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When they were young… they were the world's darlings. The world's opinion meant everything to them, even though they tried to pretend it meant nothing. Their town was even greyer and muddier when they pranced along the streets after midnight, and the rooftops bent to kiss their dyed hair. They wandered through the shops putting their delicate fingertips on the window glass and china, touching anything colorful or sweet, pinching things between thumb and forefinger as if to grasp the town in both hands would dirty them. Sully them.
The big boys at their school shouted things at them, black dirty things that stank of toilet-wall scrawls and smeared basins. But those boys never fought them because they knew the twins were magic. Everyone knew the twins would go away to the city someday, where they could pick rhinestones out of the cigarette sludge in the gutter, and the moon would be as aching and vivid as neon cheese in blue velvet sky. And they did. They went to New Orleans.
In the city, artists put them in films. They were twins, and the hip crowd loved the perversity of that. Their mirror-image pornography was art. They were Donatello Davids; skinny and beautiful, not heavyset like Michelangelo's. Androgynous striplings who outlined each other's bones in lipstick. And they were allowed every art and luxury and perversion the city held because of their over rouged lips and their sluts' eyes and the poetry of their hands…
They grew jaded, tired, but still insatiable on their own mattress. They lived and saw the first lines appear around their eyes. They saw years of liquor, expensive cigarettes, drugs and passion etch themselves on their movie starlet faces. They watched the mirror as they would have watched a quicksilver film of their death, in a cold heat of fascination, dread, clutching each other. They bit at each others' throats in desperation, thinking to regain beauty in blood, to drink the pulse of life.
But their blood was thin, grainy, mixed with other substances- no longer the rich purple fountain they had once known. They went out less, spending whole days flat on the mattress like two dried sticks side by side, forgetting to eat, watching the cobweb cracks in the ceiling plaster widen, spread like spider web tracery on their faces. They grew weak. Eventually they had to spend alternate days alive. One would watch over the other, keeping vigil over the still chest, the blotted out eyes, the dry mouth. At the first tinge of dawn the dead twin would begin to move, and the living twin would lie down and stretch himself taut on the mattress, his skin already crackling on his bones, his hair straggling like grass across his bare hollow shoulders. One day… one day their eyes were open, but neither of them moved.
 xRawrImmaKannibalx · Sat Jun 20, 2009 @ 06:35pm · 0 Comments |
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