MERGE
by SKYLER MELNICK
- An Abstract Sort of Grotesqueness
You’re ugly.
No, you’re ugly.
Not as ugly as you.
My twin and I talk like this a lot. The truth is we’re both ugly––we’re identical. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where it all went wrong. It’s an abstract sort of grotesqueness, features that slant evil, prickly eyes, mouths like canines, thirsting for blood.
We’re an okay sort of people. Anne draws. I like history. Anne speaks to people. I speak to Anne. This makes me her shadow, mostly I live as her shadow. The world doesn’t particularly need two of us.
But the absolute truth of the matter is that she’s uglier. She has a mole on her chin that droops down, like it doubts itself. I have a similar mole, except more self-assured, like it wants to be there.
Don’t move, Anne tells me.
She is drawing my face. Her face. It’s a self-portrait.
Can I smile? I ask. Our teeth are our best feature. They’re small and sharp, like a shark’s. They suggest strength.
Sure, she says.
Only I don’t know how to smile. I lift my lips and hope for the best.
Anne studies me, studies herself. She thinks our chin mole is the same. I know it’s not. Anne takes her arm, the arm that looks like mine, and moves it across her notebook paper. She is not a great artist. I don’t tell her this.
Done, she says, holding up the notebook.
My eyes dart to the mole, and it’s not even there. She has gone for a stick figure sort of portrait. Our eyes are dots. We have no mouth. Our body is a line. Our hair is one curly cowlick.
The plan is to open a museum when we’re older, with history for me, and art for Anne. She wants to exhibit her work there. I will not let that happen. Maybe one portrait. In the bathroom vicinity.
Anne thinks that a shadow, me, is behind her, ready to obey her every whim. A shadow, me, is not hiding, but waiting. I have been waiting 11 years. I will wait one more. And then I will emerge. And there will be only me. Ugly and singular.
- Death and Deductive Prowess
Today is a special day. Anne and I get to skip school and attend a memorial for someone who has died. Anne thinks it is our mother, but I’m fairly certain our mother has been dead many years. We live with our auntie, and she does not exactly convey information to us. We are often left to our own deductive prowess, which is, in Anne’s case especially, extremely limited.
We know the dead is a woman, as we heard our auntie on the phone, gasping, is she really gone? And surely we can deduce that much.
Really, it’s moot. We are delighted to have the opportunity to travel by train and view a dead body, no matter the reason. We have wanted to see one ever since I learned about war and Anne started depicting the human form.
Bring the rabbit book on the train, Anne whispers to me across the breakfast table. She likes rabbits too much for an eleven-year-old. I am going to tell her this on the train. I will not bring the book.
Bring the pink crayon and the teal and the purple, she adds. Do not bring red.
I nod. I will bring nothing.
No whispering at breakfast! Our auntie joins us at the table, delivering sustenance. She does not like being left out, does not like us having secrets.
Anne and I eat breakfast the way we do everything: together. We share a bowl of porridge, porridge with bananas. Though Anne is starting to think she does not like bananas, which is odd of her, as she has the strongest affinity for bananas of anyone I’ve ever known. It’s me who detests them.
Our auntie watches to make sure we eat, because lately we have taken to displacing the food she gives us, displacing it into various crevices of the apartment. We think it is highly amusing. Anne spreading her porridge under couch cushions, me plopping it into the fish tank.
We will not do this today. That is fine. We have much excitement ahead of us. I eat all my porridge portion and feel it sinking to the bottom of my stomach. It is not a pleasant feeling. I assume Anne feels the same.
I will drop you off at the station, our auntie says, scraping porridge with her pinky finger, and Uncle Melvin will pick you up. I’m sorry I can’t attend, she says, I simply can’t bear it. She stifles sobs. You’re doing well, very brave, very, very brave.
We nod. We say nothing. Anne stares into my eyes and I stare into hers. Our auntie coughs a throaty chest cough and phlegm comes out. She is a mystery to us.
- Journey
We get our own train car. We use old, reliable methods to secure it––fellow passengers slide open the door, and Anne and I hold hands and hiss. We have to do this seven times in a row. Nonetheless, it is effective. I think it helps that we wear identical white dresses and make our eyes wide and twitchy. I don’t remember whose idea it was to hiss. Perhaps mine. I am more evil than Anne. Anne is bland, like toast.
The train is mere minutes into its journey when Anne and I begin bickering. I was trying to think of famous trains from history, when Anne asked for the rabbit book.
You are eleven, I tell her. Too old for rabbits.
Then Anne smacks me across the face. It’s more a fit than a targeted assault. It hardly hurts. Anne’s arms are wiggly sausages. They don’t do anything meaningful.
Then Anne is out of our train car and searching for a bathroom, but also trying to get away from me, and I’m following her because what else would I do. We snake through aisles. There are so many doors to open, but we don’t. We are searching for the bathroom so Anne can escape me and pee.
I watch Anne on the toilet and she watches me watching her. She is trying to tune out my existence and convince herself that I am her reflection. I try to mimic her, to reflect. I squat down and squish my mouth up small like hers. She is conveying anger.
- Destination
Anne is still conveying her anger, when Uncle Melvin acquires us at the station and shuffles us into his vehicle. We are headed straight to the service, to death. The man clears his throat. He is our uncle, but we have not seen him for years. He could just as well be anyone.
You’re getting so big, he looks in his rearview mirror at us, at me. Anne is not being very reciprocal.
The man who is our uncle presses his lips together and emits a loud smacking sound. His mustache quivers. He is not an attractive man. I start to hope it’s his body we’re en route to see.
I also hope that maybe Anne is right and the body is our mother’s. I haven’t seen Mother in so long. It would be nice to see her, even in cadaver form. Sometimes I feel like an orphan. Good thing I have Anne.
Though Anne still isn’t speaking to me. So I shove her with force, her body crashing into the car door with a thud. Her anger amplifies and she starts crying. She’s always crying. The reason I can’t is because she hoards all the tears.
Uncle Melvin says nothing. He is busy smacking his lips. He is of elderly age, hair prickling with white. Perhaps he can’t hear us.
- The Body
The three of us funnel into the church, Anne dragging her feet. Uncle Melvin disappears into the crowd, and we are left alone. Everyone wears black. Our white dresses make us look like angels. Perhaps we are. Perhaps we were sent here to reanimate the body.
I want to talk to Anne about death. So many people throughout history have died. Wars, plagues, murder. It’s all very exciting, and I can’t bear to have no one to share it with.
Anne keeps trailing behind me and people look at us and blink to make sure they aren’t seeing double. Anne has become my shadow.
As fate will have it, cruel cruel fate, the casket is closed. Body out of sight. A fat man in gargantuan robes talks for hours, and I drift in and out of sleep, bored to death by the absence of it. Anne sits beside me in the pew, mute. I shove her a little, but she doesn’t move. It’s not just her dress that’s white, but her whole body, pale as paper.
There is a reception after, people must leave the church and go elsewhere. But I don’t leave and neither does Anne. Uncle Melvin seems to have forgotten about us. Perfect.
I touch my eyes and they’re wet. Odd as I haven’t been able to cry, not for years. Because of Anne, the tear thief.
Casket, oh casket, I whisper, wandering toward it, wiping my wet face.
Anne follows, silent. It is aggravating. I’m supposed to be the silent one.
Do you dare me? I ask her, my hand near the casket. I think maybe it’s a portal. I’ll open it and be transported, to a world without Auntie, without porridge, without orphans. A world with only Anne and I, merged.
Anne does not respond, but I feel the dare, on the tip of her tongue. She stares at the casket, lips parted. Is she thirsty? No time for bodily needs. Need to see the body. My hand creeps closer and closer, until it collides with casket. I lift with all my might, but it turns out my might is not much. It takes many minutes of grunting, Anne watching, nervous and useless.
You’re useless, I tell her.
Finally the casket door lifts. I look back to share my triumph, but Anne is gone.
Anne? I ask the empty church. Anne, you’re not entirely useless. Come back please.
- My Body
It’s a strange sensation to open a casket and see yourself inside it. It really is. Only it’s not me exactly. Anne must have crept in somehow when I wasn’t looking, to play dead. She’s a silly thing. I shove her arm, the skin translucent and sort of bluish, like a dragonfly. She moves but not really. Her arm is cold and flaky, is my arm that cold and flaky?
Wake up, stupid!
I shake her more vigorously, her skin flaking off. I rub the flakes into my dress. Anne is tiresome today.
Did you go and DIE on me! I tickle Anne’s armpits, giggling. Giggling so hard, stomach starting to hurt. Somehow I end up in the casket beside her. It’s a small one, quite squished. I haven’t been this close to Anne since the womb. I try to warm her cold, ugly body. Her skin keeps flaking onto me. Probably some of it’s mine. Still, it’s nice in here, real nice. Maybe Anne knew what she was doing. She knows some things, after all.
Can I be dead with you? I cuddle up to her.
I will be dead with you! I declare, but my body refuses to die. How did Anne die? She’s been dead for a while, hasn’t she? It was her mole wasn’t it? Her ugly, drooping mole.
It’s bright in the church, too bright. I wrap my fingers around the casket door and pull. I pull and pull until it crashes down, closing us in.
author pic here
skyler melnick is currently a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow, with an MFA from Columbia University. She writes about ghost girls, guillotines, and women falling from the sky. Her work appears in Fairy Tale Review, Prairie Schooner, Split Lip, and elsewhere, with support from Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
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