Rustia and Mingey are fraternal twins. Since birth, they have always looked and behaved quite differently from one another. As they were born into a scratch of hard life that escaped any sort of institutional attention no one in their small, brutish village could understand how two children of the same womb could be so different from one another. The villagers came to fear them or at least be wary in their presence. As a result, Rustia and Mingey themselves came to understand that they were freaks of nature. Their childhood games, which they played together by themselves, always sublimated their sisterly sense that they had a curdling effect on the world.
Mingey has always been darker than Rustia. With hair like fertile earth and a slender frame, Mingey bruises easily. By contrast, Rustia has always been fairer, hungry, and large, with thick, pasta-like hair and irises so icy blue that her eyes resemble peeled onions. Rustia was considered ugly well before the indomitable putsch of her sexual maturation. Only by contrast could Mingey be considered beautiful.
But prior to birth, when they were still just fetuses inside the tight nestle of their mother, Rustia was violent with Mingey. Rustia had a tendency to kick in the womb. Her wild activity spurred their placenta to dilate, delivering more and more sustenance, all of which Rustia would claim first by virtue of her ravenous insatiability. Mingey’s earliest life — unmarked by memory– was instead chaptered out on her skin with many porous bruises that gently leaked aminos and blood into their mutual coil. Mingey would quiver with malnutrition, growing colder inside the maternal furnace. She would be underweight and nervous all her life.
Rustia’s mouth quickened almost overnight and she frequently snapped around to exercise its meaning. She bit Mingey on more than one occasion. Rustia hungered for the world; to feel and to see, to be liberated from the confines of her mother and the choking, weakening thing that was her sister. It seems certain she would have eaten Mingey had it not been for a sudden, induced birth day.
All of this was, technically, unknowable as it occurred behind the opaque walls of flesh and predated the twins’ abilities to self-differentiate. However, the emotional reality of it strengthened their bond once they breached into the world together, as sisters. The year of gestating predation created a breed of intimacy between them that would not be possible otherwise, even if its nature was unspeakable .
In adulthood, the sisters joined Drutherstone’s Circus in search of a better material life. It paid off. Perhaps not handsomely but well enough. Rustia grinds their unicycle while Mingey curls herself around her sister’s shoulders. They have always been this way.
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