Tantamount

Two small girls faced each other in their bed and told secrets in cryptophasia, each looking at their own executioner, smiling at God’s wit. I imagine God herself took cuticle scissors and cut DNA up along the double helix, dividing the zygote, so that 29 years later she’d have something to read about over coffee. Like the most impractical joke.

And I wonder what that kind of passion for unification feels like. What it is to share so much of yourself with another person, down to a cellular level. And I think of God being so cheap for only giving them one soul.

So maybe that’s the reason, as women, they found themselves with a weight in their palms in exchange from their shoulders. And a countdown, because timing is everything. I imagine they started at ten...nine...eight…

Then through chambers bloomed lead and a simultaneous “pop” that absconded in infinite directions throughout Colorado, propelling itself through November’s brittle air, striking God’s eardrums like an egg timer. I wonder which sister kept the mutual soul, and which had really died.

One twin dead , one twin the suicide note, and never being asked again “Which one are you?”.