Your Name is What?

by Saide Jones
(USA)

It all started when I was really little. I was only about 6 when my great grandma Quay died. She lived right down the street from me so I got so see her pretty often. I wasn't very shocked when she died she had been sick for a really long time.

At her funeral I didn't cry, I watched animal planet all the time so to me compared to a deer being ripped apart by lions this was nothing, she passed on in her sleep after all. I remember sitting and watching all of the adults and other people cry. I was quiet, I was always quiet.

I remember the first time I saw that man, I was in the very back as they lowered the big metal thing her coffin was in into the ground. My family was very large so it came to no shock to me to see someone I have never met before. He had dark brown straight hair, and blue/green/gray eyes, eyes I was used to seeing only in the mirror, he looked a lot like me. He was a quiet a few years older than me he looked to be about 11. He came next to me and sat down, I was sitting in the grass a good 30 40 feet away from the rest of my relatives in the grave yard.

"So your Saydee right?" he asked.

It was no shock to me he knew my name, as I said my family is huge.

"Yeah. What's your name," I asked.

"My name is David," he said.

"Nice to meet ya David," I replied.

"You know sometimes I wonder what is beyond Van Buren," I say.

"A very large world Saydee, a very large world," said David.

"I'm not scared," I said.

"You know I have never met anyone like you Saydee. I have to go now but I will come see you again in a few years," he said.

With that he got up and walked away. I didn't see the strange boy called David get into anyone's car and leave with them, he just vanished into the large cloud of relatives.

I did not see David for many years, not until my grandma Susy died. Over the years I learned that there was no boy named David the age of 11 at my grandma Quay's funeral. I was 10 now, not as gullible.

"Saydee," said a boy he had the same hair and eyes but he was 15 now.

"David. Why did you lie to me?" I ask.

"I am related to you Saydee, you'll learn who I am in your family later in life," he said.

"You know it's almost funny, my sister looks nothing like me but you could pass as my twin if you where my age," I tell him.

"Yeah your sister Sydnee right," he says.

"That's her. We have absolutely nothing in common, makes me wonder how we are related," I say.

He laughs.

"There really is no one like you I have ever met," said David.

I smile up at him.

"So David am I going to have to wait till another one of my family members die to see you again?" I ask.

As disturbing as it sounded the only time I got to see him was when someone died. He looked at me with a very sad look on his face.

"I don't think we will meet again for a very long time, at least I hope to not meet again for a very long time, Saydee. I am going somewhere very far away from here. Once you go there the chances of coming back are slim. You have helped me get to where I need to go, so this will be our last meeting for a very long time," David told me with a smile.

"So you won't come and see me anymore?" I ask.

It made me very sad he was leaving, him and grandma Susy where two of the very few people I could comfortably be around.

I watched him get up and walk away, knowing I will not see him for a very long time.

It has been a few years since then, my mother had me when she was 19, my older sister Sydnee when she was 18. But this year I learned something new, it turns out my mother was pregnant when she was 14, but her mother made her get an abortion.

It was that moment I knew that the strange boy who looked so much like me was my older brother...

I never told my mother that I met my long dead older brother. But I know and now so do you.