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A phalanx of storks wades in the river. Reedmace tails graze against pillars of their red legs; they graze against Andrey’s bleeding knees, too. It is a hot day – as they lately tend to be – and the sun unbuttons his shirt. His sternum shines with minuscule beads of sweat. The beads of sweat shine with lavender reflection of the sky.
There is mud and filth and sharp stones under his feet, and it’s grounding. Between green strokes of a brush, somewhere lies Peter, another sharp stone, embraced by tall handsome grass. His elbows dig into dirt. There is no end nor beginning to his thighs. He and the Earth blur. He and the World blur.
And Andrey loves the World, perhaps for this very reason, and he wants to take in the magnitude of its components. His hands transform, curl and curve. A thirsty digit-gutter dives in the mirror below him. The water drains through crevices between his fingers, and the sunrays join the perverse waltz of escapists – they sneak through the fissures of the younger twin’s locks and kiss his adolescent skin.
And the two figures bathe; and the two figures wash; and it is (their) (in)nature's baptism.
Then Andrey drinks the sacramental venene. Arched back straightens. Translucent shafts stream down his chin; like blood would from a predator’s muzzle; and the storks startle. The brute Sky swallows the muster, but the bravest of ciconia-daughters roars off to meet the Sun. The Sun is a cage. The bird hangs in the air. The bird’s outstretched wings envelop the Sun.
Peter disappears in the shadow, and now it’s only Andrey and his crimson-painted legs.
(The daughter’s crimson-painted feet, crimson-painted beak and crimson-painted quills melt. The daughter disappears in the light.)
The brothers are older now.
Their story is still sculptured with precise moves of slender bristles; the red bleeds onto each whisker and oozes into a canvas. The paper, stubbornly, illuminates a different shade. Raw, deep, rich — titian, if you asked Peter. Andrey would say, it’s nothing less than revolting.
The reflection’s source leans over the table. The silk of the third’s shirt rustles as arms extend in delicate poses. Long threads of fingers waltz around the wooden surface. A harmony streams from a broken tongue, an addition to the performance: shy, modest. Eerie and hypnotic.
Peter’s vermilion border of beak-like lips dissolves in the backgrounding redness of the cloth; now, there are no restrictions to his physical body. There is no him, either.
He blurs; and then, the architect’s colors swallow him whole.
The perspective shifts. Two narrow slits veil angry observers — the older’s twin pupils become pools of disdain. The brother tries to grab the third artist by his reflection’s slender ankle. He tries to entrap him in an eye-mirror. He tries to drown him. (It’s desperation, or a silent plea to his greater half: “See me once more”. It’s sorrow.)
A twitch of clenched fists. Navaja wrenches Herself out of the depths in Andrey’s pocket. Then, a miscalculated swing — flames of a nearby candle dance in the blade’s eye — and a miss. Farkhad, untouched, disintegrates in the thick, herbal air of the twins’ loft: and with him, Peter.
Andrey’s stare climbs onto the edge of the table. It locks on Peter’s first portrait of their Daughter.
His gaze jumps. The Cathedral’s blueprints are laid out in the very center. The man’s heart cracks.
Smoke and ashes and filth sit in the air. Nina Kaina’s pleated skirt extends in columns and falls to the ground; the chintzy pillars expand into the Rose’s groundwork. Andrey feels favorable soil underneath his nailbeds. The promise of an Utopia blooms.
The soles of his shoes impatiently pin the Crucible’s floorboards. Bloodshot scleras catch Peter exchanging a bouquet of hushed words with Maria; the awkward angle births another disappearance in the corner of Andrey’s eyes. A sunken face of his brother hides behind a vase of bosom flowers. Curious.
A step forward. Andrey props his weight on an unfriendly doorframe. He takes a sip of red wine, — “You must try my wife’s favorite,” hanged on Victor’s lips as he poured, — and spots a broken mirror in the nook of the dark room. In its reflection, his brother’s stare, lined by a pair of furrowed brows.
The shard, the one bearing Peter’s reflection, tints. It’s green, in silent rebellion to the violet lights of the room. The chamber turns hostile.
But before Andrey returns to his place in the vestibule, he notices a new crack forming on the specular glass. His lips curl in a curved smile.
The fissure escapes the brassy frame and seizes Peter’s shoulders: a pair of brittle branches. The Fissure feasts on his epidermis to grow a body. The Fissure transforms into a scarlet ribbon and coils itself around the puppet’s joints. Strings, in controlled, but quite clumsy moves, pull the heavy limbs toward the glass – or toward the faux-mirror of the flask’s surface.
(Peter wonders, sometimes, if the Fissure misses where it came from; if it craves the warm dampness of its mother’s womb. He hopes to return it to Maria’s vanity someday.)
And the bottle weighs heavy in his hands. A shroud of liquid frost trickles down his chin.
Peter drinks, drinks, drinks; and when he reaches the bottom, suction pressure forms; and Peter’s devoured by twyrine’s depths. Peter fades.
The emerald of the bottle slowly fills with the silhouette of Andrey’s contorted simper.
The act is reaching its end. It’s him and Peter now, as it always was. It’s the two of them and the red turns into green billows of filth and lethargy.
Something-someone-something crawls and whispers: "a rebirth." It's merely a ripening.
The brothers are older again.
Peter rests by an open window. The sky is lavender. The grass is green. His fingers pull at mobius strips of the hair-plait net. Dark strings form into braids on the surface of his thenar eminence. His vision doubles; the white of his hands becomes translucent. He swears there are two of his brother(s) in the room.
Fingers still and stiffen; they curl in a benediction sign.
Andrey feels a cold embrace of the water on his tired wrists; the bucket in his hands fills with water, opaque and amniotic. The vibrations coming from behind his back send discord to the still surface; these quiet, little sounds vomited by Peter's syrinx. Sounds shape-like; biting with their edges; sounds stabbed by the sharp tubercle of the man's lips before they meet the world.
The rust chews on his fingers. A line of deformed vowels stops.
Andrey turns around, and finds nothing-no one-nothing staring back at him. There is no Peter, no brothers Stamatin, and, by extension, there is no Andrey. (There is no Third.) A winged shadow points at the bucket in a skewed motion. His eyes follow.
A pair of green jewels stares back at him. Three red droplets fall and stain the painting. It's red now. It's red again.
The next vignette is applied with a mottler. A generous wipe of thick oil births a river; and Andrey feeds it with the bucket's contents and bare ankles.
The weight is stolen by a current. He feels light; lighter now. His knees bend. His knees meet the sharp stones. The ground removes patellar skin. The World removes Them.
And the Daughter, christened Polyhedron, disappears along them; with them; and the brothers revel in the thicket of grass once more. The storks gather again. The Stork sets off as Andrey washes his face, again.
This time, he comes prepared — the noose around his neck loosens and flies to his hand; and the rope captures a crimson-painted leg of the brave ciconia-Daughter.
(But the next time, Andrey pulls — rips — and the limp-limb falls and paints the river red; and the bird falls and paints Peter's face with a spout of blood.)
It is a hot day.