This is a short story I just finished

“Gospel of Eli”

“What have you got for us?”
Issac sits straight backed against the smooth concrete wall, a rough blanket clutched in his two fists and wrapped around himself tight, he stares through far off eyes imagining the tiny rivulets into Niagra’s boiling falls as they trickled into the gutter.
“Issac,” insists the boy in front of him, “what have you got for us?”
As if being pulled up through viscous layers of reverie Issac looks up, eyes focusing slowly, and shakes his head. “nothing today Eli. Ask Lucas if you must.” His voice is soft, softer than it ought to be coming out of cracked lips and hollow cheeks, but it is reflected in his distant eyes.
Eli shrugs and, retrieving a cigarette from a pack of Camel Filters, jamming the butt between his lips, slumps down beside Issac.
“Lucas is a fuck, and a miser, I doubt he’d be in the charity business if he didn’t get his pick of women.”
“Did Joseph On First tell you that?”
“yeah.”
“You shouldn’t listen to him, he lost what mind he had left last winter.”
knows it’s true. Joseph On First’s engine never ran smoothly, all rusted over with holes crumbling through, but he always knew how to get smack. Or rather he knew how to get enough change, and when that hot lump of silver and copper weighed his pocket down enough the smack would find him, always on First Street, always looking around hollow eyed. “It’s a squeeze,” He used to say in that pulled out long prophet voice, “yeah, it’s a squeeze, but it’s worth the juice.” That winter there were rumors whispered in the houses and the doorways that Joseph wouldnt leave First, just stayed there and shivered in the cold waiting for more smack to amble down his way.
“mmmph” Eli grunts, rembering
“Anyways, what were doing on First”
“Bumming, like you should have been down here.”
Issac shrugs. “Business is crap, and everyone knows you can pull better territory since you're still a kid.” He refers to the hierarchy of the homeless: Kids and pretty girls pull the most money and so get first pick of territory, then small groups including kids, next the disabled and the elderly, then men with dogs, and finally, men between nineteen and thirty.
Eli flicks his lighter and holds the tip of the flame to his Camel, letting it lick the end as he drew in slow. Through lowered brows issac regards the cigarette “you shouldn't be smoking” The familiar chide.
Eli glares back, “And why the fuck not?”
shaking his head issac gives no reply and recalls the first time Eli had smoked. At the age of seven. He had coughed and almost vomited, the wretching providing sickening punctuation to the chorus of guffaws from the lips of the older street-rats who had given it to him. He said he would never smoke again that night, but a week later he was choking down another Camel Filter, trying to look cool while leaning against a wall, holes in his jeans and greasy hair in his eyes.
Now the brothers walk in silence down the dampened sidewalk. The rain has slacked, in standard Portland fashion, down from a near downpour to the slightest drizzle, drops just heavier than mist so you dont notice how wet you are getting until your jacket soaks through and your thirsty cotton shirt drinks it straight to your skin. The two shove their fists deep into their pockets to avoid numb hands, Issac with both deep in the pockets of his jacket, and Eli with one burried in his jeans the other making a frequent round trip between his lips and the hovering space just above his hip, his fingers lazily pincering a fresh Camel. Issac glances at eli as if to break the silence. “I hate this weather” he might grumble as the two make their way across the city from Northeast to Burnside, a frequent sojourn which each knows by heart, but the words simply never spilled off of his lips. As they pass the numbered streets to Main there is little to distract them from the silence save the people passing by and their looks. Northeast is nice, and the people there usually are too, living in high houses stuck up on rickitty cliff sides. These people are almost always guaranteed to give a street kid a pitiful look, as if the Government wasn't required to take care of them, as if they didn't have a choice in the matter. Then, as they would move towards city center, the beautiful homes on the hill would give way to progressively taller glass-sided building and the upscale modern fashions would give way to progressively more black slacks, blazer jackers, and flat leather shoes. The looks that came from these were practically non existent, as if avoiding a street-kid's gaze would somehow make them go away. The only time the two would cross would be while panhandling. A street kid might be slumped on the side of some office building or mall and as the business men bumped by, drone-like as Eli always says, the kid would hold out a paper cup. “Hey man, got any change?” “Please sir, I know you can spare somehting” Then the business man in question, or maybe whichever one felt least in a hurry, would turn and, as if noticing the kid's existence for the first time, regard him with a judgmental stare, as if to say; “get off the street you little shit, and get a job.”
At first these were the stares which bothered Issac the most, he felt the need to shelter Eli from them, and would be sure to always pull Eli's hunter's hat down low over his eyes so that he would be unable to connect to those piercing eyes. They still bothered issac now, but it was Eli who had grown to laugh at them. Unable to shelter Eli forever Issac eventually gave up on the pursuit and Eli simply absorbed them as a facet of daily life, more a moving feature of the environment than anything else. One day bumming together at the corner of the Pioneer Place Mall, Eli had laughed at a man regarding them from a ways off. “They're just like cats,” he had said, “to themselves they are all important and everything else is just a curious inconvenience.” Issac laughed, but he thought that a cat was much too innocent a thing for a suit to be compared to.
The brothers near Burnside as they pass the Bohemian neighboorhoods, where you can never get a handout, but you'll be treated like a real person, especially if you can busk. They walk on and can almost see the waterfront ahead, streetlamps glinting off of the dirty waters of the Willamette, a sure sign of the homeless mecca which Burnside represents. Finally it is Eli who breaks the silence.
“Look man, I dont burn on you for the days when you slack, or your 'Moods', so just dont get on me about my one vice, you know? Live and let live.”
Issac nods, though he doesnt agree, and a small ember of agravation is fanned behind his eyes. “At least my 'Moods' arent going to kill me” he thinks, scowling slightly.
Eli pushes farther in. “I mean, at least I can smoke and bum at the same time. With you, I never know whether or not youll bring in your share.” He emphasizes the words “your share” jabbing the camel at Issac for further emphasis.
Issac's steady auto-pilot pace comes to an abrupt halt and Eli brushes he shoulder bodily before realizing the halt in their forward progress. “what?”
Issac's eyebrows lower further and the line of his lips under his half-grown beard thins to a paper-thin line. “What do you mean, 'What'? You really can't stand there pretending that if you didnt spend money on cigarettes, we wouldnt have to dive, or get a fucking handout half as often.”
“Since when did money mean so much to you?”
Eli's question is honest, in no way a jab. It humbles Issac, who shakes his head wearirly. “Whatever man, forget about it. It's been a long day. Lets go to the Mission Shelter, grab some slop and then some z's”
“agreed”
Later at the Mission Shelter, Issac and Eli walk up to the barred window set in to the wall next to the door. “Names and ages please, boys” The voice belonged to the sturdy black woman who operates the shelter on weekends.
“fifteen.” Eli states begrudginly, Looking back at Issac.
“And Im nineteen”
The big woman behind the bars nods. “Alright then, one bed for the youth room, and one for the adult bunkhouse.”
This is the routine. “But ma'm, “ starts Issac, “we're together and...”
Her finger is in the air cutting him off before he can finish. He stares at the thick digit with a half formed vowel clinging to his tongue. As he rolls it around trying to remember it's flavor and shape, she shakes her head. “Sorry, adults with adults, youth with youth. That's how it has always gone, and how it always will go. No matter how good of friends you are.” she says, punching the two syllables of all-ways out from each other, like each was a blast from a double barreled shotgun. Eli tried his best to look pathetic and Issac shook his head back at the thick dark woman.
“No, you dont understand,” he tries again “We're brothers. Each other, that's all we have,” he says as Eli continues looking abject and pathetic “Eli, hes never known anyone but me for family, so I guess what I'm trying to say is, either we stick together here, or we stick together on the streets.”
The act works just the the brothers knew it would. The deeply ravined creased of the big woman's brow unfolds, and oragami crane being pulled appart by the wing tips. She sighs softly “not every day you see a pair of rats as close as you two.” and after a pause “alright, ya'll two can have a bunk together in the adult bunk house, but you... Issac is it?” He nods “im sure you already know, but you are responsible for his safety. You, not us.”
Eli looks up at her through doey eyes, laying it on thick fly paper “thank you...” He even adds a slight upward inflection at the end, just to make sure he sounds painfully sincere.
Soon each lays in his bunk and, with a guffaw towards the thick lady, they sink into sleep.
Issac sits up in bed, it is to small for him the blue and yellow painted wood bedframe pushes insistantly back against his heels. The old house, the reoccurring dream. He is supposed to feel safe now but he doesnt. He knows it too well, despite the countless variations of the dream. Soon he will smell the smoke and hear the dampened, far-off blaring of the house's phalanx of smoke alarms all sounding the warning-ball at once. Tonight he hears the alarm first, he doesn't wait for the smell. Grabbing the thick woolen blanket off the bed and stepping on to the jungle-themed carpet he is suddenly tiny again, transported back to the only perspective of that house he knew. Trailing the woolen wedding veil behind him he floats through the expanding and contracting hallways that coughed with the smoke choking them. Down the hall, to the left, he needs to find the rest of them. Alarms blare out a symphony of hopeless monotone. Eli is there by his side, only one year old but now capable of walking, even breaking in to the slogging trot of dreams. Next he goes to the stairs, to the parent's room, but he cannot pass that way, tongues of flame lick at the wallpaper and hardwood stairs, eating them the way his father had always told him not to eat a popsicle. With the flame lurching and snatching after them Issac leads Eli out the door, and now they are outside, safe. Issac looks down to take up Eli in his arms but Eli isnt there. In fear he looks to the house. This isnt how it happens. In the second story window the flaming visages of his parents yell down to him, their voices are choked by smoke and muted by the now cacophonous smoke alarms. They flail. “Eli” he hears, Eli is still inside, alone.
Issac sits upright panting, an elevated heart rate keeping the syncopation with the smoke alarms still blaring in his ears. As the dream fades back into memory and the swirling haze of night and nightmare he realizes that the alarms are not a product of the dream. They persist because they are real. Eli looks around, he sees the others in the bunk house slowly rousing eachother from their sleep and gathering their things around themselves. “No, too slow” he thinks rising out of bed, one pant leg on already. practicedly he grabs the woolen blanket from the bed, draping it over her arm the same way he has done hundreds of times before. Groping at the edges of the bunk above he shakes. “Eli get up.” There is no response. “Eli, get up!” forcefully now he pounds where he guesses Eli's shoulder would have been. Only blankets meet his insisting attempts to wake his brother. Now panic enters his eyes, a wild churning. “Eli!” he shouts, trying to outdo the smoke alarms at their own game. Issac wheels around and around serching the darkened dirty faces for the familiar young face and stringy dark hair. Now the words of the thick black woman echo in his ears “You're responsible for him” she mocks over and over. Issac moves through the halls shouting for Eli and desperately pleading “Has anyone seen my brother? Has anyone seen the young kid with long dark hair?” No one answers as they milled at a dream like pace. Now tears soften his cheeks, cleaning them of so many days of street life. He can hardly breathe, though there is no smoke choking the halls. Issac runs from the building and out into the cold, damp burnside night, half expecting to turn around and see the smoldering silhouettes of his parents there in a window above the shelter. But no smoke belches from the building, no flame licks the pain from the walls. A sedate and groggy crowd had shuffled out of the shelter's mouth and continued to shuffle about grumbling.
“Issac!” a voice from behind, the familiar too-low-for-fifteen tones that Issac only knows as Eli's.
He stands with a half-smoked through Camel clutched between his lips. “Gee golly.” He says in a put-on drawl, giving Issac the once-over. “you look like youve seen a ghost!”
Issac's knees feel weak but can't help but wonder where Eli has been. Did Eli leave without any consideration for him? Was Eli already outside? The questions cascade in his mind but a weak “Where were you?” Is the best Issac can muster.
Eli shrugs, “smoking.” He offers without further explanation. A moment of silence sits between them, ripe with things unsaid, but it is only allowed to hang for a moment before Eli supplies what Issac has been searching for. “Inside” He says.
“inside?” Issac turns the implication over in his head momuntarily until he realizes. “It was you. It was you that set off the alarm.”
“So what?” Eli shrugs again, as if Issac's terror had meant nothing. As if the fact that it was him who brought Issac's dream into near-reality was nothing worth mentioning, a footnote to the inconvenience of having to smoke outside in the cold.
Issac is silent. His breaths are shallow and measured, a pattern imitated by his speech. “I thought you had died Eli, I thought I had lost the one person left to me,” His breathing begin the shorten and quicken, and his speech again keeps up, “you didnt even think to wake me up and tell me that the building wasnt actually on fire, that your fucking smoking habit almost killed me. As if it isn't enough that you are slowly killing yourself!” Now he is closing in on hysteria, and hysteria is closing in on him, two trains on one track heading opposite directions. “It was me who grabbed you out of the house before you could even walk. It was me who decided to take you with me when I left uncle Azel's house, and it was me who has always stayed by your side, the only fucking person, Eli. You can't even remember our parents faces, our parents voices, Im the one who carries that. And this is how you show me you care?” At last he is sobbing, chest heaving, staring in to the expressionless face of his younger brother, the face that has devoted everything to him and he realizes that he has gone too far, overstepped the place where you can take it back and gone for the killing blow. “No. Eli.” he tries to explain, but he is already understood.
Eli turns silently and, both hands deep in his pockets, walks away.
Standing paralyzed Issac suddenly finds it too hard to stand and as he slowly crumples to the ground he becomes aware of the tens of staring faces. Faces with beards and dirt and grease and frowns smeared on them. Faces that had watched the two brother's drama unfold just seconds earlier and now are handing down judgment. One face steps out of the crowd, long beard, hollow cheeks, yellow teeth, and wordlessly hands Issac a flask of Jim Bean. Without hesitation Issac unscrews the cap and fills his mouth with the burning amber. Issac chokes, he can't swallow, as the cheap liquor's fumes conjure his uncle Azel there in front of his face.
He and Eli had been five and one year old respectively when the house had burned. In their parents will and testimony their Uncle Azel, the only living relative to be found, was left full custody. It started off well enough. Like a visit to Uncle Azel's ought to have been. But as the days turned in to weeks and the weeks in to months it became apparent that Uncle Azel wanted nothing to do with the two brothers, instead finding company and comfort in bottles of cheap whiskey and rum. The boys learned to stay away from Azel when he had a bottle in his hand quickly, and learned even more quickly how to rely on each other for company. Some nights Uncle Azel's shouts would seem to shake the double-wide to its foundations, booming cusses about “the goddamn runts”. Issac taught how to walk quietly through the kitchen when Azel was asleep on the floor, and Eli could find the best hiding spots for the liquor they took from Azel while he slept. He would always be in a fit when he “lost” a bottle, until they would assure him that he had “drank it down last night and pitched it at some stupid so'mbitch.” Then he would laugh and say that he didn't know his own liver strength, laughed for nearly five years, until the day the board on the first stair in rotted though and he caught a good look at all the full and half full bottles of his best friends Jack and Jimmy. Then he looked hard all through the double wide while Issac and Eli were at school, and when they got home he had almost fifty bottles lined up all down the kitchen counter, in the sink, and spilling out of the dishwasher. Azel sat the boys down and asked them why they had hidden his drinks. Eli said they thought it made him laugh, but Issac stood up and told the truth. Azel turned red and quivered, he took up one of the nearly empty bottles of Jack, one with a nice long neck, and swung it at Issac's head. The blow wasnt hard enough to break the bottle or Issac's skull, but the glancing strike split the skin all the way from the top of his forehead all the way down in to his eyebrow. That night, after holding a rag soaking in warm water to his head like his mother had done when he would get hurt, Issac decided that he would leave his uncles house. That night, when the shouting had died down from outside, Issac grabbed his blanket and made his way carefully to the front door. He opened to door inch by inch, making sure to easy it through the squeaky parts. On the small patch of grass out front lay Azel, blacked out surrounded by the previous days re-discovered mother-load. Issac felt free as he walked out that front door, unbounded by anyone or anything. He was three blocks away when he thought of Eli. How Eli had cried and begged him not to die when his face was gushing blood, How Eli would feel in the morning when he was gone, How Azel would treat eli the next morning when he found Issac gone and Eli still there. Issac doubled back. He woke Eli gently and told him to be quiet, that everything was fine, that they would make themselves a life better than Azel's.
Vomiting as the faces look on, Issac tries to learn from Azel but he cant, can't swallow any whiskey, can't forget about Eli. Ungrateful Eli, unthoughtful Eli, unhealthy Eli. He wipes his mouth and stands, shakily at first, as if his bones aren't quite solid. Handing the bearded man the bottle he heaves his eyes up from the puddle of his own bile and into the wall of faces and downcast eyes. But among those pairs of avoiding gazes is one pair seeking his. There among the faces is Eli. Caring Eli, comforting Eli, the younger brother left untouched by the burning image of their parents pressed up against the second-story window. Issac looks at Eli and realizes what Eli had always known. Each other really was all they had, even the thick women had seen through what he had thought was all an act.