Derrick

My first thought wasn't to question why there were stacks of classic violins interspersed among my furniture. Instead, I stared in amazement and said to myself, Christ, it's only been four days.

My brother was sitting on a stool in the center of my living room, rapidly entering commands into his iPad. I wondered why he hadn't left himself a more comfortable seat. The sleek, shiny 3-D printer was whirring happily behind him, even though it must have been running nonstop since the morning I left.

"How was your trip?"

"Long." Too long. I was going to shoot Miranda for sending me on that networking retreat. "Derrick, why are there so many violins in my living room?"

"Well, I think that should be obvious." His mouth curved into a tiny smirk, and then he sprang off the stool to check the printer.

So it's something about money, I thought as I found an empty corner for my suitcase and entered the living room.

My brother was one of the few individuals who had actually benefitted from the 2016 debt crisis, partly because of his ridiculous schemes. He had invested his money in a select list of companies that most stockbrokers had ignored or written off, and somehow ended up richer than he had ever been before. Unfortunately, instead of using this money wisely, he kept up a childlike need to experiment with more crazy ways to make money.

This concept seemed more ridiculous than usual, though--and I knew why. This isn't going to win him back, little bro.

I walked over to the nearest violin and gently wrapped my knuckle on it. The hardened plastic seemed sturdy enough, and the damn thing even looked like it was made of real wood. To the everyday person, it could've been handcrafted by Antonio Stradivari himself.

My brother spun away from the printer. "Careful with those!"

"Why? You have dozens of them. Seriously, why the hell did you print so many?"

"To sell them." Derrick rolled his eyes. "Obviously. How much do you think people around here will pay for an actual Stradivarius?"

I thought about my middle-class neighbors: the high school vice principal next door, the massage therapist across the street, and the dentist beside him.

"You never went out to meet my neighbors, did you?"

"Well, I'll be selling them at a discount. It'll be like carrying Picasso prints around, or something."

An image of my brother wheeling a cart of mass-produced Italian violins through my neighborhood flashed through my mind.

"They're not 'actual' Stradivariuses."

Derrick made a noise somewhere between "meh" and "pft" and waved his hand.

To prove his point, he plucked a string on one of the violins. The noise it made sounded like other violins I'd heard before, albeit horribly off-key. Derrick plucked at a few more, and if anything the noise got worse.

I grinned at him. "Still the one instrument you could never play," I said.

"Yeah," Derrick said, staring at the violin. "Never could figure that out."

"Some musical savant you were--flutes, trombones, piano, but no violin."

I kept smiling, until I saw the way he was looking at that violin. It was only then that I clued into the slightly melancholy tone to his voice, and finally the light taste of my own foot in my mouth.

Since I figured I had reached the low point of our reunion, I decided to get the inevitable question out of the way: "Did you talk to Victor?"

"Nope."

"Are you going to?"

"Not yet."

"Derrick--"

My brother looked up at me, over his shoulder. "Just leave it alone for now. Okay, Ryan? I need to do this right now."

I looked around at the Stradivariuses, wondering--as I had with every previous scheme--how he could possibly "need" to do anything.

Before I could say something else, the doorbell rang.

Abruptly, Derrick's face broke into a grin that had to be partly forced. He hurried past me. "That'll be the extra parts I ordered!"

Alone in the room, I stepped over to the printer. The device was sleek and shiny, and even though it was smaller than I expected, it still dominated the back of my living room. My dream of putting in a new fireplace this month was clearly a joke. I ran a hand across the printer's front hatch, where Derrick had been removing his new products, and wondered again why he had bought it. Not for the first time, I thought that maybe Victor had a point when he threw my brother out, claiming he couldn't handle his ludicrous schemes.

Never could figure that out, Derrick had said. I looked around at the stacks of violins, remembering the months my brother had spent trying to master the one instrument that he couldn't seem to operate. He had actually turned to business school not long after. When I thought of that, and Victor, this new scheme actually made a modicum of sense.

Derrick came back into the living room in the midst of opening a large package. He grinned at me and showed me a handful of tiny nuts and screws wrapped in plastic.

"Finally! You know, I can't wait until these printers produce all the working parts on their own. Having to ship the tiny stuff is a bitch."

I stepped aside so he could get back to working on the printer. Derrick seemed to have forgotten I was there. It took me a moment to process exactly what he had said.

"Are you making more violins?" There was a touch of hopefulness in my voice.

"Not yet." When he looked up at me, I swear the glint in his eyes was manic. "These parts are for a new printer."

I closed my eyes and sighed. "You're going to use that printer to make another printer?"

"Oh, yeah." He turned back to what he was doing. "That way I can increase my production rate."

For several seconds I just stared around the room, imagining the second printer parked where I wanted to furnish a new reading nook. My previous sympathies toward Derrick faded, in the way that only a younger brother could cause.

"Derrick, could that printer make me a shovel?"

"Yeah, that'd be easy. Why?"

"Just thinking ahead," I said, and went to drag my suitcase upstairs, ignoring the happy whir of the printer behind me.

THE END

Bio: Mr. Crilly is a high school History teacher living in Ottawa, Canada. His speculative fiction has appeared most recently in On Spec, Encounters, and the anthology Tides of Possibility (Skipjack Publishing). For more information about his published work, please visit brandoncrilly.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter @B_Crilly.

E-mail: Brandon Crilly

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