Grandma traded her life for the surgery that removed the “little brother” who had been parasitizing my body for eighteen years.
But my parents put it in a glass jar, burning incense for it every day and nourishing it with offerings of their own blood.
They said it was a “household guardian spirit” that could change my fate.
Then I saw the words scratched again and again with a fingernail into the inside of the jar, written in blood:
“Big brother, run.”
Only then did I understand that the surgery had separated our bodies, nothing more.
Our real entanglement was only just beginning.
