The Twin Thing.
My twin brother MEANT to stab me. I know he did. Everyone, including our mother, still like to say it was just an unfortunate accident, but I know better. HE knows better. And Both of us know Why.
We were born at 24 weeks gestation; premature, small, and sickly babies, the two of us. We were supposed to have been born in the spring of ’89, yet somehow, God saw fit to bring us into the world in the fall of ’88. My grandmother says that God saved us for a reason, brought us here early because we had some early work to do upon this wretched place we call the earth; some early lessons to learn, I suppose.
I am the older twin, a girl, and, having come into the world 20 minutes apart, I suppose that always meant I looked upon myself as older than him, in many ways. For some reason, I told myself that being older entitled me to more priveleges, special toys, private friends, and seperate birthdays, while my brother was meant to live subservient to me; in my shadow.
Looking back on it, I think that’s what caused my brother’s insatiable rage, early on. He was jealous.
And, for that reason, when we were six years old, he decided that he was going to kill me.
Now, I’ve never been one to believe all that supernatural crap about evil twins and whatnot, perhaps only because, if I did, that would have required me to take a good look at myself; because, he and I both knew, even back then, that, between the two of us, my brother wasn’t the evil twin. He was relatively docile, when in comparison to the miscreant that I was destined to become. Perhaps, unbeknownst to everyone else, My brother wasn’t truly jealous of me at all; instead,contrary to what the rest of the world saw and believed, he was just trying, in all actuality, to save his loved ones by ridding the world of what he believed to be an evil whose destruction was both imminent. Although the task was, Im sure, a daunting feat, it was, nonethless, a deed that which my twin must have, in his twisted frame of mind, have somehow seen fit to have been to be incredibly necessary. The death of his twin. My immenent death. My imperative destruction.
It was a breezy and yet relatively sunny day on the day that it all occured; we were sitting side by side, at the breakfast bar, waiting patiently for the babysitter to fix our usual noontime meal of peanut butter sandwiches. I was being a typical six year old, finding an unrivaled amount of joy from simply swinging my legs back and forth, and watching curiously, as my small, brown legs dangled down from what was, then, an enormous height upon the barstool which I sat. My brother was next to me, eyeing me interestedly, mimicking my movements as best he could. I rolled my little eyes back in my head with as big an eye roll as I could, and sighed. Lately, he was all about copying me, and it was growing tiresome, and fast.
“Minnie, make him stop! He’s doing it again!!” I whined, my soft and squeaky little voice was laden with annoyance and aggravation.
“Minne, make him stopppp!” My brother repeated, deviously, with a smirk around his lips. He was no doubt enjoying my friustration, and couldn’t wait to see what I would say or do next. Thankfully, I chose not to feed into his provocational tendancies,and simply huffed, crossed my arms, and pouted as I waited for Minnie to speak up and admonish my errant twin.
Much to my consternation, no admonishment ever passed Minnie’s lips.
In fact, all had grown surprisingly quiet, as I looked down upon my folded arms.
Too quiet, I realized with dread.
I quickly looked up from my glowering position on the barstool, and glanced over to where my brother had been sitting. However, where he should have been, he was no longer. My eyes widened, and I quickly whipped my head around back to the counter just on the other side of the bar, where moments earlier, Minnie had been dutifully making us our lunches, expecting Minnie to greet me with her usual calming smile.
Except Minnie wasn’t there either.
I swallowed hard.
What was going on?!
I quickly slipped down from the barstool, and crept around the towering wall that was the breakfast bar, and gave way to the kitchen counter.
I gasped.
Minnie was sprawled out upon the floor, her face plastered with an ungodly grimace, perhpas the last expression that her pale, pasty face would ever make in this world. Her chest was bloody, it appeared as though she had been stabbed multiple times with.... with what? I wondered.
All of the knives were kept in the drawer,which sat way above either mine or my brothers head, far out of our reach, and even so, was accesible only to grownups, or, to one of us, by climbing onto the cabinet doors, and balancing, just long enough for one to pull open the drawer and grab a knife, but not before falling down with a thud onto the linoleum floor.I hadn’t seen nor heard a sound from either my brother or Minnie. so how on earth had Minnie been stabbed? Who could have done such a thing? Who would have wanted to STAB Minnie?? And, More importantly, WHERE was my brother? Was he hurt? I couldn’t see him, hear him, or feel him; the latter being of far more concern to my immediate anxiety than anything else. This was the first time in our six years of life that I hadnt been able to place him at least within 5 feet of my body at all times. The realization was stunning.
With my heart pounding at an utterly frghtening and interminate rate within my tiny chest, I crawled on my hands and knees over to where Minnie lay, making slight gurgling sounds, blood bubbling up from her mouth in a frothy red bubble of spit.
“Minnie?” I whispered, nudging her gently.
She didnt move. Didnt acknowlege me; simply kept staring, sightlessly up at the ceiling. I wondered if she was in pain. It was a stupid thought, I knew even then, but at a mere six years old, I had very little Idea as to what to do. We had never had any type of emergency within our family; at least, none in my conscious memory to date. I had not yet been taught what I was to do in times of peril, which, sadly, rendered me helpless in times of immediate need. I definitely didnt know the correct procedures as to what to do when it was grownup in trouble. I didnt even know where the phone was, much less how to use it.
Shit.
“Minnie!” I whispered again, more frantically this time, shaking her as feircly as I could. “What happened?” I leaned in close, placing my ear as near as I could possibly manage to her bloody lips, praying for some type of answer.
I got nothing.
I sat back on my heels, my heart pounding, tears of fear and desolation beginning to well in my eyes.
What do I do?
“She can’t hear you.” My brother’s voice peirced the silence, making me jump.
I whipped around, springing up off of my position on my knees, from the floor, and stood, shaking, facing my twin.
He was grinning, with an evil, calculating smirk accross his small dark brown features, and absolutely drenched, from head to toe, in what I could only assume, was Minnie’s blood. My eyes, which I’m sure had grown as wide as teacups, gave away all the fear and confusion I felt inside of me, feelings I knew that, if I was feeling,then he too, was feeling them right along with me.The twin thing. I shuddered.
I knew right then that my brother had had EVERYTHING to do with this. The only thing I didnt know was why.
“She was in the way.” He spoke softly, as if to answer my question that I hadn’t yet had the chance to even speak out loud. He ALWAYS knew what I was thinking.
“In The way- the way of...what?!” I mumbled, my confusion and fear growing all too evident to him, much more so than I was comfortable with. I didnt know this person. I didnt know this brother of mine. Was he still my brother? Surely, he couldnt be.
He must have been possessed. Had to have been. It was the only thing that made any real amount of sense. I knew very little about ghosts and demon possession, and the little I did know stemmed from the viewing of the many forbidden, rated R movies that I had managed over the last few months to sneak into our mothers room to watch, and those were enough to have ensured my unwavering belief in the supernatural. But I wasnt entirely certain that anything about this incident truly WAS supernatural. At least, I prayed it wasn’t. WHAT was happening to my brother?!
“She was in the way of my goal.”
His smug answer was marginal, at best.
Okay, seriously?
First of all, What the HECK was a goal?!
And secondly,how come HE got to know about it before I did?!
Of course, My jealous and utterly incorigible bratchild mindset had taken over. Not that this was at all the correct time nor place for any type of jealousy whatsoever, but I mean, cut me a break here. I was six frigging years old, for crying out loud.
“Your...GO-al?” I repeated, sounding out the word, getting used to the way my lips moved as I pronounced the new myserious word. I still didnt know how he knew that word or what it meant.
“It’s time to go, Selene.” He continued.
Go? Go where? Mom wasn’t due to be home for another ten minutes, And Minnie, well. The boy had clearly killed the babysitter.
My brother moved toward me, ominously raising high above his head the bread knife that he must have wrenched from Minnies fingers as she’d been making our lunches just before he attacked her. My eyes darted between the weapoon and him, and then I did the only thing I could think of.
I turned and booked it, like a bat out of hell, out of the kitchen.
---------
When the cops came, they discovered me, passed out under the bed in my mothers bedroom, covered in stab wounds. They handed me over to the care of the paramedics, who in turn, whisked me to the nearest ICU, where I remained,in critical condition, long into the night. When My mother arrived, after having been at work all day, she was startled to find the babysitters corpse lying in a pool of stale blood, dead fro, her wounds inflicted by my brother. She immediately called the police, and then went hurridly throughout the house in search of her children. She found Sam, crouched in the basement, hiding, his body glistening with sweat; his eyes aglow with childlike trepidation. But there was nothing childlike about Sam that day; not anymore, and I suspect my mother knew that. Somewhere deep down, she must have realized that there was something very wrong with this little boy, something very wrong indeed.
When the paramedics took me away, and my brother was escorted by the cops to the asylum, its been said by many a neighbor that my mothers face was akin to a woman who has just been sentenced to death by a jury of her peers in a court of law. She was pale, and she appeared shrunken, and older than her mere 30 years of age. Im sure, looking back on it, Losing both of us in one day haunted her for the rest of her natural life. What mother wouldnt be haunted by such a devastating turn of events?
The babysitter was dead. Selene had been taken to the ICU, and Sam was the cause of everything that had transpired, and, therefore, was destined to spend the rest of his childhood locked away behind the walls of an institution for the criminally insane.
In one day, my mothers life had shattered. And in our incredibly tiny and unconventional family, there was no one else left behind to help pick up the pieces.
I was never the same afterward. I had trouble breathing properly, where the blade that Sam had weilded had punctured my lung. I would have lasting scars all througout the expanse of my body, physical remnants of the attack at the hand of my twin that had nearly cost me my life.
As for Sam, I still see Sam. Nearly 20 years later, I still go to see my brother, and still attempt to uphold a relationship with my Twin brother, despite the fact that he once attempted to end my life. Sam is still Sam, although just barely, due to the effects of the massive amount of sedatives they keep him under at all times.
It’s for his safety, the doctors tell me.
More like my own.
Because, unbeknownst to the Doctors, Sam doesn’t appear the same to everyone. To most, he appears mute, docile and harmless, sedated and effectively confined. But, in my presence, and mine alone, He speaks.
“My Goal.” His eyes whisper to me, Nonverbally confirming what we both know is true.
My twin is evil. Mistakenly, all those years ago, I had believed that I rather than he was evil. But I was wrong. If set free, He will stop at nothing to ensure what he deemed so long ago, as a necessary occurance, but, failed, miraculously, thankfully, upon delivering.
My imperative destruction.
It must be the twin thing.
-Smallsiren.