One Syringe for the Both of Us

My dad died when I was thirteen. They said he put his shotgun in his mouth. Mom and Dad drank a lot and fought a lot. I barely saw a single tear grace my mother's once beautiful face at his funeral. All the tears I saw, came from Anna and Eliza, my sisters. He never blamed them for his drinking. They never had to use the expensive foundation that they scrounged up pennies to pay for to cover the purple and blue flowers that blossomed over their skin. But where dad's hands were his weapons, mom's were her words. Her tongue was like a pistol. It shot out harsh words and bitter laughs at anyone who disappointed her. So my sister's had bruised souls. They used forced laughter and sobs into pillows to cover it up.

Three years passed. We built iron walls around ourselves, in order to deflect the bullets our mother's mouth flung. We learned how to hide while she drank--and how to drink away the pain ourselves. That's when Eliza and I began to grow apart. We didn't see how she began to look at us with those cold, calculating pools of blue. You'd think that all that we'd been through would bond us in an unbreakable way. But all it did was cause those iron walls that we built around our hearts to be built between us as well.

Eliza and Anna were twins, identical in every physical way possible. You couldn't look at one without seeing the other reflected back at you in her cerulean eyes and unblemished skin. But they hated each other. While all Anna did was look at her sister with love, her twin's eyes held nothing but disgust. Eliza had ice in her heart since she was a little girl. Our mother always mockingly said that she must've had frostbite in her uterus when she was carrying Eliza, resulting in the emotionless sister we saw in front of us. But Eliza's empty heart gave her the one thing that we lacked: strength.

Then the call came. I'll never forget the day the phone rang. That piercing shriek that hadn't been heard in years. (We didn't get phone calls. Ever) I answered.

"Is this Mrs. Dannis?"

"No." I replied. The voice coughed, uncomfortable with the news he was about to deliver.

"Can you put her on the phone, please?" I could. But I wouldn't.

"She's indisposed at the moment. Is there something I can help you with?" I forced politeness. I knew. I knew that this couldn't be a pleasant call. This family would never be so lucky.

"This is Hillsborough Hospital calling. It's about a member of your family, an Anna Dannis? You need to get down to the hospital immediately."

Twenty minutes later, my mother and I were standing in the pediatric ICU of the hospital. Eliza, cold, pitiless Eliza, had long since left out of boredom. My mother cried quietly over my sister's body. The doctors said that she must have fallen down the stairs. She hit her head hard enough to knock all of the parts of her that were Anna out of her head, and into whatever waits for unloved little girls after they get to leave the pain and misery of the real world. All that lay in the bed in front of us was an empty shell. Her scarlet hair fanned around her on the pillow, reminiscent of the blood that had pooled around her hair after she fell. But I know she didn't fall. Eliza had inherited the part of our father that could take a life. But where our father took his own life, she took her twin's life. Which I guess was, in a way, taking her own. Anna was the embodiment of everything she hated and envied. Anna had a heart that couldn't be blackened by circumstance. Eliza's soul was black as soon as she knew what it meant to have one. I guess Eliza was sick of watching Anna growing into a strong woman who could get out. Leave this shithole town, and this shithole family. She was going to make something out of herself, and leave us. Eliza couldn't let that happen.

But the broken doll in bed still had a heartbeat. The doctor left Mother and I alone to flip the switch that tethered my sister to this world.

"I can't do it." Mother sobbed. She turned her face to me, with the same blue eyes that we all had, and took my cheeks in her hands.

"Please. I'm not strong enough for this. You've always been the strong one in this family, Beth. You need to be the one who lets your sister move on." I held her gaze. Movement behind her pulled my focus, and I saw Eliza walking to us from behind her. Mother didn't acknowledge her as she came to stand beside me. I felt a cold hand intertwine itself with mine, and I knew what I had to do.

"I'll do it." I said softly. My mother's eyes drooped shut with the relief that she wouldn't have to kill her firstborn child, and I whirled around and walked to my sister's room as her sobs rang out in the background. Eliza never let go of my hand as I flicked the switch, and Anna, with one last, peaceful breath, left us forever. I heard a high-pitched giggle.

"It's strange, how flipping a little plastic switch can take the life of our beloved twin, isn't it? No harder than flipping off the lights!" I slowly turned and looked at Eliza. And as I looked at her, a sickening mixture of agony and anger ripped through me, breaking my ribs and licking at my lungs with fingers of flame. Eliza's eyes widened with malicious glee at my pain. She's gone She's gone She's gone She's gone. My other half, my best friend. Eliza was trying to keep her from leaving us, but she caused her to flee somewhere we couldn't follow instead.

"Actually... I think we can follow." Eliza chirped. Her face had the excitement of a child's on Christmas morning. With the flourish of someone opening the box of an engagement ring, Eliza pulled out an empty syringe from the pocket of her black peacoat. "All dead bitches go to the same place, right?" My eyes flitted between her and the syringe before they narrowed.

"Right." I echoed.

"Well, then there's your solution! Just push it into your veins, and voila! A heartwarming, nauseating sisterly reunion." Eliza's eyes were filled with the only tender emotion I had ever seen from her. An aching, bitter hope. She wanted me to go. She knew how much pain I was in--and she knew better than anyone that the pain would never stop. She was our twin after all. A hand that didn't seem to be mine reached out and took the syringe from the pale, outstretched hand. I took off my coat, revealing white skin and the blue veins that marbled my arm. I looked at Eliza.

"Together?" I asked.

"Always." She replied. She had no more reason to be cruel. We would both be dead as soon as that insignificant bubble of air entered my veins. She placed her hand over the syringe and guided it to one of the rivers of blue that peeked through the thin layer of white. I felt a small pinch.

Then Eliza and Beth were gone, and the world fell away. All that remained for them was whatever comes next for unloved little girls who get to leave this world of pain and misery.

---

A freshly carved headstone sits over a pair of freshly dug graves.

That poor mother, a pair of mourners remark. Losing her twin girls, her only daughters, in the same day?

The headstone bears two names:

Anna Kendra Dannis and--

Elizabeth Stella Dannis.