twins

Jana is thirteen, she is just beginning to grow into her skin: the city’s summer swells her breasts with sweat and muscle, her hair is greasy and growing longer by the day. With green eyes, and fair skin, she is a beauty. Rebellious, certainly, but very smart. (Or so I observed, but they told me this, too.) Lara, though also in her early teens, seems younger, physically, and in what Jana calls “her philosophy.” Her, Lara’s, eyes are dark, her skin is darker. Her hair is haphazardly styled, rattyshort and dry. Still, to each other Jana and Lara are twins, identical. Their mother, since dead, burned one once with a cigarette to tell them apart before she abandoned them on the stoop of the hotel at which we met (in the lobby, one night, very late). Jana says Mom burned Lara, who of course says Jana. Neither can find the burn, nor identify it, from among their very many burns. As the city is dangerous, they must stick together, stay close: They’ve had themselves pierced, I won’t reveal where (neither will they), and their piercings are either interlocked, two rings one on each of them rung into one another (Lara), or else are connected through the agencies of a very short chain (Jana), a loooooooong chain (Lara), and so on. However, they both agree that they did the piercings themselves. As they wander the streets of the city in search of sustenance and heat, they stagger even after much rehearsal, practice: they seem like they’re always leaning on each other, propping one another up, throwing themselves forward while one sits in the other’s lap.