Virgin(s)

Father’s wide, furrowed brow is hanging like a cooked steak and slowly rises when we reveal to him why we are holding our stomachs gently. We notice the anger in his eyes and the forbiddens that slip past his teeth, remembering back to the summer, when we all pitched tents in the heat and suffocating humidity that made us go insane for money.

The champagne we consumed between acts, while watching the jugglers (with sweaty sleeves twice turned up) switch from balls to knives to delicate glassware (and even a woman’s bewildered baby) in deep concentration, was to prevent us from exploding into the one million mosquitoes that plagued us. When it was our turn, voices gasped at us, we who had no body to ourselves, but a single shared one in a dress sewn as wide as the moon to fit the both of us. We held out our arms to the crowd with the ribbons in our hair wet with sweat and bumps on our skin. “More champagne, the tiger tamers are coming out!”

In our own tent, Rose was uneasy on our feet, drunk as I was (and as father is now), and pulled me down with her as she fell. We lay barely lucid in the silence between background roars from the orange beasts and from the audience. We slept one sleep like a snowy town, about to be woken from its womb by a foreign, unexpected morning.

A white house, meeting the family. The two boys, some mother’s cousin’s children, whom astonished children also gasped at, smiled like kittens. Soon to be men, mirrored in each other infinitely as they moved. Let there be alcohol! They waltzed about the room with each other and various guests, free from each other forever. They greeted us in a double voice, and offered more hands than we had for “A dance, madams?” We watched the indistinguishable two as they danced with both of us in a step which accommodated for our single body and two feet, and urged the band to “Play louder!”, and poured “More champagne!” into our mouths like we were babies, until we could no longer speak, only yield to twenty delicate, quick fingers which somehow knew our form. Squeezed our skin free from the world. They were something cool we could digest, sweet relief.

In blankets, in the dark, we could not tell if there were four, or three, or two of us, but they knew. There were for hours many salty tongues, many chapped lips, many closed eyelids resting against our blended flesh until day broke and we could see again. They were gone, and we wanted no more than to see the remainder of the world which had been hidden from us for so long, which itched and called to us, which drunk, ashamed father will take away from us now that he knows. What would have been our twin girls removed from their capsule of sleep. Milky, warm dolls gone cold; the beautiful fruits picked unripe from an infinite number of mothers and fathers.