I remembered standing there, staring at the remains, waiting for the fear to arrive, the monster in the wardrobe that must have done this. But neither the fear nor the monster ever came out. I was left with only confusion. A hollow space where a memory should have been.
And as time went on, that hollow space became all too familiar.
Some mornings, I’d wake up with dirt under my nails, packed so deep it hurt to scrape them out. Other mornings, my palms were sticky, darkened with something that smelt like metal. There were times I would notice dry blood on my nails and on the cuffs of my pyjamas. Yet I would search my body and find no wounds.
There were always gaps in my memory. Whole hours, days missing. Like someone had taken scissors to my life and cut pieces out while I slept.
One morning I woke up and found my mother lying on the bed, still as a picture. My little sister, Ophelia—two months old—was wrapped with a thin linen, left on the bare mat, wailing, breath heaving loudly.
And my mother…my mother’s skin was breaking. Not rotting all at once, but splitting in places, soft and wet, as though her body had forgotten how to stay closed. Thousands of maggots writhed through the seams of her flesh, pale and frantic, spilling out of her the way words spilled out of a mouth that had forgotten how to stop speaking.
Her lips were dry, white. Her eyes…empty.
At first I didn’t understand. My mind couldn’t. Because the last thing I remembered was eating the porridge she made for dinner. I had stood by the counter while she stirred it, watched the steam rise and vanish. Ophelia was long asleep on the bed, thumb buried in her mouth.
I remembered going to bed full…warm that night.
I had slept.
I had only slept.
But whatever had been wearing my body wasn’t asleep while I slept.
AtAn Sgàil House–an academy for the children considered wrong by society–where my sister and I had been shoved into after our home was set on fire, I finally met him. The thing—boy or ghost living inside me.
I was standing on the bathroom stool one morning, facing the mirror as I brushed my teeth. But something was off; the boy in the mirror didn’t move the way I did. His mouth curved when mine didn’t. He had a sharp grin while my lips were pressed in a thin line. And his eyes looked older, watching, not reflecting.
He tilted his head, studying me like something fragile.
Then finally,“Hello, brother,”he dragged the words on his tongue, testing it, sending a chill down my spine. My toothbrush slipped from my grip and clattered into the rotten basin.
I didn’t scream.
I didn’t run.
Because somehow, I already knew his voice, knew his existence.
According to my late mother’s dusty diary that I was able to grab before we got kicked out of our home so they could set it on fire—with my mother’s decaying body in it, the doctor had told her it was a‘vanishing syndrome’.One moment, the scan held two heartbeats, the next, it was only mine. The doctor said I had eaten my brother. But he laughed it off like it was something dismissive.Babies do that sometimes. It was simply…biology,he said.
But did biology have a history of whispering to you in the dark?
My twin brother didn’t vanish. He lived as a ghost inside me. I hated it, but it was a price I had to pay. A little sacrifice becauseI had taken his life before he got to live. It was a predicament I was willing to endure. As far as he stayed out of my business and I stayed out of his.
But this blood always clinging to me every time I woke up was annoying. I hated it.
A soft groan left my lips as my eyes cracked open for the first time in a while. My cheek was pressed against the black porcelain tile of my room. My fingers twitched, as if life once left my body and now was slipping back in through my bones.
Half of my body was on the bed, while the other half had slid to the floor, twisted, like I attempted escaping myself the night before but couldn’t.
Then, a familiar scent hit me; coppery and fresh, clinging to my skin like another pulse.
I lifted my hands and saw it, blood lining my palms, damp and thick. It threaded under my nails, streaking up my forearms like something had been dragged down.
My throat tightened. My nose flared slightly, and my jaw flexed.
Seriously, what exactly would it take from him to just clean up, leave my body the way he met it?
I stood up fully and a ringing started in my ears, faint at first, and then sharp enough to blur my vision. My memories from the last moment I was in control of this body flickered, broken, a fragment I was desperate to piece together.
