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so dreamy. You‟ve got to take care of him when I‟m not there."
           And he had, for years. Though he was thin and quiet, Danil didn‟t mind using his fists against anyone who tried to torment his brother. When they were both in high school, Piotr started calling him a "golden toad," a reference picked up from one of the nature magazines he loved. He said he meant that Danil might appear gentle but could turn aggressor when needed. Danil always laughed and said anyone who talked about golden toads and ladybug elytras and brush-footed butterflies clearly needed a protector. Still, somehow it was mild Piotr who had been persuaded after a single year at college to go help fight a war, some damn unfathomable idealism kicking in. And somehow it was Danil who found that fight foolish.
           These days their mother, who ran her used bookstore at the edge of Cleveland, Ohio, had grown thick with refusal, dodging the truth about Piotr and writing long letters to Danil. One of the last ones included a snapshot, tattered at the lower left corner. "A photo of me and my two boys. Can you tell me why…" When Danil and his mother were together, her confusion deepened and their sorrows seemed to multiply. When they were together, they could neither deny Piotr‟s absence nor ignore the distance left between them by his death. So Danil never answered the letters, never called home anymore.
           Instead he stenciled on crumbling brick walls of deserted buildings, on rusting metal factory doors, and once on the side of a van abandoned in an empty lot. While he was working on the sketches, cutting the stencils, he thought about Piotr. He remembered some things, he realized others about his brother. But while he was actually doing the work in the middle of some half-blind night, the anguish finally settled. There was no past, no future to concern him, only here and now, and him alive, the sound of paint misting from an upright can.
           When he finished with the white, he waited again, testing for dryness. Then he quickly removed the paper and backed up next to an abandoned car seat. He checked the street to his right and left—still empty—before turning on his flashlight.
           Sometimes he practiced on one wall in his rundown studio apartment. He‟d tried out this stencil there, painting over the remnants of other projects, a trial run to make sure the layers came together as he‟d hoped. He‟d felt fine enough about the results. But the outcome always looked different on location. When he planned it right, the environment—fading tags on marred cement walls, straggly weeds fringing tall buildings—multiplied the meaning of the image. Now, something nearing satisfaction swept through Danil‟s body, not pride exactly but a kind of certainty that this work was deeply moral. Ephemeral art, echoing ephemeral life, and randomly finding its temporary partners.
           He thought of people seeing the piece in the morning as they headed into the bodega on the corner or the high school across the street. He imagined a couple kids sitting on the grounded bench seat, facing the wall, studying his work, really seeing it: a life-sized woman with a serious expression, dancing on top of an oversized clenched fist, and wearing a black dress with red teardrops falling from the hem.
            His brother‟s body arrived home with a medal attached, but Piotr was not a war hero, not in any traditional sense. Instead he‟d become a victim of a creative effort to rewrite the present. To sanitize it. So Danil had become a Reminderer; he considered it his unpaid, untitled job. Dear passerby, plugged into your smart phone, lost in one form of oblivion or another: if you focus on a middle distance, you will remember. Ravenous war is upon us still.
           He was not yet finished. One more plastic piece taped on the wall. One more can of paint, a pale yellow. On the black of the dress, he