It was a couple thousand years ago. She stood next to me.  And then, one leap-length to her right, there was my brother. Above my brother and then on top of him again, a small bear jumped. I watched as the wolf’s eyes snarled in their sockets. A smile ripped her jaws apart as she stared at the cub on my brother, waiting to pierce it. When she snatched  the cub from his lap, my brother did not cry. He watched patiently, with his hands folded in his lap, as she ripped the limbs of his companion apart, red lining her lips, throat and the space under her eyes. 

When we grew older, it was my  brother who grew blood stained. The wolf did not mind. Her fur shone a red-less yellow above her white teeth. She stared at him with eyes clouded with gray smudges, as if her gaze was sewn from white cloth that had been battered in the wind. I watched my brother kill while standing behind him, reading the ripples on his back contorting with the expressions of his face. At the end of the day, when it was dark enough that our gazes could not find our way to each other, I would sit next to him and ask him questions he would not answer. Once, I asked why he fought beasts when we could consume the gifts of the land. He moved into the moonlight and I saw that half face was disgusted with me and the other half was bleeding from where a lion had gashed his eye. The veins on his forehead bulged like ropes and my hand drooped in front of them like a hanged neck. I believed, for the longest time, that my brother loved fighting. I believed this without knowing what love meant. But perhaps he simply did not know what he was without murder, the sensation of someone else’s blood in his hands. So every night after we ate his slain animals, I stopped myself from asking him if he was in pain and waited until he was asleep instead . Then, I pressed my forefinger to the cuts on his forehead, letting his veins thud against my palm as lines of blood rusted on his face. 

One night, when I had been alive for around seventeen years, the wolf nudged me awake. Her glare was visceral and heavy. She brought herself closer to me until her face was all I could see for miles in any direction, until our breaths twisted into each other, until I memorized the dark smudges that made a wall around her eyes, that scribbled themselves into white as they reached her yellow iris. I pried open her eyes and climbed down those walls and sat in their sand colored center. To the right, there was the wolf again. Her unchanging expression was strapped onto her eyes. Clouds were stuck frozen in the sky. Droplets of water sunk into my skin and blood from my old wounds rained down with them, then both the downpours mixed into one, turning the color of the ground as they hit it. When I looked up, I found that the walls above me stretched full with thousands of people. Their voices did not sound. The mouths of the spectators were expanding and contorting, like they were chewing on quiet and spitting it out, making the emptiness weigh on my  ears. I tried to make my heart beat fast, letting its cluttered sound push out the quiet. But I could not bear the way I could feel my lungs stretching in my chest, feel like a crowd of veins and blood wrapped in skin. There were droplets of water clinging to my body. There was the wolf's jaw in my thigh. Then her face, coated in my blood. The crowd erupted out of my skin. 

I was weak and the wolf wanted me to feel it. It was not enough for me to simply know it; facts were not evocative. It was only when the realization of my weakness welled through my bones that the wolf sliced her gaze. She threw me to the ground, leaving my leg throbbing as if it truly had been gashed. I felt clenched between my own teeth. The side of the wolf’s face upturned in a smirk. 

She left through the walls that were wrapped into my bones. 

From my bones, the walls and ground infected my brother. And from there, infected every other Roman bone. It took many millenia for the disease to show. It is then that they built the colosseum. 

It is a countless number of deaths later. I am lingering at the heels of the colosseum, where another gladiator  is dying. It is, like all Roman deaths are, filled with life and entertainment. A broken man lays tattered on the ground, shoving breath into his lungs with brawn he never had, an assortment of muscles contorting his body like a rope. Every atom in him collapses grandly.  Shouts slither out of the spectators mouth and twist together until they are shaped like a roar. There is the classic scent of death, that crimson liquid on yellow skin. 

What is the man who fell off a cliff to say to the dead gladiator? I might mention that life is unfair. That death hurts. But why mention the end, when it was never ours? When paupers die, they rot inside the same lessons.  Life Is Unfair. Death Hurts. What is ours is the middle, the way we learned these lessons, the places our hearts cracked before shattering. 

It is nearly night now and the gladiator still has not died. The colosseum bakes the remainder of the day atop it, the blackening sky simmering like smoke. The arches in the structure are like eyes, blinking when the spectators rise to watch boys carry a newly-dead body off the sand. The eyes close when the spectators leave, their smiles and chatter about the terrific death lulling the colosseum to sleep. 

This day is blisteringly beautiful. 

The first establishment built by my brother was a structure of bones. It was the day before we abandoned the jungle, before we set out to roam seven similar hills with seven forgettable names. Much of it eludes me, but I know that the base of the structure was a jaw speckled with raw lesh.

“Rome,” said my brother, staring pensively at the bones. He ran his hands through them as if they were a tangle of hair. e next morning he got up and let, without asking, without wondering if I was following. He stopped, first at the heels of a small hill that hugged the river. I asked him if we could stay there, a little because it was pleasant, mostly because I wanted him to know I was behind him. He said no, that he wanted to build a city, that this hill was not apt for his task. When he began building a wall around another hill, filling stones between the empty bricks, I watched. Animals hovered around him, ready to be bloodied. My brother was hungry but his expression was not interested in murder. I wondered, as he hacked at the bricks, whether he was tired of things with a heartbeat.

One morning, without warning even myself, I leapt over the beginnings of his wall. He looked up at me, his breath thrashing in his chest, escaping in lurries from his mouth. A gust of wind blew over my body, and I became desperately still, like the cold had numbed my limbs out of being. I barely shivered.

“Why do you desire a city?” I asked. “Were we not fine the way we were? e way--”
“If you do not like Rome, leave”.
His voice echoed wholly, its sound not even slightly cracked at the edges. He walked with heavy

feet towards the end of his wall. A hundred steps away from me. Two hundred, yet I could see all of him. In the jungle, the sounds of animals and insects shriveled his shouts. He walked 50 steps before a

net of branches and thorns enveloped him. Our lives were diluted by our surroundings, our words were the shadows of their meanings. Within these hills, nothing clouded our gaze. My brother’s words slammed raw and stif onto the ground.

So, when my brother asked me to leave, I did. I turned away from him and took many thousands of steps worth of leaving in the direction of the river. e next morning, I took a couple thousand steps worth of regret back towards him, because I was afraid alone. I scuttled at the outskirts of his territory, watching his wall grow without shedding a single one of the words that were piled inside my mouth.
My brother was fine without my words. As humans trickled into his city, he found superior words from stronger people. ey stood around him with backs hunched, like sickles protruding out from the ground. ey used their words to invent methods to haul bricks into his wall. ey lived like their voices, strong but repeatable, blending into each other. e seasons drited by and I drited back to the city. I picked up a sickle and stood like one, liting crescent-shaped slices of dirt into the air with the rest.

It did not matter, to these men, that my brother claimed Rome would become the greatest city in the world. ey built walls because it was something to do. Formerly, they had been thieves because they preferred the sensation of fear, the blood lowing fast through them. Ever since that feeling had grown old in their veins, they tried to fall in love. ey had failed, but oten spoke about their attempts. ey had been told that if they found the right woman to gaze at their heart would race. eir palms would sweat. ey would think of nothing but her.

One day, a man collapsed on the cold gray ground. His heart pounded and pounded and pounded. His hands were wet. Before he died, he stared at the city like it could not fill his eyes enough.

When his heart stopped, someone asked if he was in love with Rome. ere was a cackling laugh. And then they wondered if it was true.

My brother did not care for unproductive things like love. It did not have the muscle to build him a city. When I asked him if he loved the wolf who nurtured us, he stared at me with her stony gaze. “Get rid of the useless things like love and the rest of the world that distract me from Rome” He scofed. “You have nothing to do, do you? e least you can do is get me wood.” My hands hung idley. I was not scared of him. I obeyed because I had nothing to do.

Every night that there was a moon in the night, I set out.Light drizzled on the crests of waves. From afar, I watched the waves resound as they hauled themselves upon each other, drawn out but precise, those heaves something to measure by. When they had fallen a couple of times, my brother’s men began chopping the wood. e first tree fell with a snap, and then crinkled into the feathery branches around it. e river sounded the way it appeared, the noise cresting and falling, silent where the water was lat. It was the sound of the trees that dipped its fingers into the spaces where the river gave no noise, sufocating the quiet around me, holding it shut.

I drited to the rocks, where there were ripples in the water, blue and white ovals suspended in ponds of gray, stretching and dividing, streaks of light coloring the curves white in some places and black with their absence in others.

“You could be useful,” I said at the moon. My shadow spilled into the water. More light litted rudely across the surface of the river. Some light even sat next to me, on the rocks, listening with feigned consideration.
“You could illuminate paths for the workers to carry the wood. You might even set an aura upon Rome at night.” I said Rome the way my brother said it. Brash and rude, ready to pounce on the words that came ater it.

“But you tiptoe across infinite bodies of water instead.”

In the morning, I returned to my brother’s men in the woods. It was lighter now, so their silhouettes were colored in some places with streaks resembling bronze skin and tattered clothing. ere was a man with an ax who dragged himself behind the rest, his face sweaty and crumpled, his body on the lining of the clifside, his shadow dripping down it like an omen. On his shoulder, there was a sack of rocks that dripped down him like his shadow on the clifside. His feet slipped into protruding tree roots. ey lung him to the ground on his elbows and knees, and he sat up with his foot anchored in the ground. Other men tried to aid him but he swatted them away like lies. “Hurry on,” he ordered. Shadows of thin sticks were painted on their backs. I did not like the man with the ax. He was the only one apart from my brother who cared about Rome. He fell again; got up once more. In my head he did not. In my head his leg was a rope anchored in the roots that swung the rest of his body upon the clif. I imagined that the rope fell down with the rest of the body and he snapped to the ground. His corpse would be arched high. His shadow would assert itself over the ground. He would die astute and stif, eyes open like they could not close. He would greet death with the same alertness he brought to life.

Instead, the man with the ax returned to Rome, carried upon bloody ankles. His back curved as he worked, the skin on him blistered and red with heat. By night, his back was the color of dawn. I watched as he sank to the ground in red sleep.

When they ask how I died, I say my brother killed me. “I did not want the city to be built on the Palatine Hill” I justify. “So he hunted me through the forest and chased me to the edge of a cliff. A dagger was flimsy  in my hand. A missile was firm in his.” When I first told this story, my sentences were a staccato of lies. “When he ordered me to drop the dagger, I did. I thought he would forgive me. Instead, he sent the missile in my direction. It passed clean through me.” 

Ghosts of men who died building Rome huddle around me. Their form barely exists as it flickers between shadow and vapor, beating into the dark around them. They exist like they are deciding whether to be a trick on the eyes or a breath of smoke. I cannot feel my eyes, the ones that I stare at them through. If I stare at them for too long, their forms will smear into the trees and sky, jawline turned into a branch, blades of grass for legs. They seem most human when they are blown through the peripheries of my vision, or sit in the corner of my eye. 

When I speak to them, I describe my body. How when I stretched my arms out after dropping the dagger I felt a hundred miles wide. How I felt the slick dribble of blood down my stomach before the pang of the missile. How my skin was bronze and the tips of my hair were yellow from the sun. I describe my bones and fingertips and knees and the twigs in the bottom of my feet. In my story I am fully human, mind contained in a skull, skin wound tight around bones. In my story I die the right way. 

When they ask how I died, I do not concern myself with the truth. Hearing the truth will make them snicker and leave. I will be alone inside something that has neither the weight of a body nor the release of a soul. 

The morning of the day that I died, a pile of bricks collapsed over twelve sleeping workers, making a structure with cold bloody bodies at its base. Living bodies of workers soon surrounded it. They buzzed around the city like flies, wondering how to pry the corpses from the bricks before wondering if they even should bother. My brother did not waste time not knowing what to do and ordered them to leave the bodies.  He said that they died for Rome, that there was nothing greater, no regret in such a death. Flies swarmed around the still corpses like living workers swarmed the city, and by afternoon it was like there were 12 small Romes at the base of the bricks. 

I stared at the bodies limply. In the distance, my brother painted the men who died into poems. Workers crowded around him as he spoke of the bravery and piety of the twelve dead men, the gusto with which they built the city. His poetry clung to a meter like it would die if it let go; there was not even a rogue syllable that escaped the structure. As night approached, the heaves of the river began to march in line with the poem, and then my heart started thudding alongside them both, the three of them keeping the beat for a song that never arrived. 

When my brother's poetry ended, the workers departed, slow bodies yanked forward by their shadows in front of them. But my shadow remained still next to me, stretched taut upon the ground like it would  snap if it were pulled further. When the fire went out, the night turned my brother into almost a silhouette. He turned towards me. I thought our eyes met, or maybe they did not. I did not want to follow him. I could not go back to the city, to the purple bodies in the structure or the bodies asleep on the ground. I took a few steps towards Rome, but the stench of sweat and decay folded upon me. So when I noticed that my shadow was pointing me towards the woods I followed, watched as my body became black under the shade of the trees. It stopped existing. I was only a shadow that painted in the triangles of light on the ground as it walked, that unfolded itself over every rock and crevice, that was  elastic, that could not  cling to a meter because it did not exist.  The forest began to thin out as I approached the precipice, and I flickered between shadow and human as I walked between patches of light and night. The precipice was dark.I  was one footstep behind my human half, forgetting that when my heel would be on the edge of the cliff, the human would already have fallen off it, that although I considered myself a shadow it was the human body that made me dead or alive.

I moved my foot towards the precipice because I believed that there was still ground for me to step on. And then the human fell  into the river under me and made me dead. 

When I hit the ground it did not hurt. I believe this happened because I truly did think myself into a shadow. I must have been trapped on the brambles on the precipice above me, nothing but a witness to my body falling, watching as the thing I used to be was sprayed upon the river under me. After I had been dead for a few moments, I drifted to my body. It did not bother me that the chest that was snapped in half over three rocks was mine. I watched, almost with curiosity, as the slow river  unknotted the threads of blood from where they had been sewn into my body's bloodstream. In the cavity where there used to be a heartbeat there was now a slow murmur of water. Clear fish wove themselves between my legs and exposed rib cage, through my hair, across my smashed skull. Fish swarmed around me like flies swarmed around the twelve dead workers. Fish swarmed around me like the workers swarmed the city. Fish swarmed around me with the zeal of my brother’s laborers toiling across his city. I remember years ago when my brother said his city would be the greatest and no one believed him.  He said this before there was even a single rock on that ground that he could call Rome, but he was right. Romans were noble and horrible and bloodthirsty and brilliant. The Romans were my brother's city. 

My city were the animals that wove in and out of my corpse.

 I wondered if anything could be salvaged from my timid life. I wondered whether the fish nested in my bones would ever do anything noble like die for love or kill for honor. But the river pounded against my city until it was a wisp in the water. I watched, a ghost stranded at the sidelines of existence, as my city waned into nothingness. My brother named his city Rome before it began, and mine had nearly ended. 

Then one day, I approached my body. A slice of skull crested out between the water, smooth like a wave frozen in its motion. “Reme.” I said. I named the city softly; it was so small and useless. But waves were pushing it out to the river where eternity sat waiting, and I thought it should have a name to be forgotten by. 

“Reme,” I said again. The word became tangled in the wind before dissipating.