lightning strike in a dry field. The attendant, breathless, didn't need to embellish. "Sir, madam—it's the house. Your elder brother and Zamina… the whole village can hear it."
The news acted upon their mother and father like a galvanic shock. Abandoning all else, they commandeered a wagon and set off at a reckless pace, the horse lathered and strained under the driver's whip. The journey that normally took a day and a half night was made in a frantic, jolting rush.
Their father's face, usually a mask of composed severity, went pale. Their parents leave the party hall without noticing anyone, and are abandoned mid-sentence. Their mother let out a small, choked cry, her hand flying to her heart as if struck. There was no discussion. Within minutes, they were in a hired wagon, its wheels ill-suited for the punishing speed their father demanded.
"Faster!" he barked at the driver, his voice strange with fear. The night landscape became a blur of menacing shadows. Every rut in the road jolted them brutally, but their father only leaned forward, as if his will could pull the horses onward. Their mother clutched the sideboard, her knuckles white, whispering frantic, fragmented prayers. "Please, no folly… my boys… my girl…" She imagined a hundred catastrophes: physical blows, a house divided, a scandal so deep it would stain them forever in the tight-knit, judgmental community.
The wind of their passage was icy, tearing at their cloaks. The moon, obscured by scudding clouds, offered only fleeting glimpses of the desperate road. Their father's mind raced with scenarios of restoration and punishment. Their mother's heart ached with a primal need to gather all her children under her arms, to smother the conflict with the sheer force of her love. The journey was a physical torment, each mile an eternity. The normal sounds of the night—the hoot of an owl, the rustle in the brush—sounded like portents of disaster. They were not just traveling home; they were racing against the unraveling of their family's very fabric, driven by a dread that the damage, by the time they arrived, would already be beyond repair.
Wisterdom, floating in the semi-conscious state between wakefulness and nightmare, heard it all. The sudden, urgent clatter of hoofbeats and wagon wheels on the hard dirt road. The sharp cry of his father's voice in the yard. The bang of the front door. Then, a new stratum of sound layered over the existing discord: his mother's high, pleading wail; his father's booming, authoritarian commands trying to smother the conflict; Alden's voice, ragged and unrepentant, rising again; Zamina's, fresh and sharp once more from behind her door.
He slipped from the bed and crept to the door of their room, pressing his ear to the rough wood. It was a symphony of familial collapse. Whispers that were really hissed arguments. The thick, gut-wrenching sound of his mother crying. The sharp, ugly cadence of his brother and sister's renewed quarrel, now fueled by the presence of an audience. His father's voice, the bedrock of their world, now cracked with a desperate, unfamiliar strain. "Enough! In the name of all that is decent, you will cease!"
But their brother was beyond reach. The initial spark had become a wildfire, consuming all reason. The simple, silly incident of a child left cold had become a referendum on respect, duty, love, and failure. His anger was a living thing now, growing bigger with every attempt to quell it. It fed on his father's orders, on his mother's tears, on his sister's defiance.
From the dark jungle beyond the cleared land around the house, a pack of dogs or perhaps wild jackals began to howl, a primal, ululating chorus that seemed to answer the human strife within the walls. To Wisterdom, shivering at the door, it felt as if the entire natural world had paused to witness their disgrace. The wind carried every sound; the stars themselves felt like cold, pitiless eyes. The very trees seemed to lean in, their branches scraping against the roof like skeletal fingers.
He finally crept back to bed, sliding in between his peacefully sleeping brothers. Their innocence in sleep was a profound relief. He glanced at their faces, smoothed by slumber, and a love so fierce it was painful gripped him. He did not know how the pieces of this night would ever be put back together. He only knew that the world had fractured, and the cracks ran right through the heart of their home. The echoes of the quarrel—the yelling, the crying, the howling outside—swirled in his head as he finally fell into a shallow, troubled sleep. The last conscious thought that drifted through his mind was the unsettling memory of dinner—the taste of salt-tears in the stew, the grim set of elder brother's jaw, the oppressive silence broken only by shuddering breaths. A mundane, terrible meal.
Who could have known, in that moment, that their elder brother sharing dinner with them would be the last supper he would have.
The final, ordinary act before an unthinkable accident poised on the horizon, ready to descend and shatter the last vestiges of their family's image and dignity forever. The simple, silly incident was merely the first stone in an avalanche.