We

We’d obviously been twins since we were born, curdled in the same womb. Something, to say the least, went heinously wrong. As ordinary as a humans can be, as much as I hate to label myself as such: I am, ordinary, at least in relation to…her. During our idiot-box childhood, our teenage baby-sat experimental drug-use years, our befuddled sexual encounters…I could always rely on Agata. She was my…go-to, per say, if anything were to go wrong, and at that age it often did.
Agata was much more reluctant and naively unenthused than I was. This naivety seemingly caused her to become surprised by everything, though it was easy to tell this was just a guise. She was aloof, emotionally abstract—in the sense I felt I couldn’t possibly comprehend what she did—, and detached. Her dreamy, indolent quality bothered most people but I grew to tolerate it; it even began to rub off on me over the years.
But those years didn’t last long as Agata disappeared one day, apparently never to return, leaving our family distraught and forlorn. For some reason I had…a premonition, or at least a knowing feeling that she would eventually do this. It was in her estranged, wretched character. Wretched because she always was the spectator of her own mind, an objectified work of art to others. Over the late her indolence and abstraction only accentuated. The day she disappeared I felt nothing at all except sorry for my parents.
That was certainly not the last I saw of my twin sister, though I dearly hope it’d had been the last.

One morning two years since she’d vanished I woke up in bed surrounded by police, swaggering about emphatically that I had no idea what was going on, scrawling indecipherable notes. They told me to be quiet until finally, disgruntled, I got out of bed, tossed some clothes on—half-naked right in front of the pigs, and stormed out of the room. I still hadn’t a job and was living off my parents , who were in shambles, weeping in the living room. I demanded an explanation but everyone gazed at me warily as if I was the perpetrator of whatever crime had ensued.
“What’s going on?” I noticed only my mother was in the living room. Upon hearing my voice she only continued to sob hysterically. I was becoming neurotically impatient. Ignoring the bumbling, oafish police I wandered into my parent’s room.
My father, nude, garroted, a steak knife sticking directly out of his forehead, lying up against the bed wall. The steak knife seemed to be a surfeit exorbitance, bizarrely grotesque amount of gore and the way the body was contorted signified that the crime was quite personal if not familial.
At first I didn’t know how to respond. Part of me felt that I should be or feel some sort of deep sadness or despair. However, all I could think about was my sister; I could still elucidate her immaculately. For some reason I had the foreboding portent that this was somehow involved with her. I missed my father dearly but my obsession with my sister was devouring. Plus, the murder was too abstract for me to engorge in it at the moment. I needed some time to sleuth.

Our family had shoved it under the rug when Agata vanished. She was the stereotypical valedictorian cheerleader, dabbing into cocaine on the side, sleeping with the quarterback. She indulged in all of this with the same dreamy, indolent glazed persona, apathetic to any hormonal or emotional turmoil girls her age typically suffered. She had an inimical twinkle in her right eye; jade iris, elfin sclera. I was the only one that seemed to notice.
I had the iniquitous notion that Agata had merely vanished from our lives…not from life itself. Our town, our small town, had banished the thought of Agata returning long ago, and belief had inured into routine despite any proof otherwise. The scene itself showed no signs of perpetrators let alone suspects.
Grieving over the next couple months I toyed with the idea of Agata’s inexplicable vengeance. Had she come back to deprive us of something she herself felt deprived in childhood? My hypothesis was far-fetched until the day I came face to face with her, dawdling in our front-yard. She stood as if she was sitting on a swing-set. My first inclination was that she was a ghost, but she sauntered towards me like any other human being and reached out to shake my hand. I had been expecting a hug.
She said nothing at all for quite awhile, then limply pointed in the direction of our house, specifically the kitchen and dining-room. Leery, I turned around, mostly out of timorous curiosity, but something had also already assured me dinner was served even though I hadn’t started cooking yet, as had become accustomed around the house.
And there was the feast, worthy have a Thanksgiving banquet, somehow fit onto a tiny suburban dining-room table balanced by a tennis ball. Having expected this, I glanced back at Agata, who smirked flippantly at me. She remained silent; I was tongue-tied.
“Where have you been?” I implored.
She said nothing, twiddling her feet. Obviously bored of me, she began to walk in the opposite direction, swaying her hips impudently. I watched her walk until she was out of sight.
Then the house set ablaze, a roaring inferno teasing into some chimerical geyser of flame, razing the house to the ground within seconds.

Having no evidence the police deemed it a freak accident. However, I was the most predominant suspect, and this set the stage for recurring liability. I searched for Agata in my father’s car, who himself was incredulous of me, having not being able to afford my own yet. Despite that I insisted of her existence and partake in the arson, I couldn’t locate her anyone in the town, nor the town nearest, nor the one after that.
Just as I was about to lose faith in my own memory, a knock came on the front door and I knew it was her as if out of premonition. Before I opened the door I unlatched the safety off of my father’s revolver, aiming it directly above the chest-line. Upon opening the door Agata gave me an ingratiating smile and welcomed me outside.
“What a beautiful day!” she exclaimed, breathing in the drab climate. “Vanessa, why, are you going to shoot me?” She whimpers, taken aback, pretending to have just noticed the revolver. “What is the meaning of this—do you mean to shoot your own twin sister?”
“I don’t intend to, no, but if the—”
“Lower your weapon and put your hands in the air,” an authority figure speaks over a speakerphone. I lower my weapon and look behind me to see a brigade of policemen and detectives, all armed, pointing from assault rifles to pistols at me. Raising my hands in the air, I gaze back at my sister who’s giggling maniacally.
“What’s…going on?” I shout, immediately tackled to the ground and cuffed, lugged off to a police vehicle and having my seatbelt put on for me. I continue to inquire what’s going on, trying to sustain my temper.
The driver of the car, apathetic and languid, relates that two sisters split up years ago, years ago about now yes, one run off and never returned but supposedly, supposedly she has returned and has been framing the other for aberrant criminalities.
“Do you know the name of the one terrorizing the family?”
“I believe it’s Vanessa if I’m not mistaken, but I could be wrong,” the policeman slouches. I stare at the man in awestruck disbelief.
“Yeah, Vanessa always was the kooky one,” I begin, attempting to impersonate my twin. “I didn’t think she’d go this off the edge though.”
The driver slouches further into his seat, snatching a baggie of some sort of powder from his pocket. It’s brownish-whitish.
“So how long am I going to have to stay in here?”
“If you’re the culprit, hopefully a long time,” the officer wipes his nose. “I can tell this is going to be a long game of who’s who though. Don’t be too worried.” He snorts the powder out of the bag with a sawed off straw.

I anxiously twitter in my cell, jerking involuntarily to the screams of my fellow inmates. Occasionally the guards feed me, flinging me a tray of inedible slop. My twin has assumed my former position and somehow knows all my perks and peeves. She is, in fact, better at being me than I am. Her only flaw is that she is consummately perfunctory. She is unable to make the necessary mistakes that contribute in defining me. Of course, this is, nearly impossible to notice.
Her new boyfriend is considerably out of my league. He wasn’t always; I just haven’t aged well, whereas she hasn’t aged at all. Every moment I am in here I feel on the brink of having a seizure; I had one as a child, misinterpreting an amphetamine bottle as sweet and bitter candy.
Most of the inmates’ eyes are glued to the idiot-box in the upper hand corner of the jail room. I can tell by how their eyes are glazed over that they’ve been here a considerable while and have no intention of abdicating.
Suddenly I hear a scream from one of the guard’s quarters. Rather bloodcurdling but not unsettling. Another one, this one quite disturbing; a hyena laughing reluctantly? Scream after scream, each more distressing and exotic than the next. There are sounds of men being gutted perversely, then derisively eviscerated. For some reason I don’t feel threatened, even when every cell is somnolently bolted open.

As I flee the penitentiary along with the rest of the inmates the detective from before grabs me by the arm and drags me into his conspicuous undercover car. Nudging me into the front seat before circling around to the driver’s seat. He looks at me suggesting what the hell is going on. I shake my head; he slams the driver’s wheel.
“Tell me or I’ll—“
“It’s her; my twin sister.”
“Elaborate.”
“She’s feigning me for whatever reason; I have my doubts that she’s even alive.”
The detective begins to chuckle. “My name is detective Doppelganger.” I roll my eyes.
“If you don’t want to believe me, fine, but can you explain that bizarre phenomena? The one, where, you know, all the prisoners escaped inexplicably? Not to mention, the guards all died, to some unforeseen force?”
The detective pulled out another baggie of the brownish-white powder and sniffed it out of the same straw, then gave me a reassuring glance. He un-holstered his gun, musing over the possibilities and the impossibilities that made them possible.
An inmate pounded on the window of the DT car, eyes bloodshot, as maddened as a sane man can be. The detective revved the car up and drove forwards, running over the inmate’s feet; the inmate shrieked in agony.
“My name is Midge,” the detective sputtered, running over another inmate by mistake, shattering the window. “Fuck,” he reached for his baggie of—
He broke sharply just as Agata came into view, directly in front of us. She was smiling coyly, hands by her sides, hair undone. She looked like she had just come out of the shower, glancing at the penitentiary shrewdly. Then she simpers at me, moseying voluptuously towards the car. Midge makes to hastily open the door but I jarringly hold him back; he glances at me, perplexed.
Agata, tilting her head downwards, vanishes into thin air.
Midge looks back and forth from where she was once to me, mouth agape, confounded. I beam at him in a manner that suggests he should have suspected nothing less. Refusing to believe that someone can disappear into thin air, he throws open the car door, slamming it behind him. He walks to the exact position in which she vanished, then glances back at me as if expecting an explanation.
He trudges back to the car, vexed, switching on the radio. A reporter is broadcasting the recent prison outbreak, and to my dread, accusing me of its entirety. Midge, supporting his forehead with one hand, looks at me incredulously. I nod. The inanity is irrefutable. I am not the perpetrator and the perpetrator possesses alien qualities, yet there is no way that I could conceivably prove this.
“I’m no paladin,” Midge sympathizes boldly. “But I have…meager morals.” He smiles; a twinkle in his smile, vaguely alluring. Teeth so luminous it makes me feel guilty for not wearing whitening strips.
“Are you alluding that we’re both now fugitives if you do the morally right thing,” I plead.
He sighs. “No shit.”
After a compulsively introspective moment of silence, “So where to?”
“Was going to ask you that,” he murmurs.
“Since she’s assimilating my rage as her own, I’d suspect the worst.”
“Apparently she can evaporate anywhere, at anytime. This leaves us at a glaring disadvantage,” Midge wallops the wheel. “What do you think she’ll frame you for next; better yet, where do we hide.”
“Murder, I assume,” I brood over where we could take refuge temporarily if and until the circumstance mitigates. “Or genocide.”
“I suppose we can’t plan for what we can’t predict or understand.”
“Like demonic twin sisters that have transcendental capacity?”
He pulls out his sawed off straw. I put my foot up on the airbag compartment.
“Let me take a hit of that.”
Midge glances at me zanily. “Here, have a Red Stripe.” He reaches back into the backseat and pulls out a six-pack. “It’s good stuff.”
“You’re sniffing drugs, and, there’s a,” Vanessa glares at him reprehensibly. “There’s something serious taking place.”
“That we can,” he snorts, tilting his head back and closing his eyes, snorting again with his head tilted back, “do nothing about.”
I snatch the baggie from him and pour the powder into my hands, huffing it politically. I snort it all. Midge looks at me in despair; probably because he now no longer has a fix. “You just snorted sixty dollars worth of very pure heroin.”
“Should I pout?”
He turns the car on. “As much as I’m obligated to take care of you.”
“How about frightened.”
He snickers. “No. Just enjoy it.”
“Why do you take this stuff anyway; I mean, aside from the fact that it…”
“You got a better reason to live?” His eyes droop as he says this, raising one foot onto the front seat.
“Doesn’t it kill you?”
“Taboo kills you. You’ll be just fine for a lifetime if you’re not an idiot.” He begins to drive, forward, then stopping, then forward again, onto the highway-like stretch. He notices me looking at him affectionately and piteously. I cringe. “You know if you take the bait out of the expression jailbait…”
“I’m twenty-two thank you.” I am flirting with him too much. And this feeling that’s overwhelming me…
“Okay girl let’s focus. You have an evil twin. Something needs to be done about this.”
“And I presume you have concocted some…master, master plan!”
“I just might have,” inmates scamper down the freeway like zombies, limping, foaming at the mouth, screaming obscenities. “But you won’t be coherent long enough to—exactly. Listen. Your sister is possessed; y’know, have you ever seen that movie what’s it called, The Exorcist? Maybe we need to hire a priest. How do we summon her I don’t know. She must respond to something and it must be related to you.
“This would be a great time to get to know a little about you aside that you’re a snarky impulsive sweetheart.
“I’m going to ramble to someone who isn’t listening because I’m gifted at it. Let’s see…
“Strangers have such mystique. They're almost methodical in what they won't share. Social confines enforce it. Also, there's the phenomena that whatever a stranger is doing is more important than what you're doing.
E.g. Courtship. The whole concept of dating is, frankly, absurd. So-and-so likes so-and-so for months, spends them brooding, stalking, waiting for the one moment it takes to trigger a relationship. It's as if they need to be invited and their obsession is emotionally amorphous.
Film doesn't help either, as it sets a false paradox in that every moment of our lives should be filled with action. However, during one's life, action rarely place takes at all. We spend most of our times alone, studying, working, sleeping, etc.
All these preliminary impressions are crippling to forming relationships, especially with age. The truth is if you don't feel lonely, you're probably an archetype.”
“Would you,” I mutter.
“Shut the fuck up, I know. But I was trying to elaborate on how I don’t even know who you are and yet I’m coerced into an intimate situation with you.”
“This is not, an intimate situation,” I mouth, lolling my head on my shoulder. By now I’ve lost all physical feeling in my body; I am giddily apathetic and emotionally unaffected. I close my eyes and, as he puts it, nod off.

It takes me bout two days to struggle through the high itself and being strung out the following day. No sign of Agata, though I did get to meet Midge’s dealer, Rush. I hadn’t imagined a heroin dealer to be so kind. Not many crimes took place in this area, and Midge’s phlegmatic attitude towards life became increasingly apparent to me, including his heedlessness in terms of substance abuse. The irony that I felt comforted by a corrupt cop was eccentric, but I suspect there was so little crime that he felt no guilt indulging in it.
A day later Agata, armed with an assault rifle, shot and killed forty-seven students and seven teachers at the local high school. Midge had to turn the telecom off because the amount of hope seeping through it was nauseating.
“Why forty-seven students? Why not,” I chewed my lip, “forty-six?”
“Why don’t I care?” Midge questioned sincerely.
“I think you’ve reached a state of metaphysical nihilism that at the moment you can’t rid yourself of,” I rattle off, barely paying attention. “Plus you’re on heroin all the time.” I muse over Midge’s sincerity. He seems truly baffled. “Midge, you are a degenerate, solitary member of society that has no law to uphold except the ones you break.”
“Come to think of it, ever since Columbine I’ve wanted to walk into a high school and…”
My twin sister knocks on the window of the cruiser, very resemblant to G.I. Jane. Midge rolls down the window and jams a syringe full of heroin into her jugular. I stare at collapse on the ground, aghast. He chuckles, jaundiced, then gets out of the car and lugs her into the trunk, taking the precaution to handcuff her. When he gets back in the cruiser I kiss him on the cheek. He blushes. I smile.

“They’re accusing you of the massacre at the high school,” Midge mumbles.
“We can’t turn in my twin sister and claim it was her, not that it actually wasn’t, but she’ll just vanish into thin air, abdicating herself. We need to keep her shackled, chained, and bound.”
“Kinky,” Midge sighs, exhausted. We’ve been driving for miles, contemplating how to exorcize a possessed woman.
“What if she’s not possessed,” I pant, anxious. “What if there is no devil and she’s simply a human anomaly.”
“What if…she’s you.” Midge ruminates. “A part of you. A part of you that triggers during certain conditions.”
“Do I look like one of Pavlov’s dogs to you,” I grimace.
“Well then just because there’s a devil doesn’t mean there has to be a god.”
“I…guess,” I’m not convinced, clinging onto his arm.
“There’s only one way to find out. You stay here,” Midge places his hands on both sides of my arms, reassuring me I’ll be safe and to stay put. He opens the trunk—Agata screams diabolically—and I can’t make out exactly what he’s doing until a streaming line of blood squirts out from behind the car. I put my hands over my ears and begin to cry.
Thirty or so minutes later and lathered in blood, Midge closes the trunk and waddles out from behind the car. He looks at me gloomily and shakes his head.
“I disemboweled her. There was nothing. No signs of demonic possession.” I can tell he’s trying sincerely to express emotion but is zonked on heroin.
“Throw her body in the middle of the woods. They’ll mistake her for me.” He nods.
“What are you going to do now?” He asks, worrisome.
“There’s only one thing for me to do,” I gape, lethargically raising my eyebrows. He stares at me imploringly. “Think about what I’m going to do.” The both of us linger for a moment, woolgathering, fixating on the ground. Overhead I notice penumbral clouds ominously gathering together; lightning flashes, proceeded by obnoxious thunder. As the clouds swarm into a cyclonic tempest, a holistic light beams through the aerial foliage. God appears.
“There is no God,” he bellows, his voice knocking me onto the ground. He conspicuously broods for a moment, reflecting over something trivial, and with that, he is gone.