Prompt: A Pair (300 words or less)

The Delman twins were new to my school. They had extremely chubby cheeks, and short brown hair. Identical twins were deliriously remarkable in and of themselves, but these twins were all the more remarkable because of the resemblance they bore to my hamster. I was anxious to introduce them to my hamster, whose name was My Darling. When the Delman twins got to my house, I showed them to my mother and said, “Don’t they look just like My Darling?” It was the chubby cheeks. When My Darling shoveled sunflower seeds in her mouth, storing them in her pouch, her cheeks got fat. Also, their hair was the same shade of brown. My observation, in my opinion, was a huge compliment because My Darling was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. My mother, however, flatly contradicted me in a way meant to convey that I’d said something I shouldn’t have said, which was something that happened all too often for my mother’s liking, and mine, too.

That year, at my birthday party, after I blew out the candles on the cake, which my mother cut into ten slices to put on paper plates, I opened my gifts. From past birthday party experience, I knew that most of the gifts would be things I didn’t want, but I was schooled to pretend otherwise, which was why I pretended that the Skipper doll was exactly what I wanted more than anything in the world. But when I opened the second doll, I didn’t have to pretend. Two Skipper dolls were nothing like one Skipper doll. Two Skipper dolls were twins. Twins like the Delman twins.

Two days after my birthday, My Darling eviscerated herself on a sharp edge of her hamster wheel.

Prior to the start of summer when the Delman twins went away to sleepaway camp, they held the top two spots on my list of best friends, which I wrote as 1a) and 1b) because how could I choose between them. Up until the latter half of my first year in college, my list of best friends was a fluid list, which could alter dramatically within minutes.

Sometimes you don’t know something is missing until it’s there. The way someone born blind in one eye might wake up some morning to find both eyes working at 20/20, I didn’t know that I was only half of a person. I didn’t know there was any other way to be until I met Stella. When I met Stella, I became a full person. To be complete is to see the world with two good eyes. Twin eyes. I don’t know how else to explain it. There was nothing that I could not tell her because it was as if she already knew. It was like sharing myself with myself, the only difference being that Stella didn’t pass judgment on me, nor I on her. Instead, all things that had been shameful, painful, hurtful and humiliating whipped seamlessly into hilarity.

If I wasn’t an easy person to like, Stella was near to impossible to like, although my husband loved her, which made sense because he loved me, too. Despite that she was the most brilliant person I ever knew, her sole ambition was to get rich, get rich quick. To that end, she came up with all kinds of schemes, but she had very little follow-through. Also, she made poor choices; married, and divorced, three times. All her husbands drank too much, and for reasons we could never figure out, each of them got fired from his job soon after she married him. Except for the one who didn’t have a job to begin with. That marriage lasted longer than the others, just shy of three years.

Stella and I looked nothing alike. She was tall with strawberry blond hair and small, pretty features. She was an only child from Mississippi who never lost her accent, but still, she said to me, “In our last lives we were sisters. Twin sisters.”

Twin sisters.

Like the Delman twins, minus the resemblance to the hamster.