Turn Around and Check on Daniel

My brother Daniel and I are close in the low-maintenance way of people who text memes and see each other monthly. There was no context for what happened. No worrying phone call, no bad news, nothing.

I was halfway through my commute, stopped at the lights by the retail park, when a sentence arrived in my head. Not a feeling — a sentence, complete, in my own inner voice but with none of my inner hedging: turn around and check on Daniel. I actually said 'what?' out loud, alone in the car.

I am a project manager. I hold a modest reputation for being un-spookable. I sat through one green light arguing with myself — he is thirty-four, he is asleep, you have a nine o'clock — and then the sentence came again, identical, with the pressure of a hand between my shoulder blades: turn around and check on Daniel.

I turned around. I jumped an amber, took the ring road at a speed I will not put in writing, and rang his doorbell for a full minute. Nothing. His car was there. The spare key lives under the third flowerpot because our family never learns; I let myself in, and the hallway smelled like a struck match waiting to happen. Gas, thick enough to taste.