Swamp Foetus Read Online Free

nobody ever called them by those names, and if anybody did, the twins never answered. To us they were just the twins, more than one person, not quite two, separated at the shoulder the day after they were born and nearly bled to death. God’s will be done.
    The day they came home from the hospital, Mama hung a picture of Jesus in their room and put them to sleep in their two little cribs. They yelled all day and all night and all of the next day. Mama thought Jesus’s eyes that glowed in the dark were scaring the twins, so she took the picture down, but the twins kept yelling until she put them in a crib together.
    After that they had to sleep in the same bed all night, every night, forever—else they would scream just like they had as newborns. Mama took in the town’s mending and dressmaking, and the twins slept in her sewing room among heaps of fabric and crackling tissue patterns, their dreams zigzagged by the whine of the electric sewing machine.
    The twins learned to crawl one-armed, a fast scuttle down the hall, over the cabbage rose rug that skinned their knees in the living room. They learned how to pull themselves up, hanging onto each other. If they leaned on each other, they could take a few steps. They wouldn’t come to Mama when she held out her arms, or to Daddy or me either. They hung onto each other and toddled in circles, holding each other up, pulling each other down when they fell.
    The twins ate our food and slept in the bed we gave them and let us keep them clean, but we existed only in a tiny corner of their world, a corner reserved for such things as clothes and dinner and the hated baths. When I got old enough to discover the gift God had given me for fixing car engines, they would sometimes come out to the shed and watch me work on some neighbor’s junker. Mostly they ran free in the woods and lived under the porch, playing the games they made up inside their heads. They loved to dance in ritualistic patterns, stepping and bobbing and circling. At the end they would clutch each other tight as ticks, howling if anybody tried to pull them apart.
    The twins wouldn’t talk until the summer they were five and I was eight. We prayed for them every Sunday in church. Mama even sent away for some holy oil. It came in little plastic packets like ketchup in a restaurant, and Mama rubbed the twins’ throats with it whenever she caught them sitting still, but they didn’t talk until they were good and ready.
    The picture of that summer kitchen, ninety degrees by the Silks Motor Oil thermometer in the window, stays in my head as bright-colored and underwater still and clear as the 3-D scenes in the special Bible Mama got from TV. The twins were sitting at the kitchen table eating peanut butter out of the jar. The peanut butter was soft and caramel-runny around the edges of the jar, and the twins’ faces were smeared with warm tan goo. Mama was getting a can of potted ham out of the cabinet to make me a sandwich.
    A fly crawled in through the hole at the bottom of the screen door, made electric loops around the kitchen, and landed on the rim of the peanut butter jar. The twins watched the fly for a second, until it got stuck in the melting peanut butter and began to struggle. Then one twin—Michael—turned around in his chair, looked right at Mama, and said, “What made you think we wanted to be cut apart, anyway?”
    Mama’s fingers had just closed around the can of ham. Her hand jerked. I watched the can tumble down and thump from the countertop to the floor. It bounced once and rolled to rest against the side of the plastic trash can. Michael pulled the fly out of the peanut butter, wiped it in a smear of wings and legs and brown stickiness on the edge of the table, and picked up his spoon again.
    “I don’t want them around me,” Mama said flatly, later, and the twins were moved out of Mama’s sewing room and into an upstairs guest room which they said was too cold and haunted, and finally into