The Twins, Chapter 14

*copyrighted material*

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    October 30th, 1932. There was carbon snapping. Remindings of cherry bombs on the holiday season, blistering jumbles of hardstone, and soil clots. Thicket twigs leftovers remained as they scalded over the blazes. All while cinder downpour, knocking, and colliding with the nocturne winds out on the patio. Calvin stood there, mute and helpless. Weeping would do naught to a shrunken and rage-pumping heart that had lost count of its mischances. Wyatt could no longer hold it in, hours of self-containing had fed on what remained of his goodwill towards any others made out of flesh and blood. He could laugh out loud from the agony, and lunacy waiting for him. Smiling at him through windows, behind a distant pine at the runways, at a turn of a page, and between the lines of the newspaper. Or right inside his steaming, pitch-black coffee mug. He could barely remember the sepulture, people came and went their ways. Leading loved ones six feet under could dry anyone’s guts to withers. The fracture was deep within his fibers. The heart. The soul. Burying the entire Bixbee family had undone whatever forbearance he’d gained through the years. He carried himself like a shadow, just a spook on the walls.

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    A phantom had observed his every move. Quiet, absorbed, and unperceivable. Dressed in ebon attires, Wyatt had kicked a gifted pile of books in the petty and comfortless hotel room he shared with his brother. The Bixbee family had been too thoughtful. Too neighborly. Too soft and given to being agreeable to this world. They had died hedged by blazes, a fire lit their house, people said. But underneath the blizzard’s breath, nothing was certain. Alone, at dawn, nothing was certain. Burnt carcasses, house foundations, and an abandoned loaded gas guzzler pickup truck with oilseed bags were just what it was. A sizzling question. Donny Bixbee, Barbara—a wife and stepmother—Vivian and both of her step-cousins were now beneath a hotchpotch of collected filth and coal remains. Carved tombstones on top, like a damn sundae with its cherry on top. Too far down, deaf and silent in a matter of hours.

   Krishanu had then followed Wyatt and Calvin down the halls of The Lodge House, as they carried downstairs baskets stuffed with all sorts of publications. Twelve-year-old Calvin Elsner presented an ailed and faded condition. Emotionally indisposed and unreflective at times, a vacant mind was no good sign. The phantom took notes of the plighting state of affairs and tailed the brothers down to the lobby. The boys took the backdoor of the hotel and into its scanty, turfless patio. There, Wyatt’s actions took a questionable turn. He dug a quick hole with his fingers, the soil was dewy, pulpy, and easily removed yet sticky due to the constant snowfalls. He collected lumber from a trifling shed located at the side of the hotel structure used to store grease, forage for the horses, kernels for the backyard chickens, and stored in bottles of frozen goat milk. The residents of The Lodge House were a resilient bunch despite all odds. Wyatt and Calvin, among all of them, had contributed to a fair share of required tasks, errands, and favors to earn their spot at the hotel. Changing door knobs, securing roof tiles before every storm, and plaster fractured walls among other chores. But the poor were poor. 

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    Wyatt felt his actions necessary, for which he felt no guilt as he lit the pyre he was working on. Calvin, baffled, did not take his eyes off him. His older brother dropped encyclopedias, novels, booklets, and other textbooks into the fire pit. Hard book covers turned hastily into comb shells, those at the sides of a shore, twisting and shrinking, cut by the blades of perdition. Yet, not salty or fresh. Paper transcended into coal-black bug wings pirouetting on the light winds. Zillions of them. 

    Krishanu did not take these demonstrations kindly, a child exposed to torment? The situation filled him with rage to the depths of his ethereal core, and he was compelled to respond with degradation. The phantom walked up to the petrified kid, his rawboned thumbs blooming with colored flickers circling his wrists and the rest of his digits. He bowed before him with a slothful flow, he raised a gleaming hand and brushed three finger pads along the youngster’s brow from North to South. Thumb, forefinger, and middle finger all at once. The youngest Elsner brother quivered with rage.

     Quite a talent as a freethinker, Krishanu was a ghost that had been bestowed with what his associates identified as the ability to channel as a vessel of the Cosmos, the grand organic order. His adversaries, however, did not share such a hypothesis for their vast scholarship and didn't come to a concession with such theories. His defiance under the leagues of the Defenders of Shine had fueled discussions amongst them. This enshrined guild known just by its folkloric background by the Renou mortals found newer fields to cover less than optimistic. Newer values stood far away from their ancient principles.

    “Stop. Stop, that’s ENOUGH!” Calvin cried. But his sibling was relentless and picked a schoolbook lexicon with unseeing eyes. Flares frivolled it away, a hungry fiend that exhaled

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ashes. Still, Wyatt landed on the iced and browned soil of the patio on his seat bones, then tasted the iron coming out of his nostrils. A rock had crashed upon his face.

    “WHAT THE HELL, ARE YOU CRAZY, YOU HALF-WITTED IMP?! I COULD HAVE LOST AN EYE!” The young man wiped off his nose with a cuff of his two-bit sheepskin windbreaker but made it far worse. The impoverished residents of The Lodge House huddled around them, talking low.

    “WHO GAVE YOU THE RIGHT TO STOMP ON HER MEMORIES LIKE THAT?!” Coming tears were evident on the boy’s waterline. “BLAMING EVERY INNOCENT PERSON AROUND YOU IS YOUR KIND OF BULLSHIT. NOT MINE!” Calvin went on, flying off the handle again with a second rubble piece projectile, yet his brother steered clear by rolling on his side. Wyatt stumbled as he hoisted himself up with a brisk move of his knees, warm blood still streaming down to his jaw. Spectators looked in subtle silence, but the twenty-three-year-old lad walked out on everyone like a tempest, pushing his way through the crowd.

    Marut, Krishanu’s sister, emanated among cobalt-colored flashes and airy, crystalline fabrics in the nick of time, her energy blended with the surrounding snowy wastelands of town. Dressed in drapes that changed from their natural golds to her unmistakable cerulean hues. A feathered dupatta with the same pigments sheathed her arms and elbows. She’d materialized and caught a glimpse of Wyatt’s bloodied nose as he left The Lodge House. Quickly coming across leftovers of the brothers’ fight in the backyard, their neighbors scattered to continue their chores.

    The dainty and peaceable known Marut, The Wind, condemned his twin brother with a long and hard look. “May I ask what you’ve done now, my twin? One would think you’d refrain from perpetrating such short-sighted actions by now, considering the guild’s final deliberation.”

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    “The guild can’t see as beyond as I do, Marut. They cannot see through fabrics of continuance and perpetuity.” Her twin refuted. “We all obey the same entity but they have left her undone, her call . . .  if you had seen it with your eyes. The afterimage the Cosmos has granted me. Her sight has brought me to these boys. The future might not be bright for the likes of us. But bright it will be.”

    “Very well, then, although I won’t keep my convictions to myself.” She crossed her arms knowingly. “By the way, I’ve concluded my part of the bargain back at the Northern border. The ball is already set in motion, my twin. But I don’t know how turning the boys against each other in times of yearning and inadequacy is going to drive another anomaly, a breach between them is not what we are seeking.”

    “It feels like the right time to let them grow apart. You can call it foresight . . . A premonition, perhaps. Only time will tell if my suspicions are free of error, it is what I fear the most. The possibility we’ll have to face this task with mere presaging and adept judgment . . . It is maddening!”

    “But, that’s not going to stop you. Correct?”

    “Sister . . . ”

    “You know I’d follow you to the caverns of the deepest abyss, Krishanu. There’s no need to test me as an ally. ”

    “Thank you.” Krishanu bowed to his twin with a light movement of a fleshless arm along with his torso. He glanced up at her from that pose, “Would you mind keeping an eye on the kid for

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now? I’ll take care of Wyatt, he might need a coherent standpoint after all of these upsetting events. I might have . . . exaggerated.”

    “Sure, don’t beat yourself up. Now that we have one or two allies on our side it’s best not to lose heart, the rest of the guild might follow soon enough, give them time. Presaging or not.”

    With that thoughtful and brief exchange, the twins parted ways. Marut climbed up to the boys’ hotel room in search of the twelve-year-old. Her motherly nature proved right as she stumbled upon Calvin while he fed the pocket-sized fox with the help of a glass eyedropper and a sugar spoon. Warm raw milk and soaked chunks of stale bread in a reddish-tan deep dish for supper. The sweet-tempered ghost watched them in noiselessness. She contemplated his gullible, pearl-gray eyes, puffed from weeping. Cherry red tinctures on his cheeks, nose, and eyelids.

    Marut sat on the single bed mattress of the room and fixed her hollow sockets at the view from the window, while Calvin—sitting on the crisped wooden floor—brought the chimney’s pit to life, then wrapped the fox cub with a woolen mantle and stayed close by the radiance for an hour or two. The female ghost did not miss the high vibrations of his perturbed mind in the meantime, mourning and heartache. But it wasn’t just for anything that the twins had separate titles—The Flame and The Wind—for which they were known to be one but not so at the same time. Two creatures like night and day, one could hardly exist without the other, with or without flaws. Therefore, she was obliged to soothe the kid to maintain order in his depths, to build fortitude within him.

    Calvin sat there. His arms gingerly wrapped around the woolen nest that sheltered the tiny fox on his lap, tears that gleamed with the mellow heat of the chimney. Marut stood up and pressed her blanched kneecaps on the wood flooring. Instead of concentrating her powers on the

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forehead, she slipped three fingers at the back of his head. Tenderly brushing his hair in the process. She then pressed her head to his, and the gloominess was partially gone.

    He gasped and gazed down at Carol, but she was snoozing calmly over him. The boy stood up, carefully placing her on the mattress hoping she wouldn’t wake up. “What time is it, anyway?” He whispered to himself.

    He stared out the window, the sun had rolled down and hidden behind Mt. Mowaki and Norway’s border summit. He knew Wyatt wouldn’t come around until daybreak when his shift at the runways had ended.

    “Don’t go anywhere.” He breathed at the fox cub. Krishanu’s sister remained in place until he closed the door behind him, that’s when she walked through the wall and followed him to the lobby. There, Calvin checked the only clock of the building, a pendulum timekeeper that hung above the foyer wall with bronze arms, roman numerals, and a delicate, filigreed body of the same nickel material. It was past 10:00 P.M., thirty-six minutes in. 

    Calvin rushed upstairs and put on Wyatt’s massive double-breasted skin coat over his winter attire. He squeezed two small cotton pillowcases into one of its huge, low pockets and gingerly wrapped Carol inside before extinguishing the fire pit. The fox cub yawned and took a glimpse out of the pocket with a pleasing motion of her tail, diving in again when she felt the cold of Nooktown’s streets.

    It was a winsome night, with no dancing snow, clouds, or storms. Just a dull, plum-colored background for the sky. The discount houses were loaded, people climbed on trolleys, the occasional honking and steam coming out of the underground pipes. All the while Calvin walked to the laundromat with a massive cotton bag over his shoulder.

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    Once in the establishment, he tossed all the clothes into one of many silver boxes standing in rows, stuffed a coin into the complex machinery, and soothe his ears with the sound of the water, punching a single button. He sat down on a bench and studied the view from a large window. Every part of this routine reminded him of Vivian Bixbee, and maybe an impulse had brought him here so late at night.

    The fox cub poked out her head from the comfortable on-the-go bed, and upon notice, the kid stroked her before lending her a finger to suck into. She sucked, bit, and barked. And barked again. Solitude was gone, and Marut was as well.

END OF CHAPTER #14