Fraternal Twins

Before an ice storm snuck through Bodock, Mississippi, and flung woods to the earth by the acre, before the younger twin, shovel in tow, was led to an emu pinned to that same cold earth by a spruce pine to ease the creature’s transition, before any of that, it was the older brother drawing beads some proximate-but-safe distance from a mockingbird perched on the power line strung across the yard. No other reason for doing so but to yield a rise out of his overtrusting brother.

This was Wednesday afternoon, hours before the sky ripped open and five inches of ice poured out. Bodock Middle School had let out early amid the threat. There was concern of late bus routes, the only thing between the precious cargo and slick roads being drivers ill-accustomed to navigating such. The brothers had rushed home to use the extra time before dinner to continue wearing the new off a pair of pellet guns, their X-Men and Batman backpacks nipping like terriers at their legs as they sprinted down Main Street and skated across a Jitney Jungle parking lot already heaving with the vehicles of weather-panicked shoppers. Behind the grocery store they had taken a narrow four-wheeler trail carved during the previous summer. The trail brought them to the point in their backyard where the emu pen brushed the woods. Their father had referred to the lofty birds as the redneck cousins of ostriches and had invested much money in the fowl for their eggs and steaks. Now, the pen was a chain-linked skeleton. Their father, intoxicated one night in the month after that brief market had collapsed, had freed the emu to fend for themselves.

Holstered in the older brother’s back pocket was his own pellet gun, a gas-powered revolver instead of the pump-action air rifle he had forcefully borrowed from his brother. The distance between them and the perched mockingbird was too great for the revolver to pose a legitimate threat. They were fraternal twins and so their resemblance seemed more distant than the jointly-occupied pregnancy. The older brother, Nathan, was taller and the more handsome of the two, but Nicholas had a larger head and a more sentimental nature. Nathan had already fired twice at the mockingbird, one shot just south of the power line and one impossibly to the left. The bird’s song was unaffected by the pellets whispering by. Something inside Nicholas’s toe-head explained his brother’s aim as purposefully wild. Further, the mockingbird’s gray feathers made for a difficult target, barely decipherable against the clouded backdrop except for the bird’s sporadic, melodic chirping and the flicking of its white-spotted tail feathers. Still, Nicholas could ignore neither caution nor the gullible thump in his chest.

“Nathan, don’t,” he said. “Don’t shoot it, man.”

“Nicholas,” Nathan said. “Shut up. Let me concentrate.”

“It’s the state bird.”

“What does Mississippi even need its own bird for?”

“You’ll go to hell for it anyway.”

“Says who?”

“Anyone,” Nicholas said. “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“You mean, ‘How to Kill a Mockingbird.’”

Nicholas tried to edit the smile drawing across his face. When his efforts proved fruitless, Nicholas directed his face elsewhere until he had reclaimed his composure. He settled on the wood sandbox their father had had built years ago, a small delta of silt and sand driven into the yard by rainwater through a chink in the sandbox’s wood boards. They had just concluded watching To Kill a Mockingbird at school. Nicholas recalled something about falling out of favor with God for harming a mockingbird or any other innocent bird. Otherwise he had been distracted from the movie by the lice hopscotching in the sable hair of Lacey Eutuban Benson draped in front of him. Nicholas had never before desired to examine the entire surface of someone’s body, even and especially those parts covered by swimsuits. The ellipsis of her backbone imprinted in her neck had inspired in Nicholas the sudden impulse to invite Lacey to swim the creek with him so he could long over every square inch of olive flesh she had inherited from her black father and white mother. And then there was the guilt he still felt, when Lacey was escorted from the class by the school nurse, that he was relieved he had never once disclosed his infatuation with this half-black girl to anyone.

Nathan pumped the lever on the gun several times to deposit power into the rifle before overstating the sight’s distance above the bird. Both the rifle and the revolver were Christmas gifts. A month’s worth of practice could be assessed in the remnants of plastic Coke bottles and sand castle molds blown up and scattered across the yard. But those had all been proximate targets, twenty feet at best. The gun’s trajectory at this range was one unfamiliar to Nathan. He was as surprised as Nicholas when he pulled the trigger and the bird dropped in slow suspension from the power line.

“Holy shit,” Nicholas said. “You killed it.”

“No I didn’t.”

“You’re going to hell.”

“It ain’t dead,” Nathan insisted. Nathan was quite damn sure the bird had expired. Then a wing fluttered. Nathan’s heart mimicked the gesture. Both brothers waited for the bird to take flight, to soar away in some miracle they had only ever read about in the Bible. Moses parting the Red Sea or the ascent of Elijah, who cheated mortality. Jesus raising first Lazarus and then Himself from the dead. Nathan mouthed a prayer for just such a miracle. But the bird’s flight was restricted to grotesque flopping, a one-legged ballerina pirouetting to the refuge of an oakleaf hydrangea in the middle of the yard.

When the boys reached the bush, the bird cowered aggressively amongst the shadows of the lower branches. Nathan could feel his heart chipping away from itself like so many plastic Coke bottles. He was sure the bush was on the verge of ignition, that the ferocity of God’s voice would transform Nathan into a pillar of ash more easily digested by the earth. Instead, Nathan only heard the bird, its song mimicking fear and mocking their very well-being. Or perhaps that was the voice of God. He realized then the most impressive miracle was not that Jesus had conquered death but that He had graduated from adolescence without ever having done anything terrible at all. Certainly not shooting a mockingbird. Masturbating to fuzzy Cinemax porn.

Nicholas too recognized innocence here in front of him and knew he no longer belonged to it. He could have knocked Nathan’s dick in the dirt two seconds ago or any of the boys at school scratching like apes in front of Lacey in the cafeteria lunch line just after Christmas break, before a lice inspection was conducted on the entire class. The other boys picked at each other’s scalp and mock-ate what they found there as Lacey was escorted from Mrs. Dorsey’s class an hour after the inspection. Nicholas made no move at any point to defend her. Now, his cowardice and vanity had brought to tears two of God’s creatures. The mockingbird’s pleas were synonymous with the appeal Lacey’s eyes made as they searched for some savior in the cafeteria. Her lunch tray, held between the bent, skinny wings of her arms, had quivered noticeably.

Nicholas grabbed the revolver from Nathan’s back pocket. “I should’ve stood up for Lacey,” he said.

“Licey Lacey?”

“I’m fixing to shoot you in the goddamn forehead if you say that again.” Nicholas motioned the handle of the gun at his brother. “You have to put it out of its misery.”

“Maybe the vet can come do it.”

“You know Dr. Svenson’s number?”

“Mom does.”

“Exactly.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Pussy,” Nicholas said.



Dinner was pot roast and carrots slow-cooked the length of the afternoon in a crock pot. Boxed mashed potatoes and Hormel gravy from a pouch. Nathan sat across from Nicholas at the oval table. Their father, who had just concluded blessing the meal, sat to Nicholas’s left. Utensils tilled the everyday dinnerware and the aquarium behind them gargled lamplight and their mother forced questions about school and, as usual, had to coax answers from Nathan that seemed to satisfy her. Their father nodded occasionally. He still wore the navy coverall uniform of the Bellsouth telephone company where he was assistant supervisor. Excepting his assessment that he would probably be worked like a nigger these next few weeks, on account of the storm already at siege against the county, he contributed little to the supper banter, kept his head tilted in favor of the near-noiseless commentary of a college basketball game broadcasting from the living room television. He stole glances at the game. When Nicholas as well proved uncooperative of the mother’s interrogations, Nathan feared their mother would register the change and know exactly the sin they had committed, as if she possessed telepathic powers or had transported herself back in time or had all along been able to bargain the physics necessary to extend herself into two places at once and had done so that very afternoon.

“Is everything all right, Nicholas?”

Nicholas’s concentration remained directed at delivering the gray meat on his fork to his mouth without dripping any gravy. “Sure.”

Say something, Nathan wanted to blast. Say any damn thing, be your usual corny stupid self. But their mother received her son’s forced smile at face value. Only Nathan registered any change at all in Nicholas. Nicholas had been right: Nathan was too much of a wimp to hasten the bird’s escape from the misery Nathan had condemned it to. But the ease in which Nicholas leaned down and fired half a clip into the mockingbird’s head, and the nonchalance in which Nicholas handed Nathan the still-warm gun before digging a tiny grave with his bare hands and going about the rest of the day’s business, was too much for Nathan to bear alone.

Later, Nathan lay in bed staring at the spackled ceiling. Nicholas’s back was to him. The sleet pattered on the roof like hooves and wrapped the house in a cocoon of rhythm. Nathan allowed his worry to lessen to a concerned relief. Even after he awoke later from a dream where he was chased by a flock of flightless, lumbering mockingbirds tall as the emu that haunted the surrounding woods with their glowing green eyes, Nathan had been able to tell himself that ol’ Sentimental would come around. As insurance anyhow, he sweated out a prayer promising to give up anything, even masturbating, if God would just take back what had transpired that afternoon, or otherwise grant Nathan the power, mutant or Biblical or otherwise, to do it himself.



Overnight the world fell powerless and frigid and Nathan awoke with Nicholas at daybreak to the billows of their breathing suspended above their beds and a sound like firecrackers exploding in the surrounding woods. Later that morning the brothers saw that the woods behind the house shimmered in a glaze of ice. Sections of drooping forest had been laid to rest overnight by the incredible weight that had accumulated and remained in the woven branches. As if the X-Man, Cyclops, had forgotten to wear the ruby-quartz lenses that corralled the destructive energy beams that grew from his eyes before he too had greeted the world that morning.

Trees continued to hurl their limbs to the ground with increased frequency throughout the day. Midmorning their neighborhood was disturbed by a barking car alarm when the hood of their neighbor’s LeBaron folded beneath the weight of a Tupelo gum. The brothers and their mother were roasting hotdogs for lunch in the garage over the blue flame of a propane camping stove when a cedar in their own backyard surrendered a limb. The branches scratched like fingernails on chalkboard against the roof above the garage. Things quieted down some but the lingering, echoed whispers of distant falling timber arrested the brothers, by their mother’s sentence, to the house for the entirety of that Thursday afternoon.

After lunch the brothers holed up in matching blue-and-yellow parkas and double-layers of wool socks in their bedroom to will the afternoon away on their handheld Gameboys. Neither brought up what had happened yesterday. The event, unacknowledged, seemed to expand like an agitated Bruce Banner until yesterday’s truth assumed its own hulking space in the room. At some point Nicholas fumbled his Gameboy to the carpet and excused himself.

Something caught Nathan’s eye in the window. Nathan watched as his younger brother rocked on his heels facing the hydrangea where they had buried the mockingbird, hands shoved into his pockets. In the corner of his eye Nathan saw one of the long leaf pines that dominated the woods collapse to the forest floor like a palm branch on the Sunday of Jesus’ Final Entry into Jerusalem. Nathan found himself concerned for the well-being of their father’s emus out in that violent terrain. Last summer Nathan would give impromptu chase to the flightless birds whenever they rode up on one in those woods. He appreciated now the potential for injury that had been there. Nathan could not figure why God had let his reckless emu herding go unpunished and then, just yesterday, He had allowed one of Nathan’s pellets to find the mockingbird. On the one hand, Nathan wanted to affirm the sin, the confession cleansing his conscience and Nicholas’s. But he also suspected a bitterness growing in him towards Nicholas’s inability to let this or anything else go. Nathan trailed his resentment and saw the convenience that was his brother buried alive alongside the mockingbird. So that, should Nicholas rat them out, only the soil would collect their truth. Nathan prayed to un-see the scenario.



That evening, the boys paid witness to their father, home from work and out on the back deck, grilling in February. Buried in his down parka, an orange Thinsulate glove on one hand and a char-stained oven mitt on the other, the gas grill slinging its glowing warmth into the encroaching night as it seared the contents of a thawing deepfreeze. Their father brought news that the storm had arrested most of the Mid-South without electricity for at least a week. Flames lapped at the stew pot where two bags of purple hulls simmered around red onions and deer bacon. A loin of venison sizzled whispers. The boys were still bundled up in their own parkas, their jeans tucked inside matching blue rubber boots. Nathan looked over at Nicholas, lulled by something in the woods.

The smorgasbord of venison and peas stewed to a near-paste huffed greetings from the dining table on blue and red plastic plates left over from the twins’ most recent birthday. The flames on the table danced by their single wicks and a battery-powered radio spoke from the mouth of the den.

“Nicholas,” their mother said. She glanced over her shoulder at the patio door that shared the wall with the aquarium. The wind panted through the cracking rubber trim of the sliding door. “What do you keep looking at?”

“Nothing, Mother.”

She eyed Nicholas suspiciously, addressed the father across the table.

“Yeah?” the father asked.

“Ask the boys about school.”

“The boys don’t want to talk about school.” The father cocked his head from the radio and glanced at either son. “They’ve got a few days’ break from school. You don’t want to discuss school, do y’all?”

The brothers shook their heads.

“Then ask them about anything,” the mother said. “What they did all day not being in school.”

The father curled his elbow onto the table and rubbed his buzz cut that merged seamlessly into sideburns and beard.

“Y’all boys staying out of trouble?”

Nathan stared at his plate of half-eaten food, wished for a pair of Cyclops’s glasses to prevent his eyes from breaking to Nicholas’s.

“I shot a bird,” Nathan blurted.

The mother said, “You did what?”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Where?” the father asked through a mouthful of food.

Nathan kept his eyes on the plate of food before him. “It was on the powerline.”

“In the backyard?” the mother asked.

The father added, “From the house?”

Nathan nodded.

“That’s an impressive shot,” the father said.

“Yes,” the mother said. “Let’s encourage our sons going around killing innocent animals. It’s a shame we didn’t get them the guns when you had those ludicrous emu for all the neighbors to see.”

“A pellet gun wouldn’t take down an emu, honey.”

Nathan said, “You can take away my pistol. I shot the bird with Nicholas’s rifle, but I took it without asking him.”

“What kind of bird was it?” the mother asked.

“It was an accident.”

“What kind of bird?”

“I’d rather be eating this than a blackbird,” Nicholas said. Nathan looked up from his plate as Nicholas turned from whatever held his attention on the wall. Nathan almost corrected Nicholas. Only a full admission of truth would save them, Nathan was certain. But Nathan was enchanted by some semblance of a familiar something he saw in his brother’s eyes. “Feels like we’re pioneers in a log cabin. Before electricity. Not bad, Dad. Almost as good as Mom’s pot roast the other night.”

There was a short delay before Nathan realized his role in this familiar sibling performance. “Butt smoocher,” Nathan said.

“Language,” their mother said.

Later, while placing the candle on the aquarium while she cleared the table, their mother discovered the scavenger fish floating on its side. Nicholas had named the fish Elvis because of the way it swam in a squiggly pattern up and down its plastic bag when “Hound Dog” came on the car radio on their way home from Wal-Mart. The water was dark without the aquarium lamp. Oh no, the mother said, Elvis is dead. Their father looked up from a Car & Mechanics magazine, took the small mag lite from his mouth like a cigar and said, Definitely, dear. He added, For seventeen years now. Their mother replied that she was referring to the fish. Nicholas felt his way around the dark corner of the supper table to scoop Elvis from the aquarium. Their father said the irony would be too much to flush this Elvis down the toilet as well, but Nicholas was already moving to the backyard without a coat on, Elvis cradled in his palm.



Flashlight at his side, Nathan plotted behind the door until Nicholas retired to their bedroom. When Nicholas crossed the threshold, Nathan watched his brother lumber across the room and sit on the edge of the bed parallel to his own. His back to Nathan, washed in the blue glow of the camping lamp on the nightstand.

Nathan eased the door shut. “This has gone on long enough.”

Nicholas recoiled to gather his brother at the door. Nathan clicked on the flashlight. The illumination caved in his brother’s face.

Nicholas said, “What were you doing behind the door?”

“Do you just enjoy executing animals?” Nathan said.

Nicholas shrugged.

“Look, I fucked up, aight. I didn’t mean to shoot the damn bird. Quit rubbing it in my face I was too chicken shit to finish it off.”

“It ain’t your fault I didn’t knock their dicks in the dirt when everyone was making fun of Lacy,” Nicholas said. “Ain’t your fault I didn’t keep you from shooting at the bird. Your aim became suddenly true as punishment for my prideful nature.”

“That’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.”

When Nicholas didn’t respond, Nathan grabbed his brother’s shoulders. The flashlight in Nathan’s left hand shone straight up against the popcorn ceiling. “Snap out of it, Nicholas. Just return back to normal. She’s just a girl. She’s a black girl, for Christ’s sake.”

“She’s mixed.”

“She’s still black.”

“I love her,” Nicholas said. “I love her and I wouldn’t even stand up for her.”

“You don’t love Licey Lacey.”

Nathan was sorry he said it, even before his brother’s punch found purchase on his cheekbone and copper released into his mouth. Especially after he tossed the flashlight on Nicholas’s Batman comforter and shoved Nicholas over the nightstand dividing their beds. The camping lamp landed on its side on the blue carpet. Later, the lamp would reveal a gap the size of Nicholas’s back in the drywall. Nathan would conceal the hole with the Wolverine poster that hung on the back of the door.

Their wrestling match came to a brief intermission in anticipation of one of their parents being beckoned by the disturbance. When the door did not swing open after several long moments, when no one even called down the hall to see what the hell was going on down there, the match proceeded to the floor. Nathan’s arm found its way around Nicholas’s neck. Their nylon jackets hissed at each other. Nathan was heavier than his brother, but Nicholas bore a cock-strong wiriness and eluded his brother’s neck hold and swung to his brother’s backside, where Nicholas leveraged his brother into a suplex. Nathan hit the ground holding Nicholas’s forearm. The older brother’s weight carried the younger one over with him. Carpet burned their ears and forehead. Nathan managed another hold in Nicholas’s vulnerable state which Nicholas again broke. This went on until their bedroom door swung open, the threshold framing only the silhouette of a man. The brothers, winded and exhausted, hustled to their respective corners.

“I was told to come down here and tell y’all to pipe down,” their father’s voice said. “What was y’all doing?”

“Nothing,” Nathan panted.

“We was just wrestling,” Nicholas said.

A few moments went by before their father’s voice responded. “Well, wait til tomorrow to decide a winner, aight?”

“Yessir,” the brothers said. When the closed door had replaced their father’s silhouette, Nicholas said, “I don’t enjoy it.”

“I know.”

“I can hear em.”

“Hear who?”

“Elvis tonight,” Nicholas said. “Others. They plead to be relieved of the humiliation of their near-death.”

“You hear any now?” Nathan asked even though he did not believe what his brother was saying in any way could hold truth.

Nicholas chewed on the question. “Yeah. One of dad’s emus.”

The camping lamp spilled a bucket of blue light over the carpet. Nathan was glad his own flashlight remained where he had tossed it on the bed. He did not want the ability to see his brother who had surely been possessed. There was no other explanation. In the semi-dark Nathan recalled the story of Jesus herding a man’s demons into a drove of pigs. Then, the story of the man who fought to brush Jesus’ ankle in a crowd, who was instantly healed of whatever affliction he suffered. Not unlike the female X-Man, Rogue, who had the power to assume another’s power by direct contact. Nathan wanted to absorb Nicholas’s suffering. But he couldn’t. He did not have this power. He did not have any special power. By his own estimation, Nathan was especially powerless.

“Which one?”

“One we named George. I think. I heard him when Dad was grilling. Thought it was the mockingbird speaking to me from the grave.” Nicholas barked a quick laugh. “Why not, right?”

“That why you was at the bush this afternoon?”

Nicholas nodded. “They all speak to me in Lacey’s voice. Thought Elvis was the mockingbird too til Mother found him. George is injured out in the woods somewhere.”

Nathan could not take it anymore and begrudged the camping lamp and directed it at Nicholas. Nicholas’s face seemed reserved to the fact that life’s potential for tragedy would always be a weight he would bear too heavily. Maybe Nathan could not absorb his brother’s suffering, but he could at least pay witness to it. Not unlike the disciples whom he had, until right now, comprehended not as real people who had to choose whether to watch their best friend die for reasons the disciples had not yet understood, but as near-superheroes in some story Nathan had been told so often he took for granted its meaning.

“Guess we’ll have to take care of it in the morning,” Nathan said.



The brothers took to the woods early. Their window held the blue glow of dawn as if the spilled light from the camping lamp still burning its battery on the carpet had grown until it encompassed the whole waiting world. Nathan was not sure they would come up on an injured emu. He was not sure they wouldn’t. Either scenario held the capacity to be both awesome and awful.

After they bundled themselves in thermal underwear and matching parkas and toboggans, the brothers, carrying their rubber boots, wound their way out of their home, skiing along on socked feet at the edges of the linoleum floorboards. They waited until they had threaded themselves through the crack of the back door to slip on their boots. The branch-littered backyard crackled beneath them and, once inside the tree line, they found the woods creaked like an old church sanctuary. A few minutes in Nicholas broke from the four-wheeler path and Nathan followed him up the slope of a small ridge and down into the gully on the other side. Slung over Nicholas’s shoulder was their father’s shovel. The shovel’s yellow, fiber glass handle punctuated Nicholas’s winding movements through the trees in a way that reminded Nathan of a wind vane in a storm.

“Not much further,” Nicholas said. Then, looking back, “Don’t guess you hear it?”

Nathan shook his head no and continued after his brother. After selecting the shovel from the storage shed, Nathan had suggested sneaking the four-wheeler from the garage as well so they could more quickly get to where they were going, take care of this business soon as possible before whatever strength—Biblical or mortal, mutant or otherwise—that had possessed Nathan last night betrayed him now. Nicholas voiced concern over being able to hear the emu above the engine. A four-wheeler would’ve proven impossible back here anyway.

They were making good time even as they neared the heart of the woods where Nicholas had to sew the shovel through the thick, lower brush. Skeletal curtains of thin limbs intertwined with ivy and Spanish moss snatched the toboggans from their very heads as they traipsed over the forest floor carpeted in some places by kudzu that disguised shin-eating logs and holes small enough to twist an ankle or—they’d often been warned—large enough to hide their own fallen corpses. The trees and their branches the storm had persuaded the woods to shuck like corn husks made their mission even more cumbersome.

Nathan became aware of the misshapen noise that had reeled them here as they emerged on a young pine that had arched over like a ready catapult. Nicholas handed the shovel back to Nathan and duck-walked beneath the pine. Nathan returned the shovel over the trunk once Nicholas had made it and joined his brother in the half-acre clearing on the other side of the tree. They came up on the emu, a grotesque, five-foot mound of brown, dirty feathers sagged into the evergreen needles of the spruce pine holding the bird to the ground. Caution had calmed the emu when they first walked up. Now the bird forgot its curiosity and resumed wrestling against the tree.

“Can’t we just lift the tree off of it?” Nathan asked.

“Internal bleeding,” Nicholas said.

Nathan couldn’t imagine how he could not have heard the creature’s deep, drumming misery from the house. Nicholas suggested that Nathan might want to walk away until the burial, that perhaps he should at least turn his head, clamp his hands against his ears. Nathan removed his coat and walked it over to the emu, placed it over the bird’s bald head to calm both himself and the squirming creature. Nathan nodded at his brother to proceed. Nicholas wielded the shovel above his too-large head, swung the still-sharp spade down at the bird’s neck. The first two attempts were ill-managed swings that produced only divots and sprayed earth and the slow discovery that Nathan was moving towards his brother. Unlike the disciples, who were bound by prophecy and fear and their own sense of futility, the thought had just arrived to Nathan that he did have a choice: he could not absorb his brother’s suffering, sure, but he did not have to sit back and just be witness to it either. He could stand next to Nicholas, a relief to his brother’s burden. Not only now, as Nathan broke the forward motion of the shovel and eased it from his brother’s grip, wrapped both hands around the handle and made dull contact with flesh, the emu’s head rising beneath the blue-and-yellow parka and shrieking what life was left in the upper region of its throat before falling silent. He could rub shoulders with Nicholas next week as well, when classes convened again and Licey Lacey returned to Bodock Middle School with a shaved scalp visibly free of lice, in clear view of every chickenshit sixth grader who dared have his dick knocked in the dirt.