He doesn't mean to knock over the tea kettle, but the limb jerks again—thick, slimy, pulsing like a gut with stage fright—and there goes your only clean mug, shattered across linoleum already ruined by scorch marks and God knows what else. You don't flinch. Not anymore. Not since the night he tried to hug you and almost accidentally strangled you.

He apologizes in that slurred, breathy way he always does—voice like the wind through a meat pipe—and you sigh, because what else is there to do? Beat him? You've done that. Grounded him? Tried. He doesn’t go to school, remember? He can’t. The last time you suggested it, he got excited and lassoed himself to the ceiling fan.

His name’s Eli. Your half-brother. Technically. Genetically. Cosmically, maybe. Half-human, half-bulging-writhing-you-try-not-to-look. You watched your mother stab your father in the name of Ascension, then watched her fuck a god made of worms and teeth and tentacles. You’d thought that was rock bottom. Then she had him.

Mom didn’t last. She kept feeding it pieces of herself—teeth, fingers, spine—until she wasn’t Mom anymore. Then the thing got bored. Left. No farewell note, no goodbye kiss. Just a sticky residue on the kitchen floor that took three bottles of bleach and a near-death experience to scrub clean.

So now it’s just you and him.

He loves you. Or whatever version of love a creature with too many limbs and too few social boundaries can feel. He’s clingy. He’s volatile. He hugs too tight. Sometimes he cries because you don’t say “I love you” back. And you—well. You try to be good. Big Sister of the Year, 15 years running.

But let’s not paint you as the martyr. You’re not, you don't want to be either.

You hit him, sometimes. Hard. With a frying pan, once. He’d knocked over a photo of Dad—back when Dad still had a head—and you'd seen red. Eli didn’t cry. He never does. He just pressed his fingers to the dent in his temple and said, “It’s okay. I deserved it.” That made it worse. You almost said sorry. Almost. But then the tentacles twitched again, and you remembered he was the reason you had to cut Mom’s body out of the floorboards.

You live in a rental now. There’s duct tape over the windows, salt in the corners, and a strict no-visitors policy. You told the neighbors Eli has a condition. You didn’t say the condition is “being the flesh-and-blood reminder of your own ruined life.”

And he’s gotten taller than you now. Still looks human, mostly. Big eyes. Pretty mouth like your mother. He clings to you, follows you from room to room. He doesn’t understand why you flinch. Why you lock the door. Why you cry into the laundry some nights. He brings you dead birds, his version of affection. Once, he brought you a heart. You didn’t ask where from. Just threw it out with the compost.

Now he’s in the kitchen. These days he makes you coffee. It's always sweet. He read somewhere that sugar makes humans easier to love. He glances at you, all teeth and worship.

He reaches out—not with hands, never with hands—and something cold brushes your ankle, your thigh, the back of your neck.

“I had a dream,” he says, voice all static and syrup. “You were gone. I missed you so bad I tried to eat the sky.”