What the Walls Kept Out: An Impossible Situation

Written for Great Minds Think Friday Challenge
where Rohini presents “An Impossible Situation:
Everyone hears their ancestors voices for a day”.
My story is about the brother I never got to know.

My sister’s house was finally empty after our mother’s funeral, after the casseroles, after the visitors who said she lived a long life as if that settled anything. I’d been sifting through some of the things my mother had left me. In an old Gimbels’ shoebox wrapped in tissue paper gone brittle as moth wings, I found a photograph I’d never seen: my father, young and handsome in a wide-brimmed hat, holding a baby against his shoulder. 1942 was written on the back in pencil, in my mother’s careful hand.

I turned it over again. The baby wasn’t me; I was born in 1951.

That’s me, a voice said. Not in the room but inside me, the way a memory arrives, except this wasn’t a memory. I’m Frankie. I would have been your big brother.

I sat down on the edge of the bed, the photograph trembling slightly in my hand. I wasn’t frightened, not really. Of course, I knew about Frankie; my mother had a gilt-framed portrait of him on her dresser all her life. How could I have dismissed that memory?

I died when I was two, the voice said. Before our sister was born, before you. And I need you to know something, because you spent your whole life not knowing it, and I think it broke your heart a little, even if you never said so.

My eyes filled. I thought of every birthday my mother had attended without quite arriving …. present in the room, absent everywhere else. The homemade meals, the spotless house, the perfect report cards praised with a perfunctory nod. The way my mother had held my own children at arm’s length, like fragile packages she was afraid to damage.

She used to sing, Frankie said. I remember …. well, I don’t remember, not really, I was too small. But I know it the way you know things where you are now. She’d put her face right against mine and whisper ‘Ti voglio bene, Frankie. I love you very much’. She was warm, Nancy. She was so warm.

She never said those words to me.

“What happened to her?” I whispered, though I already knew …. the war, the government telegrams about “Deceased Dependent Child”, the husband drafted days after they buried their baby, the young woman left with an empty crib, an empty house, and a shattered heart.

She built a wall, Frankie said. To keep the pain out. Nobody tells you walls don’t work that way. They don’t know which way to keep things. The pain got in anyway …. it also kept everything else out. Including you. Including her.

I pressed the photograph to my chest. “I wish I’d known her. The way she was before.”

You did know her, Frankie said gently. She was always in there. You just couldn’t see past the walls to find her. That’s what I wanted you to hear …. not so you’d be sad. So you’d know it wasn’t your fault. And so maybe you can take the walls down in yourself, before it’s too late.

Frankie’s voice faded like a long breath exhaled. I sat alone with the photograph, and for the first time in my life, she let myself cry for a mother who had never learned how.

NAR©2026

This is “Mother” by Pink Floyd

The Impossible Situation Challenge

^{Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.}