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The first ultrasound revealed to Mr. and Mrs. Funn two twin fetuses, each in its respective amniotic sac. Something that would have been adorable even, would have reduced a first-time couple to tears of emotion: The blurry image was still good enough to identify the two, facing each other, like the same mirror image, tiny hands against each other, forehead to forehead, as if it weren't for the physiological barriers of pregnancy, they were going to touch, maybe even snuggle up to each other.
But neither sir nor the lady were the emotional type and didn't seem more or less pleased to learn that the babies – a couple, mind you! – were growing normally at a good weight and that yes, yes, another good handful of months and they would be ready to be born. The good Doctor Edward broke the news smiling brightly, as if to make up for the parents' lack of reaction.
The doctor would smile a lot less in later appointments.
*
The twins didn't move.
Despite being the right weight for their gestational age, with strong and steady fetal heartbeats, according to Ms. Funn, none moved, kicked, or showed any of the signs or developmental milestones that used to make any young couple feel elated and excited. .
When the doctor voiced his concerns, as gently as he could in a delicate situation he had never encountered before being shipped to Piffling Vale, to the stoic couple, he only half-hoped for some reaction however unethical.
Mr Funn frowned at this, but said nothing.
His wife showed the slightest grimace of displeasure, little more than a purse of her lips, a click of her tongue. No protective hand on round stomach or flushed cheeks or tear-damp lashes.
No, in the softest voice: "Are they dead?"
No, he said, they weren't. Just still, growing, but still as… stones.
(The man had meant corpses, but that would be an unfortunate and distasteful comparison considering the employment circumstances of his patients.)
“Oh” The pale woman nodded placidly. Dark eyes like pits. “Better that way then. They don't bother me unnecessarily.”
Her husband nodded and the doctor was too stunned to consider an adequate response.
*
Rudyard's first memory was of heat.
Warm, humid, mild, comfortable. Fluid, blurred, like the impression of a blurred photo print, as faint and indistinguishable as a dream, someone else's memory, and he would have forgotten. It would make sense if he had
(It was so rare, otherwise, to remember a life before life itself.)
(Hm, maybe that's why he remembered, because of the peculiarity of it and–)
Then, he faced a pair – which were identical to his, even if he didn't know it yet – of darkness. Eyes that looked at him and reflected back to himself, separated by the water and the thin organic films of amnion and chorion, transparent and just slightly frosted as if the vision of a twenty-eight-week-old fetus wasn't cloudy enough,
Whenever Rudyard opened his eyes, blinking, nerves, retina and pupil still developing, Antigone was staring at him.
Whenever Antigone blinked alertly, Rudyard would look at her and transfix each other, not moving. They barely had spasms.
(Antigone's first memory was of heat…)
*
Rudyard Funn, a boy, was born weighing 2.3 kg and whimpering softly with three loops of umbilical cord around his neck like a noose, before being met by the obstetric nurse at the hospital, which at the time had more than one doctor powered by coffee smoothies with amphetamines.
He was a pale, frail little thing with a tuft of raven-black hair on top of his head.
He was also the only one born for the next 24 hours. And 48. And 72.
Antigone showed no signs of being bothered by the birth of her brother and was the first baby to be diagnosed with intrauterine depression.
For safety, Mrs. Funn remained hospitalized, which proved even more necessary when little Rudyard proved irreducible to the need to feed. He firmly refused to be breastfed, cried for hours on end in his mother's arms and was not very happy with his father either.
("At least he won't expect to be picked up all the time," Mr. Funn pointed out, to which his wife seemed to agree with satisfaction.)
The little one hiccuped, spat and sputtered when a nurse coddled him to suck a syringe of milk. He hated being rocked and hated even more fervently being left alone in his crib.
(“Maybe he misses his sister” Cut an intern once.
"Maybe he's a little shit" Retorted the nurse on duty with dark circles bigger than Mr. Funn's.)
Rudyard was placed on a nasogastric tube within the first 48 hours of life before he had a chance to die from neonatal hypoglycemia and, due to repeated attempts to pull it out–demonstrating far more manual dexterity than a scrawny newborn should have– not only did he not gained the expected 160 grams for the first week of life, but also lost more than 15% of birth weight.
In summary, the first week was… complicated.
And so little Antigone was born, not crying, wide-eyed, like a carbon copy of her big brother.
And was laid, side by side, with her twin.
One of the maternity nurses swore standing together that she heard the two gurgle a giggle.
(Babies don't laugh until they are three months old, but the truth is, young Rudyard became meek as a lamb as soon as he was near his sister, and his brother's warmth put Antigone to sleep faster than any clumsy comfort their parents could offer. .)
No wonder such an inauspicious beginning resulted in the oddball twin siblings who haunt Piffling and who were—always have been—close in a way that was incomprehensible to everyone else.
*
Antigone opened the bedroom door carefully and avoided all the pieces of wood that made noise when entering the room. It didn't matter, but she never learned to walk without sneaking, hiding in the shadows, in the tight corners that no one looked at and better to be ignored than seen too much.
She knew it. She had gone up to the attic precisely because of the screams.
Rudyard was curled up on his bed, hugging his legs with his face buried between his bony knees. He was crying softly, sobs rippled through him like shivers and he didn't even acknowledge her presence when Antigone sat beside him on the mattress.
The girl placed her hand gently on Rudyard's back and he stiffened before relaxing with a sniff, peeking out from behind a messy curtain of jet-black hair.
There was a slap palm mark on his cheek, the red bruise beginning to purple at the edges of the pale skin.
“Oh, Rudyard…”
The boy rubbed his teary eyes with clenched fists, lower lip quivering as he straightened his spine and lifted his chin to her with mock bravery.
"It was nothing"
Antigone sighed, pulling her legs to her chest, mimicking her brother's pose.
"You shouldn't tease dad when he's in that mood"
Rudyard shrugged, but Antigone didn't pursue the matter. She was well aware of their father's fickleness, it was difficult even for her to read the man and between the two, she was the less socially inept one.
“And he was drinking”
“Oh”
Mr. and Mrs. Funn were cold. Indifferent even, but there was a difference between them.
The mother was more a ghost than a person. Distant. Vacancy. Terrifying at times, but live with a poltergeist long enough and you get used to the rattling of shackles and the blood on mirrors.
Their father was another story. A lake with ice on the surface, cold on top, with dark things swimming underneath that sometimes rose, looking for air.
Sometimes it was as simple as a word spoken at the wrong time or an unforeseen event at work.
Sometimes it was a bottle. Enough to make him inflamed enough to not bear their existence any longer.
(He had never raised a hand to their mother, but the twins were close enough, especially Rudyard.)
Rudyard who was small and foul-mouthed and possessed of a terrible temper. Rudyard with his odd mood and, of the two of them, the one most like his father: The furrowed brow, the line of the jaw.
Once, after a funeral that went pathetically wrong for any number of reasons, not least the fact that a little eight-year-old boy just couldn't dig a grave that fast, their father came home and spanked Rudyard so hard, for so long that their mother intervened.
If that counted as intervention.
(Dead eyes. Empty of any emotion as she said "You'll kill him if you continue" factually, as if she didn't really care about the outcome of it, just making sure her husband was aware of it.)
(Antigone wondered if their father wasn't simply trying to kill what he saw of himself in Rudyard. The resemblance that results in an unhappy marriage and the squint of the other villagers.)
Antigone hugged her brother, because she might not be very good at it, but there wasn't much else she could do beyond that.
Their father didn't like her very much, but that was a distant, detached pain that left nothing but metaphorical bruises most of the time.
Rudyard snuggled into her arms and he was shaking like a leaf.
Antigone buried her nose in the top of her brother's hair and squeezed tighter.
They never needed words to comfort each other, the unspoken understanding that they only had each other in all the world and that should be enough.
It had to be.
“How is mother?” Rudyard asked quietly, his muffled voice still tasting of tears.
Their mother was as close to hers as she could be close to anyone, but the way her father treated them made Antigone sure that stone was softer than steel.
“She was teaching me about embalming fluids”
Rudyard pulled away from her only to grimace in disgust. Antigone rolled her eyes.
“It's cool” She insisted stubbornly “One day I'm going to make mine and it's going to be a success, you hear?”
Rudyard snorted but didn't respond, leaning back against her and looking momentarily lost in thought. Antigone poked him in the ribs in an unspoken question.
The boy looked away from her, turning his face away. The bruise on his cheek looked like a burn against the whiteness of the face, were it not for the angry red around his eyes, still puffy from crying.
"One day, it'll be ours" Rudyard muttered as if it were some kind of secret "You know, the undertaker thing."
“It's true” Antigone nodded, playing with the hem of her dress before opening a fragile smile “In the meantime…”
Rudyard sniffed one last time before pulling away from her to snuggle into his own sheets. Antigone lay down beside him, enveloping his brother in a loose embrace and steadfastly ignoring the existence of her own bed across the room.
It was easier that way. They were both still prone to night terrors and it was better simply to take turns between beds than to wake the other up in the middle of the night for company.
(The next day, Antigone pilfered the makeup they used on the dead and did only reasonably clumsy work on her brother's face.
The fine powder had her sneezing all day and that was almost enough to make Rudyard giggle.)
*
Rudyard crawled carefully through the mess of the attic, ducking into the particularly obscure nooks and crannies that Antigone favored because the bloody house was an architectural nightmare that didn't make any sense. He precariously balanced a plate of chocolate chip cookies in one hand as he crept across the dusty room, bumping into the generational clutter of junk.
Antigone had spent the entire day hiding in the attic.
Sometimes—more often than not—she got like that. Much quieter, with a strange mood and if she wasn't bothered she could go days on end without eating. Rudyard had saved penny by penny of lunch money to buy those cookies from Agatha, the young village baker. They were chocolate, sprinkled with sugar, and he looked forward to eating them in peace at the end of the week.
It just so happened that those were also his sister's favorites.
(Secretly, he admitted that he worried when Antigone got like this, even if his parents dismissed it as some kind of fleeting tantrum.)
(If there was a tantrum child in that house, Rudyard knew it wasn't her.)
The boy found her curled up in a slightly less dirty corner of the room. The light that filtered through the dirty glass of the windows barely reached there, and Antigone seemed particularly pleased about it.
Between the dark eyes, pale skin, and black hair that ran like ink down her back, she looked like the ghost of some gothic novel she so loved to read. The tired features and deep circles under his eyes did nothing to improve that initial impression.
Rudyard sat across from her and reluctantly pushed the plate of cookies towards her as a peace offering. Antigone stared at the plate in acknowledgment but did not move.
The boy rolled his eyes as he stretched out his legs and effectively sweated the fabric of his pants. Mother wouldn't like it, but really, there was little he could do to make the woman even acknowledge his existence with anything other than the vague irritation she reserved for him when he inevitably got into trouble.
"You haven't eaten anything today" Rudyard grumbled, nudging her shin with the tip of his toe. "Did something happen?"
“No” Antigone muttered under her breath, looking exhausted “I can't sleep well”
“You never sleep well”
"Well, I'm sleeping worse than usual then!" Antigone snorted but took one of the biscuits off the plate and took a hesitant bite.
An insomniac in his own right, the boy couldn't say he didn't feel a twinge of sympathy for her. Sometimes, when he woke up from a nightmare, Antigone would have been awake for hours, unable to fall back asleep.
“Do you want me to steal Mom’s medicine?”
This, despite not being a joke but a genuine offer, drew a slightly squeaky giggle from the girl. There was the tiny crack of a newly lost tooth in her smile that mirrored his.
"You'll get in trouble with dad if you do that."
“I always get into trouble with dad anyway” Rudyard sighed, poking at the latest bruise as proof “It won't make a difference”
"Nah, I'll be fine" Antigone devoured two more cookies in succession as if she had finally discovered that yes, she was, indeed, hungry "Rudyard..." The girl looked down at her hands, breaking the cookie into smaller pieces " Have you ever thought about dying?”
Rudyard frowned, considering the question. Death was not the troublesome foreign relative who occasionally appeared in the neighborhood. Something to ignore, hoping it would go away as suddenly as it came with the hope it wouldn't come back anytime soon.
No, it was more like a tenant. He lived with them on the floor below and was sometimes a little unpleasant, but he was never late on the rent.
It was impossible not to think about dying, being the son of an undertaker, but he was pretty sure that wasn't the answer Antigone was looking for.
(There were, of course, those moments when the noise inside his head got too loud. A million bees, none he understood, and Rudyard wanted to peel his own skin to make sure there wasn't anything crawling under his skin.
How not to consider the idea of making all the noise stop ? That simple)
( Get the body in the coffin in the ground on time )
But then he remembered that doing so meant leaving Antigone alone. To do that was to be alone and Rudyard Funn could do many things, right or wrong, but he refused to be alone. He refused to abandon his sister in a house that wasn't a home that was a Judas cradle, an Iron Maiden and his father didn't raise a coward.
"Sometimes" Rudyard replied. Shoulders touching, like a reminder. A promise. "And you?"
Antigone looked into his eyes, dark, sinister, but like looking in a mirror, and shrugged, going back to eating her cookies.
*
Often, looking at Rudyard had the same effect as watching a dynamite lit on either side. You know what's going to happen, but God, it's impossible to look away.
From time to time—almost always—her brother was assailed by bursts of frantic, nervous energy. Antigone had read books where characters suffered from "manic outbursts," but nothing was like Rudyard: The restlessness, the incoherence, the sudden tremors. She barely slept or ate, barely breathed, and made up for all the frustration of being unable to sit still and rest in getting into trouble as if she didn't know the consequences of it. As if she wasn't afraid of dying or simply considered herself incapable of it.
(Once, in one of these moods, Rudyard climbed one of the village's coastal cliffs barehanded and barefoot. He had climbed the full fifteen feet before she coaxed her brother down, and when he finally got back to solid ground there was blood from where he was. the nails broke or were pulled out against the hard stone.
Rudyard looked as surprised as she was by the wound, as if he hadn't even noticed the pain.)
Inevitably, it would break. It always broke, leaving the boy an empty shell. A thing drained of life.
It was as if Rudyard had always lived on poles, as if he couldn't park himself in the middle.
Either he was responsive as a dead man or he had the hunger of a demigod. Everything or nothing.
There wasn't much she could do about it.
She could bandage his fingers, disinfect the scratches, or hide him under the covers when his parents came over.
She could comb his hair, sew up the rips in his shirts, spoon-feed him in his mouth when he was too tired. She could watch over his sleep all night and make sure he was warm during the day. She could take him to school by the hand and never leave him alone.
But she couldn't do much more.
(Sometimes she would find Rudyard in the cemetery, whispering softly to the spiders and bugs in the ground. His voice was soft despite his split lip and it was as if something inside him was being mended, snoring softly, leaving itself alone. )
(What Antigone wouldn't give to keep it that way.)
*
It had been raining in Piffling since dawn, giving a gloomy air to the morning. The light drizzle, damp wind with the taste of sea salt finding every crack and hole in the seam to get under her clothes, and Antigone felt chilled.
Whether it was the cold, whether it was the drops seeping through the thick wool of her dress, oblivious to the fragile protection of the umbrella, or the fact that they were burying their own parents on the morning of Rudyard's birthday.
They didn't celebrate birthdays, and it was an afterthought that had occurred to Antigone while she was preparing the embalming fluids that after the funeral preparations were finished, the day of burial would fall off her brother's date.
She wondered if Rudyard had noticed, between one shovel of wet dirt and another. If when he alone climbed down the coffin—wounded hands, purple bruises and nails broken from hammering in the wrong places, nails escaping the pressure against the wood to kiss the tender flesh again and again—if burying one's own father was a proper birthday present .
(Rudyard had his hair wet against his face, the suit soaked, baggy in all the wrong places, too big – because it was their father's suit, the suit of the man who ran the business – making him look even smaller. deep circles under his eyes, chewed lips, he looked like a lost child and Antigone scolded himself for the mean thought.)
(She was like their mother: She was cruel when she felt hurt.)
After placing their father's coffin on the bed, he slowly lowered their mother's coffin. Buried side by side. Fair enough, considering that was how they had lived and died, something that might have been sweet in another world, with other people.)
Eventually the coffins were buried. The mound of soft earth turned against the roughness of the tombstone with no epitaph but their name.
(Antigone would like to know if they'd done a good job. If that burial would be one they could be proud of, if their parents were the kind of people who feel that kind of thing.)
Her brother put the shovel by the wheelbarrow, cleaned the dirt off the clothes – which didn't change much as far as the mud stains – and, like a toy without a cord, approached her. Antigone made room under the umbrella, aware that they were both soaked and that it didn't matter and that they had finished what they came to do and had to get back home before they caught their deaths too.
They didn't move.
The rain gleamed the granite of the bare headstone. No flowers.
Perhaps they should have bought flowers.
Maybe not.
Antigone stole a sideways glance. Rudyard returned the same dark stare.
Their mother had said they had nightmare eyes once, the same way someone comments on their daughter's dress or their baby boy's tie. It wasn't a lie, but it had left a bittersweet taste on the palate, bitter in the back of her throat, and that was how she felt about their deaths. The exact same taste in your mouth.
Rudyard looked away, cleared his throat. He looked at the dirty shoes.
"Are you well?"
Antigone shrugged.
“People die all the time.”
Silence.
“It's like a phantom pain” Rudyard commented “Without them. Weird, you feel the pain of something that isn't there.”
Antigone nodded in agreement. Weirder was feeling pain in something that was never there, like their parents. Never there, not really.
“I think children should cry at their parents' funerals” Antigone pointed out as someone who has watched many funerals, deaths and crying children.
Rudyard snorted.
“Dad hated me” He shrugged, as if it didn't hurt “And Mom…”
(There was one time Rudyard got sick. Fever so high he was delirious, coughing up blood. The doctor said it was pneumonia and their mother didn't visit their room for two weeks.
Antigone believed that their mother had no intention of hating them. Maybe she didn't even know she hated them, but yet they were still hated.
A weight they carried since before they were born. A sort of honor bruise.)
(They both knew this. But when Antigone met his brother's eyes, there was a deep hurt there. The raindrops running down his face were almost like tears.
But Rudyard didn't cry. No more.)
Maybe deep down, all a child wants is to be loved by their parents and she had a feeling that this would be the kind of wound that never heals. The kind of wound that swells and throbs on cold days.
"Let's go back home"
Rudyard nodded but didn't move. Neither does she.
The rain continued.
Their parents were still dead.
Their childhood was still a knife stuck in their throats: it cannot be easily removed.
*
Rudyard made her hot chocolate before they went to their respective beds.
It was sweet and warmed her stomach, melting the ice trapped in her veins.
When she cried, she couldn't say why.
Rudyard held her hand the entire time, though.