Two Minutes

The metal rod is a little stiff but serves me well with my respite. There is nothing as a pouffe attached to it unlike the broken wooden chair Rally often rested his back on, and which he does now as well, only in an armchair that is but made of plastic. The old chair is too dilapidated now, and it is not to evince in any way that it was not ramshackle in the quondam times, never necessarily; it never was that comfortable a seat, but merely a seat that could compose a space for one to sit down on and consider some relief. It was, however, always massive enough to make room for both me and Adjin on its pouffe, always. To visualize it stand at the corner of the roof, the only part of the latter which remains cloistered pricks me bitterly for I know I will have the entirety of it all to myself. Every summer, in the month of August especially for that, was and that still is one of the warmest months of the year, Rally would climb upstairs and let his back fall on the wooden grid of rhomboid crevices which have now come out perilously, with nails and hooks of iron from the incomprehensible nooks of its frame. I cannot tell if Rally enjoyed the wind or if he would merely do a runner from the extant status quo just because that would appear too intricate for him to untangle. I never really delved into the depth of it. Thus, I only get to surmise now, and not formulate anything firm. That entire plain piece of spectacle now strikes me newly, and the pictures from the former times scrounge room in my head like a fresh memory. It seems like I am beholding the sight all over again upfront, as if in a reel that lugs the pictures of the instances that I am struggling to forget from microfiche right from in front of my eyes without much effort. Rally is seated just a little obliquely from the position right behind my back, resting his feet on the triplicate slender iron bars that barge out of the concrete cement of the terrace perilously. Sets of such three-legged iron bars don’t stand at one locus; such unique presence of only a single set of triplicate rods, utterly black and corroded, was never the case. They were sporadically distributed all over the peripheral ledge of the terrace. Rally now shrinks deeper into the plastic seat of his chair. I can tell without looking at him because of the creak he produces as he presses himself towards the reticulated back. I am, at the moment, astonished to know how I’ve accustomed myself enough with these details to now recognize how Rally’s body moves on the chair just with the sound it produces. I wonder if I would have been able to do the same had Rally sat on the old broken ligneous chair. He no longer uses it, I do. The scenery around me darkens underneath the quiet black of the night sky. Surely I will be foolish to expect stars in August; so many nights have I clambered up the stairs to saunter here, expecting to descry the stars above, only to lift my head up and find a clear black sky with barely visible nimbuses. So I sit still. Absolutely still. It isn’t onerous for me to manage the stillness now for I have been so often restless all this time, always having the paucity of patience at my fingertips; the stillness seems rather natural within my body now, only that I somewhere miss the agitation. I wish it could to me without causing a disturbance. Blood runs through my veins but I still feel the dearth of motion underneath the skin of my chest which also feels too light, as if it is pumping thin air and not blood. I’m terrified and unaffected simultaneously. Amidst this complex ambiguity in my sensation, I manage to enquire inside my head if this is normal. It too seems to be dead inside. I realize that I do not want to think, perhaps, at all. Having earned a titular label of “a retarded brain” for the small mass of cells inside my skull, it surely has been disappointed. So it makes me think that I should probably relinquish, simply everything. I was always aware of these mental repercussions. If only I considered a soupcon more of care to see the other side that had been there. “Did it await me always? Was it in fate to happen? Would it be this way no matter what I did? Would it be the same?”, So I ruminate all over again for the fifth time on the day. I can see it now, all too clearly that the remorse comes in me like an inrush of mayhem that implodes my entire system. “Indeed, I do recall those days. Such easy days were they, with no tinge of pressure. Anyway, I will be home tomorrow. You will be paying a visit there, won’t you?”, Rally speaks on the phone, swaying his piece of a percale shirt to and fro. “Uh-huh, I will catch up with you then. Pardon? Oh, I will set out from here at eight sharp. You can expect my advent on Calif Town at around eleven. Um-hmm, I believe I should be there by then, given the traffic doesn’t derail the journey on the route. But I shouldn’t be any later than noon. I…Okay, great. That sounds great. I will see you then. Have a good night. Good night.”, He hangs up the call, stopping to sway the garment now. Rally now opens his cell device. I do not look at him, but I can assume what he will do next with certitude again. I can figure out that he will soon squander by checking the cache files in his phone. This is what he always does right after he is done with any call on his phone. Somehow, I don’t trust my assumption, or perhaps, I should say that I don’t want to be right about it. I heel my torso to steal a glance. I pray to confound myself as I do so. I keep my eyes closed and my fingers crossed, something that has never turned me down so far. But I am gripped with fear because unlike the other times, I can’t seek the confidence within myself now. I hope that I will turn around, open my eyes and behold him doing anything but peeking into his cell in the dark. I do as I planned, and behold his face looking westwards, the glow of the light from the screen of his device accentuating his visage clearly in the dark. The light of his screen is so bright under the stygian sky that his face is easily discovered. There he is, doing just what I prayed I wouldn’t find him doing. I am crestfallen, only a little more. Never have I decided on something and then wished to be wrong about it. It was strange that I did today. And strangely, the desire of finding him bereft of his eyes on the screen of his gadget, just to refute me, is still alive in me. I keep praying that it will actually happen, except that it didn’t. A cool strip of airstrikes my face. I realize that I’ve been sweating. The normalcy of the hour peters out and I am now commencing to think that the encounter I witnessed in person downstairs two and a quarter of an hour ago now prefigures an ominous presage that I can no longer be evasive with. Rally switches on the Juke Box of his gadget and starts dancing, although, barely moving inches from where he sits for he doesn’t leave the seat. He swings his body and displays a distinct mannerism that I can always tell typically reflects him. A sense of sadness overwhelms me internally because I do not laugh at the thought of it, and because I know I would have had I not been struck by the damage inside. I am sad that I hurl a dekko at his hilarious movement but my lips are too consciously reluctant to twist and let my visage bear a smile on the cheeks, not even for a jiffy. There’s a dearth of mercy both from myself and for myself; I can only conceive dejection if I surmise scrounging that smile in someone else. My gaze reverts and I continue staring blankly into the darkness ahead at the distance. I don’t lookup. I am scared to find the sky filled with stars. That shouldn’t happen, not tonight. I press my hands against the edges of my forehead, close to the top of both of my ear pinnae, and curl my eyelids tightly inside. I strive in the ways I can to not think of the other way there was and that my brain now keeps reminding me so constantly that it only seems blasé. I try to think about something else, anything else in this world. But there it is, proving its invincibility once more to me. I never thought I would be vanquished by my own brain someday, that it would become a part of my body that I would merely despise with my bitterness at its utmost and I wouldn’t find it funny at all to do that all at the same time. Sitting on the metal bar with my head held downwind, I wish I averted the encounter with Adjin. I wish as I strengthen the pressure on my forehead, still trying to not think of the other way that I can only understand more clearly now. There is no way I can escape knowing that there was another way of looking into the matter and it didn’t need to end in ruins. It infuriates me beyond hell to be unable to escape thinking about something I don’t want to think. This is one heck of a fascination for me to comprehend as to how that can happen, but is also insipidly ordinary in tandem because it has been this way with so many other mortal brains in this world. Everyone else has ever since moved on with this sort of conundrum so noiselessly that I am too embarrassed to bandy it as an interrogation. And as I grow weaker and weaker, I can settle it with a simple verdict – that I am failing at this. Only if I foresaw the aftermath a couple of hours back in time that I am now living. Perhaps, remorse was meant to make room for itself inside my mental space that is lousy as a greenwood rendered derelict by a hurricane. I hate to look inside, but again, that is exactly what I keep doing. I wonder if there’s any theory or any concept associated with such a self-contradictory human behavior; I will be gratified beyond heavens just to know that there is one.

Trivial squabbles had been just our thing since we came to acknowledge the truth that we were siblings; the twin facet of it could only be associated with it to intensify the desire in us to excise each other’s skins. So many of such imbecilic blows did my head house until now. The hassles were raw wounds at the moment of their executions that would later become child’s plays for us both in the hindsight, all dipped in the saccharine sweetness of two silly kids coming after each other’s hair after one had stolen another’s pencil. So did we once get into one of those mêlée where I had eaten his part of a blancmange that had Cornish choux pastry in the dessert, leaving not a smidgen of a trace of the same for him? The consequence being he had nearly capsized my desk for he knew my weaknesses well to misuse them to have the upper hand. That is one tournament I have always sheltered in my mind without any sign of distress regardless of the space it captures inside because that was the first attempt from both of our edges at getting literally at loggerheads with each other and leaving no other option for Salph but to ring up mother in the middle of the day and cry for urgent help saying “they are out of control!”. This resides in my memory as a staple instance of delight that I have looked back at searching for something that can make me smile whenever I was breaking down. This petulant struggle to get at each other from in between Salph’s elbows and our own clipboards meant for the purposes of examination in lieu that would become our shields, his armor in bronze and my cuirass of iron temporarily, was always oracular and intractable but never messy. Reminiscing these skin to skin hours when we would bicker about anything and everything sometimes, I’m now reminded of the truth that the former incident had possibly been the inception of the tonnage of such bust-ups we witnessed in the hours that unfolded later in the coeval past and in a trend much alike to what the first in the row had been like. I raise my palms along the edges of my forehead. They now slide to the top of my head. I slap the skin right below my frontal hairline on my forehead with both my palms, not wanting to have these memories inside. I hurl my legs outwards and scratch the floor of the rooftop with the soul of my clogs. The surface is rugged, nowhere smooth. I envisage picking up a stone and mauling the skin of some part of my body for real. At least, the warm air inside will find a way to leave my body. But as I said, having now owned a proprietary moniker of ‘a a knucklehead’ for the disheveled mass of cells inside my mental skeleton, I have very much irked my own brain. So all it has to respond with is one more memory. It is somewhat beyond a brutal vengeance; you see, the glimpses are all sugar sweet.

I remember planning to learn the bicycle for the twelfth time. It was the summer of 2014. The holidays for the inchoate summer months, ones that my school somehow saw as the months of summer at its zenith, had begun. Like all of the past summers following my learning to have a cognizance of the milieu on my own, I had concocted my list of things to be done for one more time with learning to ride a bicycle at the top. It was as easy to jot down in my scheme as it was strenuous to commit to it. Surely, I was aware of how I was, in no way, going to make it. The entirety of the house merely had a single bike. It was Adjin’s. I hadn’t known then that I was just an entreaty away from being not just allowed to take it for the lesson, but from being volunteered to be taught as well. It was as if he was only waiting for me to ask. I can dive deeper and deeper into the memory and go on losing track of time without any abstention. I sat down on the padded rump of the bicycle and my job was done. That was all I did all of the days as I kept stressing over the fact that I learn it. See, I had foretold Murphy’s Law. The mere part of every session of the lessons of the ride that demanded the essence of the work from me was the part of waking up. I would wake up at five in the morning. I remind myself of it because never did I pass a day of the sessions being the only one who would do so; he would do that too. He would push himself out of bed just as I would. He would strive to make the cycle move as I would make myself comfortable on the triangular seat of the bike, and bother to merely rest my legs on the pair of pedals. He would move the entire cycle bereft of anything as massive muscles for he didn’t have them back then. He was the one to perspire an ocean out superficially all over his torso; sweat oozed out of the cowlicks of his hair that composed a tuft on the back of his head, the curlicue of his coiffure bothering him all the way as he would push the bike by its carrier. Yes, he did it foremost and for me, and was never aggrieved about having to do that. He did it for his twin sister after all. Why would he deprecate having to shed some sweat for her? Strange it is all over again now – he has built muscles and I have learned how to ride, both on our own. I ponder over how we both would have turned out to be had we never ceased aiding each other in the ways we could. Would we have been in better shape now or, will we be now thinking ‘only if we had done it ourselves? The zephyr strikes my face again, and so do I hear the crackle of Rally’s recliner. He alters the song and changes the one he has switched in a trice and switches on to yet another number. I manage to reckon that he is on a high of caprice just as my mind is at the moment we are both living together by sitting only inches apart. I slacken the tight clasp of my forehead and extend my fingers eastwards in the dark. The breeze is colder now. It isn’t one of winter but hits me like a gale of snowflakes. I grope for air even when I sit in the open arena with only the night sky over me. I realize I am still scared to look up; not even once does the thought of stealing a glimpse of it cross my mind. I am gratified because my brain doesn’t coerce me to do it. Rally finally puts an old Bollywood song on play. I am astonished how despite the ruckus mayhem inside my head, I recognize the song. It is from a Bollywood movie that I can also tell I have watched at least once. My fingers keep extending further and further and I avert to notice that I am trying to reach out to the black sky above. I keep my eyes closed, still terrified to find the stars above. I have admired them in ways that will be forever inexplicable to me; only the spell is palpable. But it is certainly different in yet, another way tonight that I can expound but do not wish to. I think of ways to not know the way I actually know all about it. Unfortunately, I cannot help but feel like I can walk down all my quondam ways of looking at them. It just hurts at this second to not want to admire them. But I cannot help that either. How pathetic! I am bemusing myself with just the thought of the stars at the top, but the cacophony inside is actually one heck of a maze for me to wander in; as much as I try to forebear whispering it to my own ears and squeeze my stomach inwards to not admit it, I only speak it out loud inside that I have lost my direction. Another kiss of a flurry from the milieu and I drown in yet another memory of mine with him.

We were eighteen then, having all grown up. Yet, we were both careless enough to ever check our ages for we only saw each other as siblings, not as teenagers or adolescents. Moreover, it was and still is a truth undeniable that we were growing up together. We were shamelessly weird in the same manner, with him having dealt with mild Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and myself have had no more than merely a tiny fleck of mania in my early years of primary school. Yet, we were also saddened by incidents all alike and so were we nourished likewise, with prejudice shunned in our mother’s heart. Indeed, she did not see us as a pair of a silly boy and a foolish girl, but as her own kids, kids who were only two minutes apart from coming to her lap in tandem. What was to derail us from executing our kind of strategy of being together – we spent the nights kicking each other on the same bed. Yes, we were eighteen and slept together. Huh, how we let alone bother about all the biology that works the crescendo of my damage now. We would ask for mother’s cell device and prefer tucking it in between our pillows; his one always felt like a stone every time my head rested on it, which was accidental by the way, always. I may sound like a braggart but the truth is that my pillow was always softer than his. Sitting here on the piece of metal, I try to figure out how it felt to rest my head on his shoulders. I guess I have lost the feeling somewhere. I wonder when. We would then switch on the music player at the minimum volume possible – I now see it, I used to care about the ménage back in time. Can I not or do I not want to care anymore? All I can claim with sureness right now is that I don’t know how to, how to care for someone who is compelling me to consider relinquishment for good. Perhaps, that is the least I can do. Then would kick-start the versatile compilation of harmonies on the bed with absolute improvisation to the songs of heartache we didn’t have the faintest clue about as The Vamps would rage in their single Middle of the Night at the middle of the night and the boys of One Direction would sing Midnight Memories at the top of their lungs right when the device would alter the date in itself. The gradation in the genre of those Western gems was often because of me as I was a diehard and a captive of Little Mix’s Told You So and The Great Big World’s Say Something and of course, the fairy tale number of Beauty and the Beast, songs that he, however, fortunately, did not hear as too girly as he too often did find Breath, Crazier, Love Story, Teardrops on My Guitar, and a plethora of all of the Swift numbers. I adjust my torso on the bar and ask myself how the confabulation transmuted into something so sensitive that night on the eve of our Mathematics examination at school which would greet us both the next morning. He allayed my fears concerning a subject like Mathematics. No one on Earth had ever been able to do it, let alone the ability to palliate my stress in a way as good as he had it. No one had ever done that nor has anyone been able to so far. So yes, we were still singing all night; you see, I had meant it when I said it – a foolish girl was I. It was right after we had ended composing a harmony to the song Paper Hearts by The Vamps. He tilted his head just enough to hurl a squinted shufti at me. Perhaps, he was checking out if I was asleep. Finding my eyes wide awake, his head reverted and so did his dekko to the off-white ceiling of the room. My eyes turned to the right edge of the bed which he had fancied to occupy that night and caught his face on whose surface was a speck of the lambent lights that stood on top of the cuboid walls of the richest mansion in the neighborhood outside, and to which the gates of the bungalow remained attached. The entire house in white and a juniper green always posed a sight that was flawlessly immaculate at midnight, and it was just that time. I noticed the flicker of light highlight his brown curls of hair. He was the only one who had had such a coiffure in the entire family, something I do not get to speak more about, not anymore. Yet another change that pricks me now is that he no longer has any hirsute curls. They are all too flat now. I have never touched them. I conjecture if I will think about the rough curls he used to have if I do bother to ruminate in this area as well. “You know, something really different happened at Mr. Allison’s class today.”, he said, staring at the top of the pink mosquito net. “What do you mean to say? What did he teach today?”, I enquired in response. “He was just commencing to teach John Keats’ poem A Thing of Beauty”, he said, becoming abruptly quiet. “What happened then?”, I said, trying to continue the dialogue. “He put up a question to all the students who were there in his class today.”, He said, running silent again. I surmised that he would tell me in his way, and did not insist on him any further, but looked at him from the edge of my left eye and couldn’t stop staring at his. Seriousness brightly gleamed in his eyes as the light from the neighborly mansion at the wayside continued to fall on his face from the edge of the mullion of our double window. “Mr. Allison asked us all for our views on the jurisprudence appertaining to the blame that is too often imputed to the rapist in any case of molestation when it seeks a trial in a court of law.”, he spoke, waiting for me to respond. I knew he wanted me to. “What did you all say, in a nutshell?”, came my query. I took out my hands from under the shawl that we were both sharing and placed them on the top of my caudal ribs. “What is right. We supported the rectitude of the decision that courts make and were tenacious about the correctness of the punishment that the rapists deserve as their just deserts.”, he said, turning his face towards me. “What’s the matter then?”, I asked, looking at his face. I hadn’t looked elsewhere since my gaze was once transfixed on his visage. “Mr. Allison did not stand with us. In fact, he was the only one in the whole crowd of the class who spoke in clear obverse. He called shrewdness as ‘mistaken’. He said that the fault wasn’t entirely the rapists’, but the victims’ as well. Expounding his point and not substantiating it, he ascribed the flaw to the dressing senses of the girls. He was overtly sexist to point out the name of Shram in the class and describe the leotard-like jeans she had worn the other day somewhere outside the school’s premises. She was embarrassed to have him talk about how her tight jeans divulged the silhouette of her thighs as the fabric attached closely to her legs. All and all, he meant to put the blame on the victims of molestation, calling their short dresses as nothing but ‘an invitation to the men, that they entice the latter with the parts of their bodies that their dresses don’t cover.”, he halted and breathed in deeply. I sighed. For the first time in our nights spent together, I was uncomfortable indulging in a conversation with him. I ransacked enough courage in myself to finally ask him “What do you think about his question? What is your view on this matter?” “Of course that the blame is on men. If we can wear what we like, so can the girls; the difference is only in the gender and nothing else you see.”, he continued to say, “I want you to know something. This is the reason I brought up this kind of matter tonight. I have seen a few crooked lanes around and also a few men who remain constantly sozzled at those avenues. God forbid you should never have to meet with such a heinous encounter anywhere in your entire lifetime, but if you ever do, I will want you to fight. Fight them with all the strength you have in yourself. Just do not give up, not at any cost. I mean to tell you this not only because you are my sister, but because I won’t like you to let someone dominate you in any way. No one owns a claim on your body but yourself. So give it all you can. Just don’t stop fighting”. He closed his eyes as he turned his face back to the pallor of the ceiling above the room. Surely we still had an examination at the door of the next day, and it was almost three in the morning by then, but I did not regret a second of it. Having spent that time listening to him being evasive with my sleep seemed to be worth a few hours spent. Somewhere inside my heart, I knew I was going to take that for life. It was just a dialogue witnessed out of nowhere on one night of the year 2018. I cannot let go of this lesson which, unlike the bike lessons with him, was so easy for me to grasp. That was the moment I knew what pride felt like because I had that in him. His empathy and sagacity in seeing to the issue of such subtlety despite his masculinity won my pride for him that night. In the darkness of the night, as it was living its last hour and the sun was peeking through the stratus in the sky, it was his brotherhood for me that was underscored in the silver lining which had somewhere made my confidence in him a little more palpable and had made my hair rise as lint of strength on my skin.

The remembrance of such a night passed with him foments the air in my milieu now. The traces of such memories are not pricking me anymore; they are chiseling my soul apart. “He said that, didn’t he?”, I whisper to myself as Rally switches off the song and makes a call to someone. He leaves his chair, but I don’t want to grab a seat anymore; I barely seem to be moved by the disturbance within. I only fear that I will collapse if it doesn’t stop to judder my core. “He called you his sister. Yes, I remember he did.”, I iterate my words with a skerrick of variance to myself again. I can feel the affliction intensify in me as I recall his voice that once uttered the noun ‘sister’ for me, yet I keep recalling and recalling over and over again. I can’t, by hook or by crook, ever grasp his words of that night as voiced with a blithering charade and ones that he never meant. He meant them. Yes, he surely did. I felt the emotion in every syllable he had spoken that night. How can I ever take them for pretense now? The songs that we sang while being completely careless of our hours of sleep and construct broken harmonies for the same, now echo within the skeleton of this rotunda that rests annoyingly at the top of my body and that I so badly want to detach myself from. Only if I could without having to die to do so, damn I would have done it! The lyrics of various songs sing themselves in distant melodies that fit together really well. They are all too versatile and amiss with each other the next moment. The harmonies are rather desultory, perhaps, evincing to me that I never got mine right with him. Out of the surfeit of the songs we spent so many nights of our teenage singing in whispers, I can only hum the lyric of Fleurie’s song Hurricane - “Coming like a hurricane, I take it in real slow. The world is spinning like a weathervane, fragile and composed”. I hear Rally leave his seat and get up. He traipses along the edge, not stopping to hit his fabric to and fro against the air that is too thick now. He waddles further ahead and strangely, that concerns me. I turn around my head to check. I see him standing on the farthest edge of the terrace. My eyes then fall on the ground and I approximately fathom the distance that lies between us. It measures to be somewhere around five strides long from my seat to where he stands. He puts his left leg on the ledge and continues to beat the fabric in the air. He retreats towards the chair after a minute or so passes. He sits down again and begins to hum another Bollywood number, putting a different song on play on his cell device. I am left to heed to the previous moment that passed me by just now with some serious consideration. But it’s not in concern for Rally. My head reverts, but I turn it back for one more time and look at him. He swings his head and the gestures of his arms are precisely visible in the dark. I heed to the moment of his stance close to the ledge for myself. I see it as an omen I am supposed to comply with. The gradual degradation of the sense of innocence in me clobbers every corner of my corpus inside and I struggle to make room for my spirit to reside in it. I detest the way I feel now and want to set myself free of the taste so bad that I want to become incapable of feeling, but I don’t want numbness to work it out for me this time; it does the job but never serves the purpose. It’s the only palliation that makes me incur the worse in the aftermath. The aftertaste has often bruised my tongue. I look downwards at the cement of the terrace right beneath my thighs and then look straight towards the ledge that stands well constructed and upfront, just a few feet away. I sense an eccentric desire to fathom the depth that lies ahead of it. The words of Jennifer Niven clamor inside my brain saying “It will be over in seconds”. It turns into temptation and only grows stronger as my mind reminds me of the second hour of the afternoon of today. I hit my head with a fist, only to flaunt my failure at mollifying the sensation. The latter now feels sharp on my skin. It is hard for me to keep clasping the surface of my body; I can only scratch it to feel the burning pain on the surface because it is too warm beneath it. I slip my palms from my forehead to the sleeves of my georgette jacquard. The pieces of glitter pulled out from the fringe are palpable on both my palms. I look for anything that is jagged to cut a crevice on a part of my arm and let it all out. Nothing I do slows down the pace at which my brain prepares another memory for me. It’s as new as a fresh injury; I have received it only today.

“Adjin.”, I called out as he jiggled in the room I juxtaposed the door off. The door was ajar. I did not move into the room. Rally was kipping in yet another room which came prior to the room I was in. I had collated the money from him. I held the bundle of notes and counted. “Five hundred and fifty”, I repeated to myself for the sixth time. Peeping in through the space that remained in between the door and the doorjamb of the next room, I screamed this time “Adjin!”. He had plugged in the earphones in his earholes. I somehow assumed that he was either watching some video on a physical workout or any latest release of the official music video of the Korean boy band BTS. I turned my sight towards the window of the lateral windows of the room the moment he lifted his head and took notice of my call. I tightened my grip on the bundle of notes inside the fist of my right hand. In the spur of the moment, I sensed the seductive desire of hurling the notes right on his face deep within my chest. “Don’t do it”, I told myself, slackening the grip. He came into the room but had to stop at the doorway for I was standing quite close to the door itself. “Here, take the money that I owed you.”, I spoke, quelling the fury that was ablaze within. “Be polite.”, I whispered to myself inside my head. He accepted the wad of notes and commenced counting them. The gesture of his counting the money in front of my eyes was the staple evidence that he had lost all sense of his brotherhood for me. He no longer trusted me. This prompted me to ask “Was I ever out of your sight Adjin?” “What?”, he replied, barely looking up from the bundle of money. “Was I ever at any place even in this house where I was invisible or somewhere where you couldn’t find me that you conjectured I might run away with your money? I believe we lived, as we still do, in the same house. I was and am in front of your eyes every second of the day. Where did you think I could have run away to, taking hold of this petty amount of money?”, I enquired, quelling the anger deeper inside. I had forgotten that doing so would only make it recede in a high tide. “You have given the money that you owed me. We are done now. The matter is settled.”, he said, just as I had expected to hear. “NO! We are NOT DONE!”, I shouted. “How much do you think this amount measures up to huh? Just a trivial incident of my revelation of impatience once more and you shun your brotherhood elsewhere! Just in the span of two days, you confounded your stance as my brother. In just TWO DAYS! Two days did it take you to relegate me to the position of some of your damn business clients! In two days you showed the ugly truth, pulling down your veneer and divulging your true colors. How dare you treat me like that?!”, I was not pressing my fury any lower any further. “Didn’t you hear what I just told you? I have got my money back and we are done! For God’s sake, leave the matter now!”, came his response as he reached out for his wallet on his desk that stood at the closest corner of the room. “I WILL NOT leave the matter! You are too obsessed with associating me with Rally’s actions, given my behavior, aren’t you? I think it’s my moment to turn the mirror at your face; may you bother to take a glimpse of your own reflection because you look just like him. Let me explicate it a little to you, dear. Ever since Rally married mother, tell me if there has ever been a word of compassion in between the two?! On a bigger screen, he is so avaricious that he has never thought of how his words must sound when he asks back for his every single penny from her. Well, my dear twin brother Adjin, you did just that. Do you see it now? And you call me as an image of Rally. I think so, are you? Tell me if you can deny it! Oh YOU DARE NOT!”, I uttered, the tone of my voice rising. “I have got my money back. I’m done with it. I don’t care whether you are or not. So just shut up.”, he came back, pushing the money inside the central pocket of his wallet. “Did you not hear what I had uttered a moment ago? I WILL NOT!”, I continued to say, loosening my grip from over myself. I did not wish to push myself down anymore. The mad dash with all kinds of bitterness was imploding inside my chest. He put his earphones back on like earmuffs in his ears and feigned to be listening to the music. “So you are scared to encounter the reality, oh you sturdy coward!”, I spoke, inciting him. “Who do you think you are Ivy? Tell me one single thing that you have done for the family. In fact, allow me to speak for you this once. You have ordered the mat for your physical exercises; you have ordered novels in a number that I can no longer count on my fingers, but barely reading all of them; you have ordered a table for the laptop that you use, a notebook as your personal jotter, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. ALL FOR YOURSELF! You are such a selfish bitch! Now hear me out what I have done for the house. I have handled the kitchen well. I have taken good care of its décor and cosseted much of it so far. Would you have done it? I cook for the family now and all you care about is to take delight in gobbling up the delicacies that I cook. Aren’t you ashamed? I have changed the scenery of the washroom and see how better it looks! I have spent money from my fund of scholarship to buy the induction stove so the monthly cost of gas utilized can be deduced to some extent. Moreover, I have learned the morse code; I have learned how to flawlessly use the jump rope, and I have also learned how to play a few other pieces of the musical composition both on the guitar and my keyboard. Now tell me, WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE?”, so he enumerated his inventory of new achievements. I remained quiet. None of what he said was deniable. It was all correct, things that he said about himself and me. “I don’t refuse to accept that you’ve done a good deal for the house. That is because you have sought your fancy in the household chores, I couldn’t simply because I don’t like to indulge in the household tasks. You have contributed a lot in this bailiwick of yours and now seek to embellish your hall of fame with rather a machismo in bragging your hauteur just because what you came to like doing matched with what the ménage was already doing. Is it my fault that I cannot like what the others like? I found my penchant for activities that are quite reclusive and thus, what I do doesn’t go for the family but more for myself. Why don’t you understand that the difference lies in our interests? I see what you want from me. If I devote my hours to doing what you do, regardless of how insipid I may find all of it, I will make you happy. Let’s say that I do comply with it. I will ask you to like what I do then. Will you realize how difficult it is to have someone else’s tongue to reckon any taste for you? I have my own mind just like you do.”, I expounded, heaving out a quiet sigh. “Whatever!”, he said, deriding my argument. He persevered to speak for the last time, chuckling with a vivid intention to guy me, “ I am gobsmacked to know how stupid you can actually be. You are such a nasty piece of drivel in this house! Had I been a mother’s place, I would have ceased to pay for you. Indeed, why pay for a profligate bane who does nothing but pricks and pricks and pricks! God! It’s incredible how I maneuvered to befriend you after giving you a second chance. Silly me. I should let you know for your own good that you are the most selfish creature I have ever seen in my whole life. How did the chagrin not kill you even now if I may know? You have only contributed in giving away more and more troubles, and DID YOU EVER FREAKING a VENTURE TO CARE UNDERTAKING THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY ONE OF YOUR OWN ACTIONS?! NO! Not in the time I have passed with you. You haven’t rendered a single stone unturned in disappointing me. I am disappointed beyond words. I must appreciate you for succeeding to turn one down so incessantly. Does that make you happy? I don’t wish to remain connected to you in any way. If my action hits you as indignation for what I did is unlikely of a brother, then I step out of it. You are only biologically my twin sister. Is that enough to put the dispute to rest? I don’t care what you do in your life. Just don’t ask me for anything. I am done. Oh! I am so done! I don’t give a damn anymore. You don’t deserve to belong to this family anyway.”

All of what we had had together then seemed to fade like sweet dreams inside my mind as does this hour with the thin air now. Their disappearance in the core of my mental confinement that remains encompassed by the walls that lack a corner makes me feel like I never had them. That bike rides at five in the morning, with him doing the entire task by pushing the cycle by its metallic carrier at the back and only my enjoyment of the ride that was always promised at the end of every session that, despite my dearth of any lesson learned, he would never deny; the nights spent whispering songs till three in the morning or, perhaps I should say three and a half in the morning sometimes when it would still be dark outside, but we wouldn’t be satiated trying to harmonize and actually doing quite well; all those instances when he had saved me from my father’s bludgeon by locking me inside a room so father wouldn’t get to me; those petty fights over the packages of Top Biscuits which were my pick and the Bourbon Biscuits which were his wherein we would draw lines of demarcation around the containers they were kept in and what not then hit me like the most terrible nightmare I could, in no way, prefer not to see. It would have been heaven had I been able to. But I had to descry a spectacle of hell in every way. Now everything appears to be just a dream and nothing else. God! If only I knew what these memories would conjure themselves into one day, I would have never ventured to dream about them. Sadly, I actually lived them. Ironically, in spite of all the sweetness they bear, they only hit me hard right under my skin. I can feel every knot of my kinship with him untangle itself. The more I try to hold on to them, the more easily they slip away – exactly from in between my fingers. I am always vulnerable to relinquishment. Had I not had him, I might haven’t been alive here at this hour of the night. It is strange for me how difficult I find it now to let go of what are just memories for me. Perhaps, it is hard for me because I loved him for real. It was always unlike his contempt for my relationship with him because my likeness with him in blood was always a little more expensive than that amount I returned to him and beyond what Biology can ever get to explain. We rested in the same womb. I know no way to see that truth as another dream of mine. Maybe, I can reason it why. How can I pretend now that they were just dreams I was beholding in my sound sleep as a little girl? I don’t know how to, unlike him who pushed them off the ledge in just the lapse of two minutes. I hate to wonder if he was always pretending. I hate to perceive that it was always a possibility because I have witnessed it gain life with my eyes wide open. Was nothing ever real to him? I guess I will never know, and the worst part of it is that I cannot try to either. It hurts so bad to think about the good times that we had even when the times were hard. Our tie together had demystified even the face of the devil. I am scared for I believe that when the demons come to get me behind the old chairs in the room we slept in, they will actually find me. I will be there all by myself, and I won’t want to fight them, not this time.

“Ivy, your mother is calling you down for dinner. Come down.” Rally says as he makes his way downstairs, leaving his chair right where he was sitting. I don’t mind his carelessness now. And I think that has my credence for an ultimate truth I have been made to realize – I am as equally guilty. I cannot gather enough strength to move my legs. “You don’t deserve to belong to this family.”, I whisper to myself, “Yes, I heard them right. Those were his words”. I do not want to be downstairs. I do not know how I should carry myself to a place where I don’t belong because my dignity still breathes insides my lungs but my confidence in everything delicate and subtle is wearing thin like I never thought it would. How shall I live with him under the same roof? From where do I rummage the guts in my core when he is the one to have emptied it into a hollow? I ask myself if I’ll ever be able to look at his face at any time and not recall that we don’t love each other anymore. Beyond my anticipation, he was too quick to be on the other side and did not look back at me this time. Of course, why would he? He is free now, free from the twin tie that those two minutes tied us with. This is such cruelty of fate, utterly at its worst. You try to save something and you stretch your hands afar to hold it tightly, but you can barely feel the touch. What you want to protect like your own soul starts vanishing, driving you mad and scared as hell. It feels like you finally open doors to doomsday. You no longer give a damn if you have to lose your hand in the pursuit of what you want to save, even if they are the dregs of spilled drink; they are the remnants of elixir for you. You are ready to die because otherwise, you are dead anyway. You simply can’t let go of it. But there it fades a little more and then white smoke is all you see gather right upfront your face. You touch the clouds of smoke and only help them disperse all around you. Sitting here all by myself now, I try to think if he ever said those words before, anytime before, at any hour of any day. I again tell myself that he did and that he didn’t mean a word of it. He blurted them out recklessly and so did I shove them aside carelessly as well. I tell myself “he doesn’t mean them now either. He is only being his former self. Remember how he uttered exactly the same syllables on that day? They didn’t even last for a day. SHIT! Let alone a day, they didn’t even last an hour. Don’t you remember?!” I say that to myself again and again that he voiced the utterance formerly as well and he didn’t mean it at all. I try to recall but the words coming out from his mouth sound all afresh and I can hear them once more, only like an uproar now – “You are only biologically my twin sister”. I keep reiterating about all of what never happened – hah! Such vain a search for arrant nothingness because he never said that before. He did not. I hadn’t sensed the gale beforehand, but now, I was in the middle of a hurricane. So little did I know of these vicissitudes, completely untoward and nothing else, when we came into this world together, with not more than just two minutes keeping the seconds of that hour when we had been carried out of the womb of our mother from marking an hour of magical coincidence. It hurts to know that it didn’t take him even that long to break it. At that moment, his words almost undid the truth that we had started off together. How could that piece of truth, so real and one that we had lived even before coming to be cognizant of how to feel the human emotions in our lives, not cross his mind even once? Perhaps, that was nothing more than just a fact for him – a biological one. You see, he made it all seem to me like we had only shared a womb and nothing else. And may I now be ridiculous enough to sketch an allegory of our mother’s womb in the shape of a minibus which we only shared as a vehicle and were too soon done as the bus pulled over. Nothing else remained. But even amidst this second when it has all come down to pieces like a shard of broken glass, I am astonished how my mind can still manage to ask “But what about the ride that we shared? What about the wind that crept in from my window and hit his face on the other corner of the bus right where he sat? What about those minutes the bus took to reach the station when we could have looked elsewhere from our respective windows and seen each other’s faces? Would we not recognize anything at all? That too was a possibility, one that remained as it had been – just a possibility”. Only the thin air around me seemingly attends to it.

The drops of rain commence pouring lightly in the ambiance. I feel it fall lightly on my skin. The scratches I have incurred burn inevitably, but I promise I don’t bleed. “IVY! Come down, it has started pouring!”, I hear my mother beckon me from the stairs of the basement below. A few drops of the downpour on my cheek and I no longer have to hold tight the tears that have formed a deluge within my eyes. Hear my mother call out to me for dinner is a plethora of complexity for me to look into now. Does she mean to evince that she still considers me as part of the family? Will she become oblivious of what she perhaps, means to keep right now at some later time just like he did? I will do anything to not live it, be whatever the price. The heartache has cost me all my strength. I don’t know if I have anything to lose because I’ve been victimized by a theft where my so-called twin brother stole my love to never return, only if he kept it safely. I see it rotting away, second after second. The temptation of taking a step ahead of that ledge still invites me with an alluring peace. It doesn’t promise any pleasure though. I envision that I’ll perhaps, forgive him if he once says that he did not mean what he had said. I will. I really will because I don’t want to lose what…what we used to have. The wind strikes my face with the wet drops of rain. I feel the weight on my heart as I realize that it will stay the same this time. It has been invariably entrenched in every part of my mind. There is nothing I know of that will help me get that shit out of my skull. I will crush my bones to ruin and the heck of the utterance will still breathe through them, sticking to every bone of mine like a repulsive treacle. “Ivy! Come down right now! What are you doing up there? It’s too late anyway. Descend now or I am coming up.”, I hear my mother speak for one last time. I count the steps that I take to reach the ledge. “Just two strides like those two minutes. Hah! Those two minutes of both hell and heaven on Earth.”, I whisper to myself and descend the height of the house that was no longer my home, falling supinely with my face facing the sky. I don’t close my eyes but keep them consciously open to behold what it was like for one more time. I wanted to refute myself over the assumption that the sky would be aloof tonight. I was terrified to see the other part of the possibility. But there it is, shining bright in the middle of August and right above the entirety of my body as I lay stretched on the lane like a vagabond who never belonged anywhere. My eyes blink once and catching sight of the sky for the last time, I close them. It was full of stars.