Johnny had to be first. That’s just the way it was. I knew that from the beginning and really it didn’t make no difference. He was the first born so it made sense.

When Mama wanted something done she asked him first. He was biggest and turned oldest first, no matter how we all tried to catch up.

He was big, even for a 10 year-old and bein’ in our family. All the boys becoming men were big in our family. For generations it had been that way. Maybe it was all the bread and home churned butter we ate or the pecan pies for all the birthdays, but we were a big healthy family.

He and Mama was real close. Maybe that was because Daddy was gone so much or because he and Mama had blue eyes, not like any of the rest of us with brown.

Johnny had the clearest blue eyes, just like the color of the sky on the best fishin’ day of the summer or of the lake when the flies were going nuts and we knew a fresh trout was gonna be at our barbecue that night. Mama said his eyes were the colors of angel’s pools because he could see clear into the afterlife. That’s how gone on Johnny Mama was.

It started with such a little thing, just a tiny red welt on his right ankle. None of us, including Mama, even noticed that Johnny wasn’t right when it began.  Just seemed like a beetle bite or maybe a mossquita. We never were sure.

Johnny, he never complained either. He was like that.

But the doc said it was just an infection and the antibotics would take care of it. They always did. But we had no idea that the infection could be what they called the MERSA, the anti-botic resistant kind of thing and pretty soon he had a hungry flesh-eating something.

All those little bacteria just eatin’ their fill like a whole family of MacMurphy’s at a picnic.

When it came to the time when he was too weak to help out, when he was too weak and sick, Mama was as heartbroken by him slipping down in the order of things as she was by his weakness and what it meant for his future.

“He’s my first born,” she cried to us.

“It wasn’t meant to be this way,” she said. Then she squinted up her blue eyes, off into the blankness, as though she was trying to make out some shape that was just beyond glimpsing. Like she was tryin’ to read something written in invisible ink.

But us kids liked that we all got a chance to be first now and help her out so we didn’t mind as much as Mama did at first. Of course, maybe we was all too young to really understand.

But we sure understood when Johnny came to be first to pass on, Mama wailin’ and Daddy drinkin all that whisky. There were a lot of tears shed in our house that day.

Suddenly I was first but it sure was no prize.

This story was the recipient of the Best Short Story Contest, Newburyport Adult Education, Summer 2014