Scene 2

GLASS

Car accident… a crash, a terrible crash spilling a family out all over the road. They are scraped up and put into two ambulances. What is left of them.

Wednesday, August 20, 1952, Central Plains Hospital. Patient number one: female, approximately seven years of age. Cracked ribs, lacerations to the face continuing past the hairline. Fractured collarbone.

The girls are each on a gurney on either side of the stage. The soundscape might be of medical equipment.

POUBELLE

Angelique?

GLASS

Patient number two: female, looks to be the same age. Fractured femur with bruising to both thighs. Fractures to both wrists, suspected bracing before impact. Facial lacerations, breakages to the eye socket. Gash to the mouth resulting in the lower lip being split almost completely. Severe internal hemorrhaging.

ANGELIQUE

Poubelle?

GLASS

Both in critical condition with assisted breathing.

Both parents dead on arrival. I've seen this before.

POUBELLE

Thrown into the grass, a pile of meat.

ANGELIQUE

Maman and Papa, eyes closed under a sheet.

GLASS

They will die. One gulps at the air, trying to push it down. The other hemorrhaging to death. Despite the entire hospital's efforts the girls show complete failure to thrive.

POUBELLE

Two piles of little girl, folded like fawns fallen out of their mother.

ANGELIQUE

Their world cracked open, nothing left but each other.

GLASS

Oh God, they will die. I try. I try. I haven't seen anything like it in a long time, but you never forget. You never forget children covered in blood.

He hangs his head. The gurneys are wheeled out so that they are side by side. The twins manage to touch each others' hands.

Life! Life in the closet where they were put to let nature take its course. The two girls put beside each other, they touch, they begin to breathe and LIFE! No hope of survival and now both—stabilized! Thriving! Living!

The twins look at each other.

ANGELIQUE

Blood is thicker than water and stronger than bone.

POUBELLE

Don't you dare die and leave me alone.

GLASS hurries off stage.

Slowly waking up to find our family gone.

ANGELIQUE

Left on the forever grass that is the prairie lawn.

POUBELLE

With no one left now, to his house we were brought.

ANGELIQUE

He took us, fed us like a parent, but not.

POUBELLE

He took us, watered us, raised us like plants in a pot.

ANGELIQUE

He built a laboratory around us, gave us our shots.

POUBELLE

Where was home?

ANGELIQUE

Past the horizon, past hills and tall grass.

POUBELLE

He raised us like a father but wearing latex gloves and a mask.

ANGELIQUE

A decade passed, charts recording height, muscles lean.

POUBELLE

Studied since seven but now seventeen.

ANGELIQUE

Nightly with stethoscopes we were looked upon,

POUBELLE

Every inch scoured, hair gone through with tongs.

ANGELIQUE

We were held with the bruised and beaten sky of the prairies above,

POUBELLE

We were held to explain to him the formula of love.