Swansong by Rose Christo

schoolbook etiquette, I know.
    “What do you think of this piece?” Azel asks.
    “Can’t read it.”
    “Why?”
    “Can’t concentrate.  The words.  They jump around.”
    His eyes linger knowingly on the scar on my cheek.  Green eyes, bright as emeralds and soft as seas.  Warmth trickles down my spine, pleasant and unpleasant.
    “Sit,” Azel says.  You’d think this was his apartment.  “I’m getting tired just looking at you.”
    What a charmer.  I roll my eyes and sit down.
    “Pay attention,” Azel says, his eyes scanning the poetry page.  “Lady Lazarus,” he begins.
    He’s reading to me.  He’s reading for me.  I sit up in my chair.  The warmth down my spine cools over in ice feathers.
    ” ‘I have done it again,’ ” he reads.
    The poem is horrible.  A lady with red hair tries desperately to kill herself.  Every time she dies, she rises again from her own ashes.  Crowds start to gather.  They point at her as though she’s a circus spectacle.  I don’t understand it: why she wants to die; why they won’t let her.
    The only saving grace is Azel’s reading voice.  His voice is warm and tumbling.  I think of stars tumbling past me, the supervoid cloaking me in endless violets and blues.  I think of planets painted in enigmatic green.  It looked so real.  It felt so real.  When I close my eyes I can see the cosmos, can feel the planets and their moons brushing past me.  If it looks real, if it feels real, how can it be anything but real?
    Azel stops reading.  By the time I’m aware of it, he may have been silent for a handful of minutes.  He studies me quietly.
    “Do you want to see it again?” Azel asks.
    I’m afraid to ask what he means.
    “The Swan Nebula,” Azel says.
    My skin feels cold.
    Azel closes my lit book silently, almost reverently.  He pushes his chair back, standing from the table.
    “Come on,” Azel says.  “I’ll show you.”
     
    * * * * *
     
    The sun is slow to set tonight.  We walk through The Spit’s streets, the sky between the white buildings runny in shades of salmon and saffron.  I can’t see the sun itself, corporate towers obscuring it, windows flashing their wares in dim holograph commercials.  You’d think they’d at least wait until dark.
    We walk past the sandstone clinic, past a bottle recycling center and a tetrad of competing gas stations.  We walk past a rusted memorial statue molded in the likeness of Charles Babbage.  Just ahead of us stands a cluster of low-rise garden apartments.  I didn’t think anything so cozy could survive in a city like The Spit.  On the other hand, the gardens are mostly of the dead variety, patches of brown weeds curled up in the hard soil.
    My cell phone’s in my pocket.  I touch the pockets of my woolen jacket, just to be sure.  Judas would freak if he came home early and I wasn’t there.  I stop and think about how weird that is, that my-brother-the-murderer is the conscientious adult.  Manslaughterer , says a nagging voice in the back of my head.  There’s a legal difference.
    Azel lets us into his apartment.  It’s a cozy little maisonette with a short staircase to one side, a coat closet to the other, the sitting area in the far back.  Azel steps out of his loafers and leaves them by the door with a tiny pair of girls’ shoes.  I untie my sneakers and put them aside, just the same.  In white stockings, I follow him across the lush gray carpet.
    The sitting room’s lit by gauzy yellow lamps.  A glass door looks out on an artificial pond, its surface glowing faintly with the light thrown off by dozens of paper luminarias.  A little girl lies on her belly on the sitting room floor, favoring the carpet over the plush, wine-colored sofa.  She giggles naughtily at a cartoon character on the tiny television set.  Her hair is wild and bushy, a shade darker than Azel’s.
    “Go upstairs,” Azel says rudely to her.
    “You’re not the boss of me,” the little girl replies,