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A Toast to Nothing
By Thomas Miller
The last time I saw my brother Richard, he was sitting in his dark apartment, the smell of stale liquor and cigarette smoke clinging to the air like a sickness. He had grown bloated, his face swollen with drink, his eyes sunken, yet somehow still burning with misplaced rage.
“You think you’re better than me, don’t you?” he slurred, waving a half-empty bottle of cheap whiskey in my direction. “Just ‘cause you got your books, your… your success. You think you matter?”
I sighed. I had stopped arguing with him long ago. There was no reasoning with a man who had already decided the world had cheated him.
Our other brother, Daniel, had made something of himself—moved out west, built a company, married rich. Richard, though… Richard never forgave the world for not handing him success.
It started small—resentment, disappointment. Then came the drinking. Then the politics. When Trump won the White House, Richard snapped. He ranted about the fall of America, about how liberals like him were being abandoned, how it was all unfair, how his people—people like him, intellectuals, the educated class—were supposed to rule, not be cast aside. He cursed the working class, the ones he thought were beneath him.
But the truth was, Richard hadn’t worked in years. He had no friends, no career. Just his bottles, his bitterness, and the walls of a small apartment that smelled like death long before it ever took him.
I visited him out of guilt. Because once upon a time, we were brothers. Because once, he had been kind before the anger hollowed him out. But each visit eroded what little respect I had left for him.
He would ramble about old victories that never were. He would tell me how he was a genius, how one day people would see. He spoke like a man who believed himself a king, but in reality, he was just another lonely drunk who had let time and self-pity strip him of everything.
That night, before I left, I asked him, “Do you even want help?”
He scoffed. “Help? From you? The one who left me behind?”
“You left yourself behind,” I said, standing up. “I can’t keep doing this, Richard.”
I walked out the door, and I never saw him again.
Five Weeks Later
The smell hit the landlord first.
A putrid, rotting stench seeping through the walls, souring the air of the entire building. The door had been locked from the inside. When they broke it down, they found him hanging from an old ceiling fan, the weight of his body having stopped its slow, mechanical turn.
Five weeks.
Five weeks before anyone even noticed he was gone.
I got the call, but I didn’t answer.
It was Daniel who eventually picked up, dealing with the mess, dealing with the arrangements, dealing with the body that no one wanted. I didn’t want to go.
The only time we saw each other was at the funeral home, arguing over what to do with the remains.
“I don’t care what you do with him,” Daniel snapped. “He’s not my problem. He hasn’t been my problem for years.”
“He was our brother,” I said, but even I could hear the hollowness in my own voice.
“Was he? Really?” Daniel spat. “All he ever did was drink and blame the world. He hated everything. He hated us.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Not really.
In the end, Richard got no headstone. No service. No mourning.
Just a cheap, unmarked grave in the farthest corner of the cemetery. The kind of burial reserved for those who have no one left. The kind of burial that fades from memory before the dirt even settles.
Maybe he believed in nothing. Maybe he thought that death was the final end.
If that was true, then I guess he got what he wanted. No one remembers him. No one visits.
Nothing remains of Richard.
Just the quiet, empty dirt swallowing his bones.
And the silence he left behind.