The Clockwork Sisters
When Sister leaves me, I am ten and she is fifteen. She gives five extra twists to the secret key in my spine to make sure I do not wake, one for each year she is older.
We live in a home of clear glass atop a sighing marsh, where our walls sink each year and cloud over with fog each morning, like a candy counter breathed upon by covetous mouths. Our parents will never leave this place, far from the city. Nearby they keep their workshop—our playland—full of gears that glitter like spun sugar and the pearls they use as baby teeth, all for the bespoke children our parents make to sell in the night market.
“The humbler the setting, the more beautiful the jewel,” Father often says of me and Sister. Like all children, we are made to gratify our parents’ desires, only more perfectly: Father’s wish that his work may outlive him; Mother’s hidden longing for a sibling; their joint preference for platinum skin and fine copperwork hair. Even our flaws are artist’s signatures, deliberately placed, from the gold-limned crack in Sister’s tongue to the diamond in my left iris.
I am born loving Sister, who is cleverer and taller and our parents’ favorite. I love how she links our pinkies to make silly promises, that one day we will run away and be pirates or librarians, and how she wipes the oil sweat from above her upper lip, and how she grows quiet when birds linger too long in the noxious air and plummet noiselessly to earth. I love how I can creep about the marsh and always watch her moving around our home, even at night, long before she learns to catch the sparkle off the diamond in my eye and know that I am there.
* * *
After I tattle on her about the flesh children, Sister does not want to be an us anymore.
We are nine, fourteen (I always think of us this way, hour hand and minute, tick and tock). I write her months’ worth of apologies, which she burns, holding lenses up to the watery sun. I bring her crystal gems and discs of nacre when she is troubled—she has occasional fits of soundless, motionless screaming, which make our parents frown—and find them in smithereens. I repaint the dials of her finest displays when they begin to peel, but she refuses to wear them, gouging them with one of Father’s cutting tools.
The day before Sister leaves me, I am watching her change in her room through the walls of mine (I am always watching Sister). An array of faces covers her vanity, slabs of flattened lapis and ruby and quartz, marbled like meat. I can’t imagine what she’s looking for—she smashed all her mirrors months ago. I was made to know Sister, and I hate not knowing what lies within the adamantine curve of her skull. It is like not knowing what lies within my own.
“Stop it, Little,” she says without turning, fingers tracing the bezel that wraps her forehead and cheeks. “Haven’t you done enough?” She tugs. Another face flops onto the floor.
Only one of us is careful with our parents’ handiwork. I learned this when I caught her behind the market with her shirt unlaced for the flesh children, encouraging them to make a game of it—to shatter her hair, crack off lustrous pieces of her chest. I ran wailing to my parents. Sister was banned from market and wept for three weeks, though Mother took a chisel and scraped her cheeks every night to prevent rusting.
“I’m just trying to keep you safe,” I tell Sister. This is how I will remember her, a laugh like a trapped gear squealing.
“Oh, Little,” she says. “Safe for who?”
* * *
Sister does leave me one gift: when I have daughters, I know just how to fix them.
When I grow up, I realize the blame must lie with our parents. They made us too similar in looks yet too separate in age, so that we would always clash, as like magnets do. They forbade me from telling Sister about all my special features—the rows of alarms studding my tonsils like hidden mouths, the camera that blooms in my unshining right iris, the tape our parents unspooled from my ribcage each Sunday in a room full of chemical smells and red, wet darkness. I’ll never know how she knew about the key tucked between my vertebrae, filigreed and cold.
Sisters shouldn’t have secrets.
I surpass my parents in horology. I study the candle, the hourglass, the clepsydra. In a well-received monograph, I argue that timekeeping is the study not of time but of keeping.
The relevant literature has been tested only upon twins, but this is a challenge, not a deterrent. I gather supplies in my parents’ old workshop, the walls still hung with their unfinished pieces. I trace these with an absent hand while I prepare, plucking lullabies from stainless ribs to quiet the pink things babbling in their bassinets. Flesh is easy enough to acquire; the night market travels, these days, but it does not diminish.
I tell them of the fun we had together, Sister and I. Even when I tickled her or caught her in hide-and-seek. Even when I painted her dials with radium, thinking her jaw might swell and her teeth fall out, which I would collect under my pillow and use for stray wishes. I would have wished to see the inside of her skull one last time.
I have made sure nothing will come between my daughters. The experiment goes seamlessly. That night, I listen to the faint tick-tock of their hearts, sloshing with exquisitely calibrated blood; I sleep and do not dream to the gentle, pendulous sound of one child filling while the other empties, like two lungs breathing in separate rooms.
* * *
Ⓒ L.M. Guay