The flesh on his arms, like an overripe banana, peels as I drag my nails upward. Ribbons of crimson appear—thin, jagged trails up and down his skin. My brother doesn’t just yell—he shrieks. Not my older brother at all…
This essay appeared in my mind as a seemingly complete, finished piece of writing. I saw its start, its middle, and its conclusion all at once. My brother and I as kids, clawing and beating each other. My brother’s awkward return from the war in the Middle East, skittish and sweating. And finally, his catastrophic breakdown soon after. It was like unfolding the pages of a magazine, the images stark and clear in my mind, just waiting to put into words. That doesn’t happen often when I’m writing an essay, but when it does, I feel the need to get what I see written down even faster. Otherwise the story will drift away and I’ll end up chasing the individual pieces and never get them put together in quite the same way.
This story coming to me so fast and complete in a way mirrors the fights I describe in the story itself. As kids, my brother and I hated each other. When we fought, it was quick, bloody, and brutal. As a writer, I like to imagine these memories of our childhood fights being stored away, holding still, waiting to see if they could ever take on some greater significance, and be written. It was when the memory of my brother losing control of himself as a consequence of his experiences at war attached itself to the memory of how we used to make war with each other, like two magnets slamming together, that the story these memories wanted to tell became clear to me.
For me, writing an essay is always an act of translation. Taking a memory and shaping it into written words so that, hopefully, what’s read feels like it could come from the memory of the reader. That’s easier with some stories than others. With “Fight Test,” all I had to do was step back, get out of the way, and let the story, the memory, tell itself.
WILL MCMILLAN is a queer writer born and raised in the untamed wild of the Pacific Northwest, where he lives to this day. His essays have been featured in CRAFT, The Sun, Electric Literature, and Bending Genres, among dozens of others. He has been twice nominated for Best American Essays (listed as a Notable Essay in the 2021 and 2023 editions), as well as the Pushcart Prize and Best Fictions (for which he was a 2023 winner). Find Will on Bluesky @willmcmillan.bsky.social and on Instagram @willmcmn.
