each bending an ear-shaped cone
to the pond’s surface. If you looked closely,

you could make out silvery koi
swishing toward the clouded pond’s edge

where a boy tugs at his mother’s shirt for a quarter.
To buy fish feed. And watching that boy,

as he knelt down to let the koi kiss his palms,
I missed what it was to be so dumb

as those koi. I like to think they’re pure,
that that’s why even after the boy’s palms were empty,

after he had nothing else to give, they still kissed
his hands. Because who hasn’t done that—

loved so intently even after everything
has gone? Loved something that has washed

its hands of you? I like to think I’m different now,
that I’m enlightened somehow,

but who am I kidding? I know I’m like those koi,
still, with their popping mouths, that would kiss

those hands again if given the chance. So dumb.

  I hang my robe and walk into the cold pool—I want it to bite at me, gnaw at me—even though at the front desk they told me it was a cycle. Hot: ten minutes. Cold: thirty seconds—this one is scary, but it’s crucial. Then: relax. Read a book. Have a nap. Repeat. Do this three times, or until we close, at nine. Trust us. This is medical fact. We’re a licenced facility. Ask your doctor.

  The cold nips, then fuses into me. Knifes my shins, then thighs, then pelvis. A wave laps over my belly button and it feels like a stabbing.

  Sign above the pool says 1. Suits must be worn at all times, 2. Shower before swimming, 3. Use caution if pregnant (no problem), 4. No swimming under the influence (I promised Mabel so I won’t). I follow rule 1, wear a navy one-piece (Mabel’s, swim-team style, look at me, athlete girl, reflective strip blazing up my hips, baggy like extra skin) and board shorts (Elliot’s, doesn’t know I have them, or forgets I have them, or remembers but isn’t coming back for them, will just buy new ones, surf waves on one hem, aloha on the other, men’s medium, held up only by the water cling-filming them to my thighs).  

  I didn’t shower before swimming. Sorry. A woman walks out from the change room with dry hair, skin powdery. Collective rule breaking isn’t rule breaking.  

  Rule 5 is No Talking. Respect the Silent Space.  

  Staff in alpine jackets carry trays with paper cups. Water? Lotus tea? Methadone? I don’t reach for one. I don’t ask what it is because there is No Talking Allowed and it’s probably lotus tea.

  I’m a blue woman here. A negative degrees Celsius woman. Goosefleshy and the colour of skim milk. A girl, twelve/thirteen/fourteen, with braces and twiggy limbs, points me out to a friend, and they scuttle off. What’s so strange about me? Really, tell me. Oh sorry, you can’t. I kneel, breathe, and submerge, the cold so thick around my chest it feels like it’s inside, tingles through my brain like a buzzed cymbal or popped champagne.

  My lungs get hot, but that only makes it more bearable. A bit of friction to light me up, something to distract from the icy liquid piercing some unlocated, constant point of my body.  

  I pop back up like a premature birth. I didn’t mean to surface. Water clears my ears and it’s quieter up here, with restrained, not-allowed whispering, and water shushing, and blood rushing back to my eyes.  

  The cold is like a skin of bees, crawling or stinging, but I don’t want to leave. A worker wearing a grey beanie and hiking boots—a late-teens/early-twenties girl with deep acne on her round cheeks—stands on the walkway with her arms crossed. She walks to the edge of my pool, leans in, and does a small wave, like to get my attention, though I’m staring at her already. She has tiny hands, and mist clings to her coat’s fleece trim.  

  I want to make her break her own rules. The back of her coat reads Silence Please so I want her to scream at me, or better, make her whisper at me, because surely at this point I’m a hypothermic colour, that same colour as the sky, and they don’t want a lawsuit on their hands. When I don’t respond, she’ll snap, shout, while I stand there, marble girl. But everyone is staring, not at the worker though she’s equally implicated, just at me. Everyone is staring from their steamy warm little hot tubs. Suggested elapsed time in the cold: thirty seconds. Why is she standing there, amniotic with ice water? Weirdo. Strange girl. Ghost girl. Doesn’t belong here, of course, but what are you going to say about it? No talking. This is a silent space. Respect that, please.  

  I climb out and, under that chipmunky pimpled worker’s eyes, take barefoot steps across the concrete, to where the water is a hot river with a fluff of white steam. I take steps in until her eyes leave mine and she walks away.

  Heat pins and needles my legs, stabbing up my soles, shins, calves. Like I’m melting from the blood. Heat, bubbles, static, then cool, flat, only warmth left. I sink to the thighs, submerge to the belly button. Elliot’s board shorts balloon and hover at my waist, flutter in the jets. Last time I wore these he was asking me to please just get in the car over and over and for one second I wasn’t screaming and actually heard him speak. I realized that he wasn’t screaming. Only I was. My throat burned, and maybe that’s why I wanted to keep doing it. Screaming, that is. It was like holding my breath too long. I had nothing else to wear until Mabel brought me clothes a week later, held his shorts up with an elastic, one side twisted into a knot. I haven’t seen him since. I guess I can never give the shorts back. Rattling with detox, I’d scratched at the hem with my thumbnail until my skin cracked, and now the threads wisp in the current.

  I want to talk to Elliot, I’d said, when Mabel came to visit me, grocery bag of clothes in her lap.  

  He’s not here, Mabel said.  

  Tell him to come here, I said.  

  Six months earlier, Elliot went to Costa Rica to do ayahuasca. He’d invited me to go with him. He’d offered to pay. Right before he left, he said it was barely worth healing if I didn’t do it with him. I refused to do it with him, so he left angry, but it’s okay, plant medicine taught him to let go of resentment. He sat under palm fronds and drank from a shaman’s cup and tripped until dawn. Apparently it cured his addiction, and his grief for his cancer-dead father, and he no longer fears death, and doesn’t need therapy or anxiety meds and has found true forgiveness for those who have hurt him. Worth the $600 a night and the ego death during ceremony #3. I said that to Mabel, I said, maybe I should go to Costa Rica to do ayahuasca and it’ll cure me like it cured Elliot.

  I don’t get it, Julia, she said. I just don’t get it.

  There’s nothing to get, I said. I wrapped myself into a bony fetus, my own elbows and knees sharp to my touch. I hid her by pressing my face into my thighs.

  Well. You’re welcome for the clothes, I guess.

  She left after that and didn’t visit me again until she was walking me into the sun two months later, saying, Julia, I think you’re a new woman now. I have my sister back.

  When we got into the car, I asked her why Elliot hadn’t picked me up. She just started to drive.   

  A jet kneads into my spine. The water is trying to whittle me apart. Look at me here in the water, Mabel. Look how 🤬 clean I am. Two weeks out and I’m still so clean.  

  Steam wafts off the surface and melds with the low hanging fog, floating through the evergreen boughs. It’s a dusky navy hour; the snow looks like a glucose-packed snow cone all soaked in blue drizzle, ignited by the lights in the pools. Sugar high radioactive. The water hums in a continuous shush. Even the water wants us to just shut up.

  Across from me, a woman walks backwards down the pool steps, one hand linked with her boyfriend’s. He follows her, a playfulness between them. He’s boyish looking and tall, an innocence that grew up with him when most shed it, a textbook compliment to her. Mom must like him. No one ever said Elliot and I made a good couple. His mom never liked me. This woman probably gets a lot of good things in life because she’s tall but not too tall and lean but not too lean and toned but not too toned.  

  I spin circles in the water with my fingers.  

  She sits across from me through the steam. I stare long into her hazel eyes because I know her. Her gaze probes back at mine with the same recognition. Her name is Charlotte, but we called her Charlie. During presentations her voice had a confident, feminine clarity. I’d dropped out six months before we would have graduated. I hadn’t attended class all semester. She walked out with her Marketing BA and probably hasn’t wondered what happened to me since.

  Her ears are lanced with delicate gold hoops all the way up the cartilage, so dainty you forget at some point that hurt. Hurt real bad. Poke then heat then throb. Adrenaline junkie? I see you, Charlie. I see you. She wears a white bikini and water beads cling to the wavy caramel tuft sticking out of the bun balanced on her crown. I thought she was so pretty even back when we lived in neighbouring apartment units. My eyes always traced the slope of her nose and jaw like if I studied, parsed, analyzed, I’d be able to replicate. When she and her roommates hosted parties, the music was acoustic and indie, the light yellow, and they never broke any windows. I’d press my nose and forehead to my wall to feel the buzz through the plaster. They talked over music, then talked over silence, then laughed sporadically until everyone fell asleep. The vibrations stilled and I had a tender spot at the third eye.

  She’s probably thinking: I wonder if Julia and Elliot are still together. Probably not. If they were, he’d be here. Julia looks awful. Skeletal. Tired, or black-eyes healing? Hard to tell. But of course, that’s no surprise. Julia was a 🤬 up girl. He was a nice boy, Elliot. They never belonged together. She was bad for him. Gave him his first kiss with marijuana. Before they’d met, he’d been a virgin to narcotics. Didn’t even like the taste of beer. Our lovely little designated driver.

  Her boyfriend whispers something to her, but she doesn’t turn to him. She blinks at me. She’s probably thinking: They were never going to last. Of course they didn’t last. Couldn’t have. Shouldn’t have. They didn’t last because Julia was so 🤬 up. No excuse for it either. Nice parents, nice sister, equestrian camp during the summers. They had a retriever and a front lawn, shining like some emerald pearl. But she ruins everything. Bad influence. Bad energy. Bad person. Junkie.   

  There’s something at the back of my throat like the half-digested remnant of someone I don’t know anymore trying to claw back up. “Elliot too,” I say, above a whisper. Lots of people whisper even though they aren’t supposed to, but it’s all sucked into that watery shush shush shush so who cares? I just say it. Loud enough to hit her over the purr. No one scolds me for not respecting the peaceful space, but everyone looks. I press my spine straight against the tile. Jets gurgle and spit against my face. Charlie blinks, 🤬 her head like I don’t know what she’s thinking, and turns to her boyfriend.  

  But I know, and she’s thinking: She was bad for him. She dragged him into it. It was her fault. She ruined his life. It’s better this way. Hopefully he’s happy now. Hopefully he’s clean now. Nice Elliot. Smart Elliot. Good grades Elliot. Bright future Elliot. Not like Julia. Messed up Julia. 🤬 up Julia. Good thing he got away.  

  When I stand, the water clings thick to my body like syrup. It adheres to my shorts hem and drips off at the seam. Charlie stares at me, and her stare invites her boyfriend to stare at me, and their stares invite the entire pool to stare at me. Say something about it. I 🤬 dare you. But you don’t break the rules. You don’t know how. It’s easy after you’ve done it once. Here, I’ll show you. I don’t want to break them alone.

  I grab a robe that might not be mine and follow the pathway between pyres of steam. Bathers look like monsters boiling up.  

  I walk into the first building I see, feet numbing hotly on the cold pavement. Solarium, the sign reads. Sun? Solar? The sky is grainy blue, retro cold. It’s vintage hour. The air inside is temperatureless. Two dozen people lounge in recliners with their eyes closed or lie on the floor. Some read books with chakras up the spines. The kind of books Elliot started reading after he did ayahuasca. The kind of books Mabel wants me to read even though she doesn’t abide by their rules herself, she just wants me to be gullible. I must be gullible. After all, I’m an addict. I had to have been gullible once. Gullible idiot, believed poison was stars supernovaing in my blood.

  I walk between the rows of people and sit at the front of the room, where windows stretch floor to ceiling. My face gaunt and body gutless in the glass, skin dissolved. I am floating eyes and a blurred edge of lip, skull-less but haloed in chlorine-frizzed baby hairs. The lack of body, or lack of soul. My skin dries and the robe slouches off my shoulders. I’m so clean I can see right through myself. Look how clean I am, dripping with water.

  But sometimes I miss feeling gold at the seams, even if it meant feeling myself rotting for periods in between goldenness. I miss feeling that, instead of tepid all the time. I miss Elliot before he found inner peace. I miss Elliot before he did drugs to make him stop doing drugs and suddenly he was better than me. I miss Elliot bad with me then Elliot better than me then Elliot mad at me and Elliot sad for me. I miss Elliot saying Julia, we have to stop doing this, then Julia, you have to stop doing this, then Julia, I don’t know if I can love you like this.  

  I miss that, instead of no Elliot and Mabel buying me a $90 spa day voucher for one. I want Elliot to yell at me for stealing his shorts. I want him to yell, Julia, you aren’t good for me, then Julia, you’re hurting me, then Julia, you need to get away from me. I want him to yell so loud his crepe-paper voice blackens my eye sockets just from the sound. He’d never do it on purpose, but I want him to. It’s just like he said, I’m not good for him, but if he’s not good for me too, we could be equals. I want him to bruise me up with his softness. Philosopher Elliot, Role Model Elliot, look at him and me now. Good Egg and Bad Egg, show me you can be both boy, because my skin is fragile, so his thumbprints could stain my arms, and then I’d have something of him left on me.  

  My skin is clean now, I’ve been scrub scrub scrubbed, and Mabel eyes the crooks of my elbows when she picks me up to drive me to group therapy every week. Nothing there now. Nothing for anyone to see.  

  Out the solarium window, the snow is starkly white against the cool brush of the evergreens. I sink into the damp cables of the bathrobe.  

  A horse pleats through the trees, snow fluffing around its hooves. It’s sleek and ebony, like a creature made of oil, black sheen gleaming under the glow from the solarium. It huffs and raises its muzzle to stare at me. Its tail flicks like an ink droplet.  

  I study the people around me in the reflection and look over my shoulder. No one looks out the window. They sleep, passed right out. Someone turn them onto their sides so they don’t choke to death. Someone watch over them. Someone be their Elliot. Don’t call 911 on me.  

  The horse doesn’t move. I want to reach out and touch it, feel the huff of its breath in my palm. Punch through the glass, shake the shards from my sleeve, the blood from my wrist, and touch it. Its velvety muzzle alive under my hand. There is no talking allowed in the solarium. No breaking allowed in the solarium. The horse flicks its head. I want someone else to see it and scream, cause a scene. I want it to leave, silent and easy like that, before I become responsible for saying nothing. Not that I can say anything. But it doesn’t. It just stands there. A stray wisp of light refracts in its solar eclipse eyes, some piece of leftover sun snagged in the trees, even though in a minute, it’ll be night.

Shaelin Bishop

            “Want one?” he says. The molten glow is the only light in Clay’s house, a thirty-year-old sedan. It has a carpet of cigarette butts, fast food bags, and gas station receipts. Six months of car life and he’s running out of space for debris.

            “No. Thanks.” I would melt. Cassie is ice; Clay is iron. That’s how the genes were dealt.  We met in the womb and said goodbye in a hospital bed we shared with our mother. We shared a body and a birthday and nothing else. If there had only been one, would Cassie-Clay live in a car or a house? You’ll get lung cancer, I think, but don’t say. “I’m gonna smell like smoke because of you,” I say, but don’t think. I cough on his breath.

            You’d think he would try a little harder to hide the pyro to his mania, but he parades it around on his fingertips. He gives his fire a kiss. “You’re gonna smell like smoke because of more than me.”

 You should quit, I tell him telepathically. Twinepathy: we’re supposed to have it. I never know what Clay is saying with words, let alone thoughts. Ash spills on his lap; it burns me more than it burns him. I swallow a cough instead of letting it erupt.

            “Gas is under the back seat,” he says. “Grab it for me?”

            I punch him with my eyes. Too bad he’s looking away. I lean over, reaching for the red handle tucked around a grave of gum wrappers and empty cigarette packs. It’s been four years since I jumped and he burned. He aged backwards from then on and I aged forward three decades overnight. We both look nineteen on the outside, but I have a scar on my temple and a permanent ache in my back. Clay’s mark is years of compressed impulses, like a shaken up soda can. I give the can one more kick, stir the bubbles to the surface by placing a jug of gasoline in his lap. Now, I can pop the tab.  

            “You’re not gonna do what you did last time?” he says.

            I tighten my fingers, still loose around the handle. “Are you?” Wrong answer and I’ll take away his child.

            “This time I’ll actually burn it. If that’s what you want to hear.”

            “Can we just go? Your car stinks.” I pull my hand away, like it’s already burning.

 

 

Five hours ago, Clay had traced the teeth of a butter knife across the tabletop. He flicked off the pulp in the divots and carved another line, tally marks on a prison wall. On the table’s corner is a scorch mark from where Clay took a lighter to the oak when we were eleven. This was later blamed on a tipped over candle from Thanksgiving dinner. A candle I tipped, of course.

            “Chicken, Clay?” Mom said.

            Rather than drop the knife, he knew to play subtle. He nudged the napkin over the scratches. “No, I’ve stopped eating meat.”

            “When did this happen?”

            “I don’t know. It’s a health thing.”

            “You quit smoking, then?” Dad looked from Clay to Mom. “If he’s not gonna eat it, I’ll take his piece.”

            “Clay? You quit smoking?” I said, eyes to him and then to the damage he clawed.

            “Not eating meat counteracts the smoking.” Can someone made of fire burn even more? Perhaps he needs to smoke to stoke the embers in his chest, to poor fuel on his life force.

            “Well, maybe next time you stop by you should give us some notice. So we can cook you something different.”

            “Don’t worry for him,” Dad said. “Smoking suppresses your appetite.” He went on to comment three times that the chicken was delicious.

            “Cassie, what times does your shift end tomorrow?” Mom said in a tone hushed enough that it was meant for me and only me, but placed in a conversational lull so it instantly became collective business.

            “Five.”

            “I’ll pick you up, I need the car. Your appointment is at five-thirty.”

            “Yeah, I know.”

            “What appointment?” Clay said, his eyes bounced from his damage to me.

            Mom answered “Dentist” at the same time Dad answered “Shrink”.

            I excused myself under the guise of getting a glass of water and never came back. I spent half an hour eavesdropping from the stairwell with my forehead on my knees. A chair screeched. Dishes clashed in the sink. Clay’s footsteps—soft, sure, like a burglar—padded away from the nightly bicker, which fell right on time no matter which twin was present for the evening. The door opened, and never shut all the way: an invitation.

Clay twirled a cigarette through his fingers, like a cat plays with its prey. Smoke fused through frosty dusk, he held a single star. I shut the door and sat next to him on the bottom step. He leaned back and I curled forward, forearms on my thighs. My breath made patterns just like his, freezing in the air instead of burning it.

            “You’re a vegetarian?” Code for: you’re a pathological liar?

            “You’re still in therapy?” Code for: I really 🤬 up your life, didn’t I? “How are things in this old household, Jumper?” A question whose presence answers itself, like a love letter never returned. Instead of looking at me, he raised the end of his cigarette to one eye and tried to find an answer in the ash.  

            “You’re the only person who still calls me that.”

            He puffed smoke into my face. I couldn’t slap him across the shoulder, couldn’t touch the charge to the conductor. Doesn’t he know some people have lower melting points than he does?

            “Do you even remember my real name?” The firefly he had trapped on a leash beat, brightened, and burned. It pulsed with the heart it clogged.

            “Probably not,” he said, making me the prey he batted between claws.

            “It’s Cassie.”

            “It’s Jumper.”

            I pulled dead grass from the edge of our lawn, and dropped the pieces over my lap. Some caught an edge in the air and lolled to the ground. Others crashed, broke bones. They lay there, concussed. “The house. Better. Now that you don’t live here.” I stretched my neck, cracking the joints. A four-year-old ache, it’s never gone away. “How’s the car?”

            “Sweet.”

            “It’s a filthy piece of 🤬.”

            “Yeah, but you don’t live there.”

            “Why are you in town?”

            “Gotta stop by every once in awhile, or they get suspicious. A dinner here or there. How’s the cat? How’s work? You know, so they don’t file a missing persons report on me.”

            “We don’t have a cat.”

            “Noted.”

            “Why are you here?” I pulled the weight of each word as heavy as they could go.

            He exhaled, long and cloudy.

            “In words, please. Don’t make me read the smoke.”

            “Just a pit stop. I’m going up to the cabin.”

            “Up Hemlock? By yourself?”

            “Yep.” He crushed the 🤬 of his cigarette to the concrete step.

            “For how long?”

            “I probably won’t even stay the night.” From his pocket, he flicked another smoke from the pack.

            Lighter on his thumb, he looked at me. A half glance, rare for us. Nineteen years of garbled words, but that moment, on those steps, we spoke the same language. Negative and positive poles spun across the concrete, skittered down the stairs, and smashed together in a zap. We started as two cells cozied up to the other in a soundproof, syrupy bubble. We were finally in the same place again.

            I stood and brushed the shards of grass from my lap. “I’ll let you finish chain smoking in peace. Let me know when you’re leaving.”

            If there had only been one, would Cassie-Clay burn houses or jump from their rooftops?

 

 

Clay pops the car door open. He drags the can of gasoline with him, a crowbar in his other hand. I roll into the cold with only my body to carry. Lucky Clay, he has a permanent store of warmth in his belly. How unfair. Shivers turn the ache in my spine to a twinge. Stars burn cold overhead. The moon drops a ring of light in the ink. I pull my toque low, the fuzzy edge in my peripheral. It’s still better than being in Clay’s house, arctic rather than nauseating. The shoulder of the road slopes into a field that glows blue. Trees, their needles matted with snow, bind the expanse into a forest. Clay skids down the hill on his heels. I follow with my arms crossed, tiny steps.

            Clay says, “Hurry up.”

            I say nothing, lungs seized against the cold. He’s caught in the beam of my flashlight. With age his hair grew a shade darker than mine, his spine stretched taller, and his pupils got wider even in sunlight. It’s easier when looking at him isn’t looking in a mirror, but warped scrap metal.

Through childhood we lived in rooms across the hall, were in the same class kindergarten, grade three, grade four, grade seven. We shared blond hair and grey eyes and crooked noses. We caught the same school bus at the same stop, where we pinged stones off the same street signs while we waited and occasionally turned those stones on each other. We graduated high school with our photos next door in the yearbook and spent our ceremony sitting uncomfortably close. Static bubbled in the space between. Our names were called in procession: mine first, then his. The opposite order of our births.

            “Be nice to your brother,” my mother would say when squabbles ended in a broken toy or a scraped elbow. “He’s the only friend you’ll have for your entire life.”

            Wrong, Mom. Clay and I were never friends. We’re estranged.

            I’d hold out a reluctant hand, and Clay’s eyes would never meet mine as I pulled him back to his feet. “Sorry I pushed you,” I’d say, no eye contact. We had that perfected. I knew to look at the spot right past his ear, only catching out of focus wisps of hair.

            “Apology accepted,” like Mom always taught him to say. “I’m sorry I said you were stupid.”

            “Apology accepted.” Code for: I’m not sorry.

            What’s the use in apologizing to someone you’ve never met? A stranger’s words don’t hurt. He probably fell on purpose.

            Now in the snow, I test that Twinepathy again, thinking fall, fall, fall; but he stays steady, not even a stagger. His shoulders are dropped low, relaxed. Mine hunch up to my ears. We can’t be twins: I’m cold blooded. I follow the glowing end of his cigarette; smoke ebbs from his mouth like a drop of blood in water. There’s always a face in the pattern. How can so little form so much?

            “You don’t want to do this?” he says, after ten minutes of walking. We’ve slipped into the thicket of trees; their wells are quicksand and they’ve cut off the moon.

            “Does that matter?”

            “A little bit.”

            “It’s fine, Clay. I’m just cold.”

            He doesn’t pry, because you don’t care about the secrets of a stranger.

 

 

“Who’s the evil twin?” Schoolyard kids would ask to our matching faces and shared last name.

            “It’s Clay.”

            “It’s Cassie.”

            We always broke the rules, never fit the mold. One good, one bad. One light, one dark. Create and destroy. One has got to be messed up in the head. Everyone knew it was Clay. Those kids stopped asking the summer we were fifteen. They all knew it was me, I still knew it was both of us, and we weren’t twins—couldn’t be. If there had only been one, would Cassie-Clay be pure or corrupted? I suppose people born as a whole instead of a half get the luxury of being both.

            Something prickled the same at the extremities of our finger tips. We were connected through one organ, invisible and unfound in the rest of the species. Siamese twins that still felt the other’s painful tug even with miles between. Clay was no surgeon. Rather than take a scalpel to the stiches that bound our hearts, he took a match. He’d been trapped in my orbit. His gravity bruised me. Why sever the bond when you could burn your other half and brush away the ash a completed man? He’d lived with me attached for fifteen years when he decided to cauterize the wound.

Clay held a match and my eyes flickered from flammable thing to flammable thing—books, clothes, bed sheets. My room was tinder built for a spark.

            I’d said, “Clay, please don’t.” Code for: Clay, what are you doing? “What about Mom? Dad?”

            “Not home.” The fire, rather than my eyes, baited his gaze.  

           “What about me?”

           He flicked his eyes up and shrugged, making a matter out of the tiny motion. A shrug: because it was nothing. I was nothing to him. He reached for the garbage in the corner, full of old papers, and raised it level with his face. The match was near biting his fingers when he dropped it inside.

The flame whooshed up like a plane breaking the sound barrier. Air clawed at my throat as I took a jump backwards, crashing into the corner of my desk.

           “Clay…you wouldn’t really, right?” I raised my hands, spoke slowly, like I’d been taught to speak to a bear. The next words came out broken, a croak. “We’re family.” Code for: we’re supposed to be family.

          He lowered the basket enough for our eyes to meet through the fire. “Are we?”

          My room was on the second floor. I kept backing away, hands outstretched as a failed shield between myself and the beast, until the backs of my knees hit the wall. No—a window, open in new spring.

          The fall, the fact I jumped, shocked me more than the crash onto my back. The impact hurt, a shatter uncoiled from hip to shoulder, a bludgeon playing xylophone on each link of my spine; but it couldn’t have hurt more than burning would have. The shatters slashed with each strained breath. I blinked once, and the world burst with light like overexposed film. The world was terrifyingly quiet. A bird chirped. A plane whooshed. My body filled with blood and bone scraps. I drowned on our front lawn; attempts at screams scratched my throat like the chords were cut and their threads were razors. Was Clay drowning, too? Did the loss of our shared blood fell him? Or, was it like pulling out a splinter?

          “What the 🤬, did she just jump?” I never found out whose voice that was, neighbour or aimless passerby. Voices scrambled over one another like ants in a hive. I never heard Clay’s voice. He knew it was best to keep fire and its intentions under his sleeve. He let strangers on the street attend to his sister—the Jumper, what a psycho—while he cleaned the ashes in the silence of our house. Only I ever knew a match had been lit. Only he knew I’d jumped to save my life rather than end it.

            If there had only been one, would Cassie-Clay have a broken back or stained fingers?

 

 

I’ve been to our cabin three times in my life. Clay and I were children: age five, six, seven. Young enough that we got pulled along in the sled for half the trek, old enough that we never formed the attachment to care when we stopped going. Squat and boxy, still shaped like fallen trees, as if a pile of timber has conveniently assembled itself into a structure. Large enough to hold our family for a night or two, but no longer. No longer because Clay tossed my warm clothing into the lit fireplace; no longer because I dug a cave in the snowbank, shut myself in, and refused to emerge. It’s been left to renters and tenants, those not prone to cabin fever. Snow is piled a meter high on the trusses, icicles drip like broken teeth. It looks like a pile of kindling.

            I’ve put enough distance between us to cut the use in speaking. The cold wakes me up. Air freezes on my lips. Snow braces around my shins, each step bogged with the effort of walking through sap. The twinge in my back has become a cramp.

            In front of the cabin, the red can has been tugging at Clay’s hand for so long it’s starting to bruise my palm. Twinepathy: there it is. He drops the cigarette 🤬 into the snow. It dies with a satisfying fizzle. There’s only moonlight left.

            “I don’t have a key.”

            In answer, Clay raises the crowbar in his other hand.

            “Hold this.” He shoves the plastic handle of the can towards me.

            When he lets go, disconnects, my arm rips towards the snow, the weight pulls at my shoulder. It winds me. I let the bottom of the can rest bright red between the tips of my boots.

“Stand back, shield your eyes.”

            I drag the can of gasoline backwards with heavy steps. Clay raises the crowbar like an ancient Greek Olympian preparing to throw a javelin, and slams the end of the bar into the snow-piled window. Lines spire out from the impact point, a web bursts and creeps towards the frame. The second time he pulls the bar back, he’s a low-life crook rather than an ancient hero. The window gets an elbow to its already broken nose and shatters like a cloudburst. Glass rips the forest; aftershocks knock through the air. Clay gives soft jabs to the pieces of glass that cling to the edges. He clips them out one by one. Wasn’t shattering the skeleton enough? Did you have to crush each tooth under your heel?

            “Pass me that,” he says.

            For a moment, as the jug is transferred from my hand to his, our fingers are squished together on the handle. I wiggle my hand free, eager to shed the weight of his touch even through layers of gloves. We aren’t supposed to touch, there’s too much static sizzling under our skin. Clay leans through the window frame and drops the can inside.

            My breath puffs up like ash being bellowed from a fire when water is poured into its eyes. I rock my weight back and forth, shake the cold off, while Clay hops through the break he made in the cabin. The light from Clay’s flashlight pivots and slams into my face. I stagger back, crunch through snow and ice.

            “Cassie?”

            I shield my eyes. “Yeah, you’re blinding me.” I pull my weight onto the windowsill, swing one knee up, but I’m shorter than Clay; it’s not so easy. His hand closes around my upper arm.

            “Clay, I’m fine, I don’t—” Code for: don’t touch me, for both our sakes. I jerk my arm away, but lose my balance. He catches me again, grip firmer. I let him help me through the window, and my boots land on the hardwood floor where most of the glass diffuses from the center of the blast.

            Our eyes meet the way they never did when we were children. His pupils are wide like the addict he is. Mine are probably the same, but the only drug I’ve inhaled is the night. We have the same blood, scripted with the same numbers. I’ve been in withdrawal from chemicals I never took my entire life; insanity scratching at my skull like a rabid rodent. Its salted claws sting. Twinepathy, why does it only ever make me fall? We’re close again, though. Have we ever touched at a point that wasn’t a boxing match? Punch or shove or push. For once, we aren’t trying to rip the sutures that connect our hands.

             “You called me Cassie,” I say, instead of thank you.

            “Whatever. You know what I meant.”

             That thing we share in the pits of our stomachs, subdued for a moment, bares its teeth. You pet an animal to calm it before you go in for the slaughter, quell its squirming before you snap its neck. I’m tired of being the creature in the hands of the hunter. Small, instinctual, breakable. I finally skitter my eyes away. We are close right now. Too close, maybe.

             He raises both hands. A battered box of matches, a pocket lighter. “Your pick.”

             My hand twitches as I reach out, and I close my fingers around the soft cardboard of the box.

            “I don’t trust you with matches.”

             Last time I was in this cabin, I was Cassie and not Jumper. She was so easy to be. We track a path of snow through the cabin, the pieces break from the treads of our boots. Hansel and Gretel—at least our trail will melt. We climb in through the bedroom and creep into the kitchen. The cabin is decorated with a few bobbles that create the illusion of a rustic lifestyle. Moose head (pretty sure it’s fake), the pelt of some animal as a rug (likely also fake), and a faded painting of horses in a frosted field.

            “So do we just,” I raise the matches and feign striking one.

            “Gas first.” Clay pours gasoline over the couch and floor, like he’s watering a flower bed.

             I walk backwards towards the door; what if a drop catches in my clothes and I burst into a bonfire along with the rest? When the fire starts, I’ll melt. I know that; it’s why I jumped last time Clay had a match in his hand. It’s why I fell backwards out the window and it’s why I broke three bones on impact, because it’s easier to tie together a twig snapped in half than mold embers back. If there had only been one, would Cassie-Clay’s blood be warm or cold?

            “What if we can’t get out in time?” I say. “Maybe we should throw the match in from outside.”

            “We’ll get out in time.”

            “Fire travels faster than us.” Code for: I melt easily.

            “I know what I’m doing.” He dots the last of the gas onto the couch, and tosses the can to the floor.

            “I almost died.”

            “You jumped out the window.”

            “You pushed me.”

            “I didn’t—I won’t push you this time.”

            I shake my head small enough that in the darkness it’s doubtful he sees.

            “🤬, I forgot my flashlight in the kitchen.” Clay carefully hops over the ropes of gasoline.

Instead of waiting for him, I get out before he can push me. I gather Clay’s crowbar from where he left it to rust on the floor with a mime’s subtlety. The floorboards are known to creak, but I keep each step even and calm. The door is frozen shut with ice. I kick it; ice crackles free and the cabin heaves a breath as it comes up from under water.

            Winter rushes into my blood, snow up to my knees. The box of matches triples in weight. I slide the cover away enough for three matches to peek out. Each one slender and ruggedly cut, top-weighted by a red skull. I test the flesh of a match’s face on the sandpaper side. Not enough pressure to spit out a spark, just enough to hear the scrape of match against the snakeskin-like card.

            Clay is in his kiln, sent to retrieve a torch where he left it on the wood-burning stove. The match is in my hands. My hands, this time. So much potential energy packed into a tiny twig of a body. It craves to let its insides out, to burst into its best self, fulfill the wishes of its design. How hungry they must be. They’ve been starved their entire lives, locked in a paper box with the knowledge that they could eat their way out of prison if they could lock hands with the other half. The label on the box has faded, worn to softness. They’ve served a life sentence. I rest the match against the sandpaper, relief ready on its teeth. I drag the match across the box, strong enough for it to flutter to life in my hands, but not enough to snap its neck in the process. What a sad life that would be: death seconds before actualization.

            Warmth eats towards the fingertips of my gloves. The match breathes a soft glow against the door, and the flicker entraps Clay as he turns around. His eyes flare in fear as the corner of my lip slides into a smile.

            “Jumper, don’t.”

            The fire is about to touch me, to melt me. “That’s not my name.”

            And I give that match everything it wants. Schrodinger’s cat: will it extinguish to nothing before it hits the ground? Or will it burst into heat and light and eat my brother alive? There’s a universe where the alternative happens.

             In this universe, the ground catches. I was right: fire does move faster than human; even a human made of fire, that casing of flesh slows him down. Actually, it’s not the fire he needs to be faster than. He runs across the room, steps in gas and flame even though he knows the two shouldn’t mix. Fire closes a hand around one of his legs. He’s steps from safety when I shut the door.

            His weight slams into the other side, but I wedge the crowbar under the doorknob. I lean all my strength into bracing the cabin closed. Fire pops, exploding into existence after years of confinement.

            “Cassie, please! Cass!”

             The door rattles each time his forearms smash into the door, soon to be embers. I have an extra metal arm. He kicks, and tugs, and never breaks through.

             “Cassie! Open the door, please!”

              Don’t try to appease me with my name. Your witch trial has arrived. Show me what you’re made of, brother.

              “I’m sorry I made you fall! Cassie!”

               The heat is palpable. It’ll melt me. The wails of the fire force themselves through my ears and down my throat and into my chest. Don’t touch anything when you have ashes on your hands, don’t leave fingerprints on your lungs—what kind of arsonist are you? I drop my arms—the crowbar smashes into my knees—and step back with eyes closed.

            The door crashes open, and Clay falls out. He coughs to expel ash from his lungs; finally wanting to get fire out instead of in. Behind him, flame flashes in bursts. Noxious smoke slithers from broken windows.

            I stagger away from the cabin a few steps ahead of Clay, the heat a wall against my back. Far enough to keep from melting, I collapse to the ground and lie flat on my back, the snow soothes the pinches from old breaks. The cold burns, too, but I splay my arms wide. Clay leans against a tree, the scrape of his back against the bark comes with a long exhale.

            “If you tell them,” I whisper to the night and to my brother and to the fire. “If you tell them, they’ll know what you are. And they’ll know I didn’t jump.”

            My brother whispers nothing back. His lungs have finally melted the way mine have. It’s not the same when you freeze back up. He’ll be full of broken glass, too. It never stops cutting at your insides. If there had only been one, would Cassie-Clay beg or fall their way out of the fire? And would Cassie-Clay make you jump, or would Cassie-Clay open the door?

            I stare up between the trees which hold bough-fulls of snow, my breaths methodical. Slow. Quiet. Clay’s are interspersed with coughs from years of smoke and a moment of fire. The clouds look like broken ice above an Antarctican sea, set apart as the sky because the clouds cradle white bundles of flame. The moon is nearly full, but a sliver off. A face obscured.

            The cabin falls apart and crackles to ash: a disintegration of hot, flickering confetti. A piece of debris rolls through the wind, one flake of molten orange ash; limp and weightless, it’s battered through the sky in pulses, tugged higher until it blinks out. I keep my eyes upwards. If I looked, I might melt. I might deform, distort, dissolve. My patched up pieces might mangle from heat and never fit together again.