CHAPTER 1
[…] Suddenly, our mother found herself pregnant with twins. It was as if we had plummeted down into her body from an astral height. […] She was only eleven, and she’d not imagined that her brother’s activities could produce even one such result, let alone two. […]
CHAPTER 2
After our births, she retreated from the social life of the Town, but her real sadness began once Mirjana and I walked and talked. How often she shaved our heads, how frequently, how publicly, she exfoliated our flesh, standing in the front yard in a flurry of flakes. The homemade bleach-based lotions she applied to our faces, how she filed our fingers down to nubs. […] Eventually, everyone knew, there would be nothing left of us but a pile of skin clippings.
CHAPTER 3
So at six we were taken to the Farmhouse orphanage, to grow into our twisted forms […], and my sister and I were bound not only to each other but also to a suite of arcane laws. These laws were set by our minders (a rotating cast of Townspeople, overseen by the Chancellor), and written every morning in magic marker on the kitchen whiteboard. They varied from the officious, to the practical, to the inexplicable, to the comedic. One morning the law would inform us that we needed to braid our hair together, so we staggered around attached at the head. Another evening the law would be that we must make warthog noises when we ate the carrots at dinner. […] For several years, the law was that we were never to read books about people, only animals, which we were told we more closely resembled. Big Ben, Black Beauty, Old Yeller. Of course, these books featured families as well, since the stories hinged on how human-like the animals became, but we were told to ignore these deviant elements.
CHAPTER 4
Mainly, we were kept separate from the other children, but once a dusty child snuck into our room at night. Mirjana was asleep, and I had just finished spraying foam into my hair and rubbing my arms with glitter cream. […] I stood with my back to the bureau, and the child stood in front of me and we looked at each other, and then she reached across and viciously pinched my arm.
Immediately, I recognized her. Immediately, I loved her. I loved her anger, of course, which resembled mine, but I also loved that she wanted so badly to have an effect on me. I knew it was important to accept the pinching as part of my fate. Tears pooled in my eyes and ran down my face, but my voice remained steady as I recited to her an old poem about pine trees, and the ghosts snagged on their needles. The child was perhaps four years old, and her cloudy eyes betrayed fear and a complete lack of understanding. But I knew her. And she knew me. She, too, was a gnostic.
CHAPTER 5
Each day, we would set out striving to forget the previous one. Each night, a minder would bring us a pill the size and colour of a cherry, and after swallowing one, darkness would drop over our heads like a photographer’s cloth. Each morning, the sun set its burning face at our bars. We were guarded by a dog with a face like coughed-up meat. […] And yet, once I could think, I thought: This life is manageable.
Once, I was only interested in trying to see through people. Now nothing fills my heart like a person willing to stand up and look at me and block out the sun. Now I cannot imagine wanting to see anything beyond the breathing being before me, talking and gesturing and laughing, all for my sake.
CHAPTER 6
We had been told that reactions to us, should we creep into the Town, would be too severe to even imagine. I would sometimes sprint into the invisible dog fence, and receive a nauseating shock, but my sister, Mirjana, never had so much as a wayward toe. Nay rather! she would say. Rather I would try to squeeze water from bricks. Rather I would trap a bat in my own hair. She just started to talk like that one day and it lasted for a couple of years, and although I loved her I could never decide whether to devote my strength to laughing at or choking her. […]
CHAPTER 7
Our bodily changes began one midwinter when we were ten, a midwinter that stretched out intractably, bringing (we heard) despair to the Town, as the ground remained frozen. […] One night, the Chancellor decided that he could coax forth the late spring. He crossed the invisible dog fence, whispering names we did not know were our own. The standard ritual used to whistle up spring called for animal flesh, wine, and unwilling females, so he dumped out raw hamburger under our window. Then he lit a torch, peered inside, and immediately found our eyes. He was not meant to look at us like that. Then again, we were not meant to look back. But his gaze was proof of how human-like we’d become. […]