Scenes from a Solitary Life

You rest on a wet pillow. The hairs cling to his forehead like strands of shriveled weeds emerge from the dwindling sea. Everyone is sweating in this dying world, but his own is a mark of hard work. Tiredness.

The baby is lying in her arms. He holds his head over his shoulder and presses the lips of the dried mouth into his ginger hair. But her eyes, wide open (or scared?) Look at her husband and twin in the long room. He whispers to the same doctors, but the power of his hissing is everywhere as if he were shouting.

"What happened? Why is there one? How can it survive alone?"

Doctors clean their colored glasses and shrug their shoulders.

The mother of the twins arrives at the bedside next to where she gave birth. He claps his mother's hands, careful not to touch the baby. "Don't worry."

There will be more children, assures the mother.

There is no room for such a deviation, he said.

You watch the edge as the other kids choose the sides of the stickball. The air is cooled, sunburned by the rising sun. Sweat dripped from his chin even though the match had not yet begun.

"We are short of two," said the team captain.

"I can play," the boy shuddered, his head down so that the flaming hair would protect his face. His hands are holding the hem of his shirt.

The captain's twin shakes his head. "It takes two to score points."

"Other than that," said the captain in the same voice, "no one wants you to be in their team. One stick is useless. Just like you."

Memorize the other children.

The child sneaks up, kicks stones on the dirt road. His mother is dead, and he is dying of a sun-stroke. Her aunt, too, once broke up with the twin-bond. With one finger he examines his father's soft, small scratches.

Why can't you get in? cried his father.

What kind of animal are you? you mean.

He kneels in front of the girl on the edge of the brown pasture. Tall and furry she has curly red hair that jumps over her head like the sun of the sun. He may look good if he is not short-sighted and with lowly shoulders.

The grass bends and shakes before asking for thermals as the girl thinks of him. Her condition is tempered with tears streaming down her cheeks.

"I'm married," the boy pleaded at her feet. "I love you. I'll be the best husband you can count on."

The girl smiles for a moment as if she were living a myth with her connecting words. He stared at the stage where his twin sat waiting, as far as possible. The girl's face is sad. It strengthens. The frozen determination eliminates little remorse.

"How can I not live? Who would my sister marry? You don't have to cross yourself."

It's not our way, he tells her.

He is very different, she said.

The boy has grown up to be a man, though one child is left with his head bent and his shoulders tilted.

Moon mines are hard work, but the only place to shelter a man without twins. They sent him into the abyss, which is very dangerous, into the abyss.

They say that it is better to risk one's life than to take two.

It would be better for a man without a twin to die.

The overcrowded veins lay there, waiting for his explosion to dig for free. Fuel full moon to power the machines to create a wormhole, to escape from their abandoned world. His work is important. It gives him acceptance, if not the friendship between other miners. You have a place here.

He rests in his room upstairs, waiting for the miners to remove the detritus caused by his explosion. But the new tunnel is unstable, and even where it lies high, the earth trembles as, beneath it, the rock shifts.

The men ran into the tunnel, in pairs. But he knows the ways well, and he is not bound by the twin cords. You arrive first.

The miner is lying on the ground in front of a collapsed stone wall. He wraps his intestines like a slug exposed to the sun. He was one of those who welcomed the man. Probably a friend, though the name has never been mentioned.

The miner sighs. "She's dying. I feel it, like someone taking me inside." He bites his nails, reaching for his twin behind the rubble.

The man holds the miner in his arms and comforts him, not understanding his pain. Others came crashing down on the stone wall.

The miner sighs, "She's gone." He is strong and quiet, the light fades from his eyes.

A man throws himself on a miner's body. "Contact me!" He wants his soul, his heart, his essence to reach and communicate with mortal man. But there is no connection.

The miner trembles for the last time and becomes as lifeless as a fallen stone, unable to live on his own.

Sitting, wrapped in a small cockpit, a small bubble in a large machine that will stabilize the caterpillar's remote area. Sweat makes his red sun hair black, nailed to his forehead like a weed dried in a dead land. The wormhole grows as his ship approaches, guards and instruments give details that his eyes cannot. You wonder how it will feel to stretch for a moment, just for a moment, but long enough to separate a double bond. He wonders if he will ever return.

He will go where only a man without a twin can go, they tell him.

He will go alone, they said.