my room. They said they would not sing at night if I would take down the Bible pictures Mama had given me, and we lived in peace.
They were five then.
They were thirteen when Daddy found them in a puddle of blood on the floor of the garage shed. They had a package of razor blades and were huddled near the back wall, behind Daddy’s truck, their gashed shoulders pressed together, bleeding into each other. Between them they had to have thirty stitches. I pulled the blanket over my head that night and listened to them whispering in the next bed.
“I thought we’d grow back together,” said Michael. “I wasn’t going to tell them that.”
“Now it hurts,” mumbled Samuel, close to sleep.
“It always hurt,” said Michael. “That place where they cut us apart.”
III. GHOST
Ghost dreamed this lifetime, asleep next to Steve in the cold upstairs guest room—a room which was haunted, Ghost knew, but only by the sad thin shade of a cat that had starved to death there fifty years ago, shut in and forgotten by a vacationing family.
The kid knew how to fix Steve’s T-bird, but could not do the work until sundown because it was a Sunday. By that time it was too late to hit the road, so the family allowed Steve and Ghost to stay for ten dollars in the upstairs guest room. Ghost lay awake late fingering the small clean bite mark on his throat and feeling the shade of the cat still roaming and listening to Steve’s even breathing, the breathing of a man at peace with himself and at truce with the world.
Then Ghost was asleep too. He found himself weaving through the milky thick clouds that often swathed him from the waist down in his dreams. In dreams he seldom saw his feet, though he felt that he was barefoot.
He was crossing the front lawn of the house. He passed the muddy hole in the ground, the hole the twins filled with coins and flowers and called a wishing well, and wondered what they wished for there. He skirted the edge of the woods and covered the thirty feet to the shed behind the house with the instantaneous effortlessness of dreams. He was in the garage. The walls bristled with tools. There was a red pickup truck, the old-fashioned kind whose shape always reminded Ghost of a loaf of bread, and a battered warhorse of a Chevrolet that the twins’ brother must work on during the aimless, melting days between the Sundays.
A thin river of blood trickled from between the rear wheels of the truck, cutting a path through the oil and grit on the floor, staining the concrete. The windows of the garage were opaque with moonlight. The windshields, the metal of the tools, glowed faintly blue. The moonlight turned the blood black.
Ghost saw the twins then, jammed together in the corner behind the pickup, naked, their feral faces and narrow chests and broomstick legs slicked with blue-white light, spattered with wet black blood. The raw weals of their shoulders, their scarred flat shoulders, were pressed together, their blood flowing into the gashes they had inflicted upon each other. Their faces were smooth and innocent and utterly blissful.
The slice of the razor. The black blood. The bliss.
“I know what they wish for!" Ghost screamed, waking himself up. Beside him Steve stirred and muttered and pulled all the blankets away, but did not wake. The scream had been only in Ghost’s mind, a dream-scream.
“I know what they wish for,” he whispered, and stared into the darkness for a long time before sitting up.
IV. BROTHER
The other one was just a kid like me, a little older, a little smarter. But the one called Ghost was an angel. I knew it by the wing of hair that fell like flax over his eyes, and by his skin that light shone through, and by the way his hands shaped the air. And I knew it by what I guess you’d call his aura.
Mrs. Carstairs in our church reads them; she can tell a lot about a person by the color of his aura. The twins, she says, share an aura. It is the purple-black of a bruise, and it