Brendan's Box

I didn't  understand the big white box. Mum had told us we were
going to see Brendan, the smallest of our gang.  My brother whispered in a tone of awe, "He's inside there!"

Brendan in a box? That wasn't a game we'd played before. If I knew Brendan he'd want to get out and maybe race down to the synagogue gates. He never won but he liked it anyway.

She must have seen the question-marks in my eyes because Mum used her This-Is-Grownup-Stuff-So-Don' t-Ask voice.

"You can say goodbye." She said quietly.

Goodbye? I hadn't even said hello! Stretching up over the rim to see into the open box was even more puzzling. Brendan was lying in there asleep. But he didn't look right. For a start he wasn't smiling his big toothy smile. Brendan always smiled. And he was yellow, like beeswax, maybe that was what being poorly did to you. Brendan had been sick for weeks: no school, lucky rat.

Mrs Murphy was now openly crying. Mum had an arm around her shoulder. Grownups didn't cry. What was going on? Why didn't somebody wake him up? He'd be really sad to miss all his visitors. It didn't make any sense at all.

My older brother was the one who usually put the jigsaw pieces of fragmentary knowledge together to make sense of things. His voice was a fierce, tense whisper filled with dread, like he was explaining a scary
film at the pictures:

"He's dead! Brendan's dead!"