October Sons

Niles, Michigan The Mercer house was the kind of place people drove past without looking. Not out of fear—out of habit. The siding was warped, the windows fogged with age, and the porch light hadn’t worked in years. It sat at the edge of the woods like it had been dropped there by accident, forgotten by time and mercy alike. Inside, Jesse Mercer sat at the kitchen table, sharpening a pocketknife that wasn’t his. It had belonged to their father, once. Before he vanished. Before the fire. Before everything started to feel wrong. Caleb lay on the couch, staring at the ceiling fan as it spun in slow, uneven circles. He hadn’t spoken all morning. Not since their mother scratched another symbol into the armrest of her rocking chair—three concentric circles, each one darker than the last. She didn’t speak anymore. Not since the fire. Jesse remembered it in flashes: the smell of pork fat, the scream, the way the flames danced like they were trying to say something. Their mother had survived, but she hadn’t come back. Her face was half-melted, her voice gone, her eyes distant. She rocked in silence now, day after day, carving symbols into wood like she was trying to remember something no one else could see. The brothers didn’t talk about it. Not the fire. Not the symbols. Not the way Caleb had started sleepwalking, waking up with dirt under his nails and blood on his socks. Jesse had found a dead raccoon in the yard last week—its teeth missing, its body arranged like a warning. He didn’t ask. They were good kids once. Jesse had been a quarterback. Caleb ran track. Teachers liked them. Girls liked them. They had futures. Scholarships. Plans. Now they had silence. And something else. It was in the way the house creaked at night. In the way the static on the television whispered when no one was watching. In the way their mother’s eyes followed them even when she didn’t move. Jesse didn’t know what it was. Not yet. But he could feel it. Like a bruise beneath the skin. Like something waiting to be named.