What was wrong with the twins? Really, the weirdest thing was that they weren't two separate people at all. Surely they couldn't be, not at age 35 and still dressing exactly the same.

Walking into the room with matched, heavy steps, and matched, heavy satchels, they sat at the same time, read from the same book, and never referred to themselves as I. It was always we.

When we were a child, we used to watch our grandmother fish snakes out from her flooded basement. She would loop them in and out of her fingers like knitting yarn, and watch them writhe and spit. They never bit her.

I spied them on campus once, following in exciting closeness. They had a beard then, perfectly groomed and combed like freshly mown grass. They didn't speak while they walked, and their duplicate height confused me more than usual- somehow there being two of them made it even easier to lose them in the crowd. In front of the chapel, they disappeared entirely. To me, it was as if they had never existed at all.

Now I see them twice a week, and I cannot look at only one of them specifically- as if they are Alice's magic moving storeshelves themselves in her looking glass. Their faces smudge into a single head, contorted by its double features, and their annoyingly hushed mumbles during conversation prick at my skin like a wool sweater rubbing your arms the wrong way. I don't believe in ghosts or the otherworldly, I say, but there is something wrong about all of this.

She was nestled in the crooked arm of a cluster of irises when I finally saw her. I had been looking through the dirty dining room window, the one over the mammoth record player, trying to find anything to distract me from the fact that I was doing what I wasn’t supposed to be. There she was, just a little fuzzy lump under the flowers. I let her lay there for a while until I finished my eggs, then I wandered onto the back porch, and woke her up by cooing her name. Her glazed eyes took a moment to register, she got up, stretched her legs, and padded into the house, through the middle room, and jumped onto my bed.

As soon as we were settled and I felt special and loved, I noticed it outside of my bedroom window. It was her twin, the same in every respect, coming down the stairs and stretching its legs just as she had. I looked into my lap to see if she was still there, as if somehow I was imagining it. All of the sudden, I felt betrayed. It was an unexpected and irrational hurt that came from the arches of my feet. Who was this, snuggling up on my bed? Had I left the real one outside? Had some imposter been sleeping under my irises, knowing that in my ignorance I would let the wrong one in? I searched them both for marks of difference, and found none.

The twin sat on the steps and cried for a moment, then slid out of the yard. I couldn’t help but feeling alone for a second. The good feeling from before was gone.

You would think the day we talked about his stories would be the day that I had a lot to say.

Mostly I stared out of the window behind the lecturer as he drawled. Mostly I thought about how one day I will be brave enough to sit down and write a letter to Lewis Nordan. I will be embarrassed for telling him that he is the reason that I write. I will probably forget to thank him for that in my excessive gratitude. Will It be short? Should I number the pages?

Typed?

Handwritten?

He's old now. I don't know how well he can see.

I thought about Sugar Mecklin and mermaids and finding a woman with perfect lips and eggshell skin in red slippers under the house. I thought about her over-the-sink kitchen window, abandoned somewhere.

I thought that it was all too sacred and magical to discuss anyway. I was a root, a vine, still and silent, attaching myself to the seat- weaving in as a part of the quiet. There were a thousand things buzzing in my mouth and I let not a one out from the roaring fear that I would gush my whole body onto the floor, vulnerable and ecstatic and afraid.

In the end, I didn't pay attention to any of it. My fierce, clawing attraction to the sticky words prevented me from listening at all.

Later in the crushing muteness of the library, I did not work on my paper. I worked on finding his address.

Ghost Takes a Holiday

Ghost bowed to the wolves and turned to the ocean, ready for the creatures that awaited him beneath- all of those squiggling clouds of fish hiding in the shadows of the flotsam, and the rays, gathered for tea in the starless blue, settling like a squirming pile of leaves, savage and real. He was ready for this. Goodbye to the foxes and trees- bring the deep, he said. I want to know its mysteries.

I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world"

--Henry David Thoreau (from Walden)

The Nosebleed

My nose started to bleed. I didn't have any tissue so I leaned my head back like Ms. Lacey told me to do when my nose started to bleed in the third grade. I knew that was a bad thing to do because obviously blood in your stomach makes you sick. It made me wonder why grownups are always telling kids to do it. I did it anyway though, because I learned once in the movie theater watching King Kong that blood is better in your stomach than on your face for everyone to see. It felt warm and silky slipping on the back of my throat. It tasted funny, like iron. Why does blood taste like iron, and how do I know what iron tastes like? I don't go around chomping on iron. If my blood is made of iron, and if my skin was opened up and the blood was rushing around in my veins like a highway-if my skin was open and it started to rain, would I rust? I felt the taste stick in the cracks between my teeth, so I took a drink from my coke that Sarah got me at the Sprintmart. It took me a little while to get the Sprintmart cup out of the cupholder because of all of the old coke that lived on the bottom of the holder. My mother and Sarah say the old coke is gross, but I say it has to live somewhere.

I'm watching the crackling silhouettes of winter trees against the pink sky. They look like lace sliding by on a railway track. I see things every day that I should write down, that need so badly to be captured, but instead roll off my memory like drops of water. I've begun to compartmentalize in my head phrases, photos, memories, and single words that are important, that can be used again--things that made an impression. I make lists in my mind like this:

From the very beginning, they all knew I was a weird baby.

I did it 'caus you had to learn.

Another night on

Start with whistling.

Subject to change

The Kings of Water Valley

Stuttering Ken?

Anything that takes place in Possum Neck, Mississippi

Cocaine Charlie never shot the vegan, he just wished it.