Twins

During the first five years of my life, I lived in a dirty brown prairie town with two other families. The town’s parents had twins, and that was how I believed all children were born. By rule, children were coupled in the womb, taken from big bellies, and shared identical, blinking twin faces.

I myself had a twin, and we wore striped shirts and combed our hair in handsome middle parts. When we played, we played the same games, and the outdoor mud sullied our cheeks like frosting. Our mother scoured our faces with a rag before family dinner. My twin and I sat together, with our legs crossed, humming the same songs in agreeable harmony. It was not a consideration of mine to differ from my twin. The only other children we knew were twins, just like us.

Only later did I discover some people, in other places, were not born twins. They had siblings, perhaps, but they slept in separate rooms and wore different hairstyles and shirts of different colors. There were still other people—people who were not twins and not siblings at all, who wore the same shirts, fashions, and hair. This is called coincidence, and coincidence evades the rules of life.

An example of someone not being a twin was when there was a flood in our dirty brown town and one of the other family’s daughters, Lydia, was picked up in the flood and deposited into a thicket of gnarly, snagging roots by the creek. She was tugged by its brown waters and died torn open, red and muddy, bleeding from her soft abdomen. Lydia’s twin, Lily, became twinless, naturally. When Lily

dressed, her outfits were uncoordinated and lonely; when she played games, she played dim, quiet games of her own accord. This is called independence but in a sad way. Our parents moved my twin and me away because the town got too low and muddy.

When we arrived in a suburb, I met many twinless people like Lily. I would ask them if their twins died, and the answer was so often “no” that my sketchy understanding of the world gained a sense of lucid refinement, like a crude underpainting receiving its first hits of bright, blue clarifying color.