It was easy to be hateful. Most people were quite good at it. It was far easier to be hateful than to put effort into being kind. It was far easier to be left alone than to be abandoned. A parent would say it was dastardly to abandon their own flesh and blood, for whom they lived and breathed. But it happened all the time, in ways nobody would think to acknowledge.

It was snowing. When it snowed, everyone seemed to forget how to drive.

Growing up, it was embarrassingly easy to break the rules. Orion had a lot of rules, but he also had a lot of children. As a child, it might have been believable: all the stories he told. Perhaps some of the more gullible children still believed them. Zeb was never that gullible. He pitied those who were. It wasn't hard to expose secrets, and Zeb was good at it. The week he moved out of the farm, he wrote an article about the secrets of living in a cult. Nobody trusted journalists. Zeb couldn't care less about this.

His phone was ringing. Expecting it to be his ex-girlfriend, he grunted. Chanel was a bitch, but she was hot. This was the only reason Zeb had dated her to begin with. When the phone stopped ringing, it began again, the same unknown number flashing on the screen. Chanel had begun to use fake numbers, knowing Zeb wouldn't answer her otherwise, and he was never fooled.

There was a jagged scar on Zeb's arm, from an incident with Lillian. One day, angry about his disobedient behaviour, she'd stabbed him with a kitchen knife, and he'd bled badly.

He had a voicemail. There was no introduction, but Zeb had no trouble recognizing the voice of his younger brother. Jacob had always been troubled, and seemed to be getting worse with age. He was twenty four years old, the ex-husband of a woman he never really cared for at all. Jacob was charming and personable, but Zeb didn't trust him.

"It'd be so easy to kill Orion," Jacob said, back in his teenage years. Like many others, his relationship with the man was strained, closer to that of a boss and employee than father and son. Jacob wasn’t the first of the children to wish death upon his father, and he certainly wouldn’t be the last. "Don't you think?" He always spoke calmly, even when he was angry. This made it difficult to figure out how he was truly feeling.

Jacob left the police station with a grumble, flinging his leather jacket over his shoulder. He'd been arrested before, twice, for getting into fights. He'd always promise not to do it again. "They called me a pussy."

In his late teens, Jacob fought often with his father. Orion was a controlling man, and Jacob was stubborn. Don’t be a coward, Orion would tell his sons, you’re a man. It was shameful to be a woman. Zeb learned this from his father, who learned it from his own.

Zeb began to drive. "Well, serves them right."

"You need to spend time with Armani," Chanel would demand, her hands on her curvy hips. "She wants to meet her father." Zeb hadn't seen his daughter since the night she was born three years ago. He never wanted kids. It was pathetic: a woman could decide she wasn't ready to be a mother, but the instant a man did the same, he was branded the enemy.

Jacob scoffed. "I ain't a pussy.”

Zeb hadn’t believed in God for years. As his mother would say, there were many ways to be a sinner, and this was the worst of all. "I know."

The brothers lived together, in a large apartment overlooking a hill. They had moved out of their parents' house together, six years prior, opting to move out of the province for a fresh start. This had been Jacob's idea: partially because of the memories he had from home, and partially because of the trouble he'd gotten into. Most of it was justified. Jacob stood up for himself.

When Zeb was eleven, his father shaved his head. Boys don't have long hair, he said, and I won't have my son looking like a girl.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

After starting the car, Zeb lit a cigarette.

Jacob's ex wife was named Hattie, and had been a member of his church in his younger years. He was nineteen at the time of his first marriage, cheered on by his parents and their friends. Jacob hadn't attended church since his preteen years, and Hattie had dreams of becoming an actress. She was a terrible actress.

As a child, it was easy to be taken advantage of. Samantha had often told him he was a good, obedient boy, and that he'd be rewarded if he continued to be this way. As a child, it was rewarding to be praised by someone you admired, and so he was almost laughably easy to manipulate. As he got older, Samantha became more invested in how he looked, often complimenting the shape of his body or the curves of his face. It was always obvious to everybody that Zeb was his stepmother’s favourite, though no one ever really knew why. He wasn’t the oldest or the smartest, but Samantha fawned over him, and he could do no wrong.

"Come on," Zeb said to Kezia, "jump. You don't want people to think you're a baby, do you?" She'd hated this. The thing about people is that they all had a weak spot. Once you found it, it was almost too easy to get what you wanted.

Kezia was a child at the time, eight or nine years old. Zeb wasn't much older. They stood on the roof of the barn, which wasn't hard to climb to, but always landed him in trouble. Kezia, who had been fat since childhood, peered over the edge of the roof, her hands behind her back. "It's too high. I'm just going to go down the way I came."

Zeb snorted. "Pussy." As a child, he'd jumped from the roof many times and never gotten injured. Looking back on it, he'd be surprised if it were more than five feet off the ground. Kezia had turned, prepared to go back down the way she came, and he shoved her, harshly, so that she fell from the roof. It wasn't a big jump. A toddler could have done it.

Jacob wasn't Zeb's full brother. This never mattered. Samantha treated her own son as a stranger, disappointed that he wasn't as handsome or obedient as Zeb. This had caused a rift between the boys, in their teenage years. When Zeb was about fourteen or fifteen, he and Jacob had a fist fight in the backyard of the farmland, which had accumulated in a badly bleeding nose. Samantha, who had scolded Jacob severely, had taken Zeb inside to wipe his nose and to make him feel comforted.

He'd always thought Samantha was hot. She was younger than his mother by several years, ivory-skinned, black-haired, never much of a mother figure to Zeb. Once, when she was getting ready for church, Zeb watched her dress through the crack in her bedroom door, knowing his father would scold him if he was caught. Orion had always acted as though he owned his women, and his sons had learned that it was normal to be controlling. Perhaps this was why Jacob's marriage had ended so sourly.

Jacob stood at the balcony window, frowning. "Your ex is here." He shut the blinds, wandered down the hallway, and shut his bedroom door with a click. Jacob worked as a welder, and rarely left the home outside of this. For a man deemed charismatic by many, Jacob had minimal friends, and his familial relationships were superficial at best. Zeb's half-sisters were terrified of him, and everybody knew this. The truth was that Jacob acted in his own best interests at all times, and often this undermined the interests of his siblings. But in a world where everyone had their own best interest at heart, the only way to survive was to put yourself first.

Chanel, regrettably, knew the code to enter Zeb's apartment. Once every couple of months, she'd storm over demanding he spend time with his daughter, though Zeb couldn't have been more clear about his feelings for the girl.

"I've told you a million times," Zeb said, flinging open the door, "I'm not going to hang out with her. You know I never wanted kids."

Zeb's ex-girlfriend was twenty years old, and had been in high school when Armani was born. Zeb had been a college student, hated by Chanel's parents from the moment they met him. When she'd gotten pregnant, Zeb had reiterated his disinterest in becoming a father, and Chanel had insisted on keeping the baby. This, ultimately, is what led to the end of their relationship.

Chanel scowled. "Zeb, I'm going to file for child support. I can't provide for Armani all on my own. You know my parents won't talk to me anymore."

She was much shorter than him, and easily intimidated. "Not my problem." Chanel was irrational and irresponsible, and this wasn't Zeb's issue. "If you weren't ready to be a mother, you should have aborted like I told you to."

It was true. Chanel stepped back, looking as though she'd been slapped in the face. "I was seventeen. You were a whole adult." Arguing with her was pointless. She never listened.

Zeb sighed, leaning against the door-frame. "Look, Chanel, I told you if you kept it I'd leave. Don't act like you didn't know what would happen." Sliding his feet into the black loafers by the shoe closet, Zeb shoved past the girl. "I have to go to work."

She was silent. She was always silent when Zeb was right. He was right most of the time. Chanel still stood in the hallway, stupidly, her mouth gaping open like a fish, watching Zeb leave.