Eight Minute Infraction

Segment II

Segment II: unedited

He met the solstice before he met the storm.

It was April; the clouds were swollen with rain, grey underbellies hanging dangerously close to the windmill spires. Black flies buzzed lazily along the damp ground, a humming accompaniment to the lazy, elegant chirping of the birds.

It was a muggy, itchy heat that clung to the soles of his shoes and slithered down the neck of his polo shirt. The air hung over his skin like a perpetual shadow, following him down the alleyway and through the courtyard of the crumbling inn. Poison Ivy was an old, formidable building, bedecked with Victorian gables and cracked colored glass. Spanish moss hung heavy from the roof and the windows, sliding down the walls with withered tenacity.

The walkway gave way underneath his feet as he walked, bricks cracking open to reveal the dark soil beneath. He crossed the courtyard and mounted the front steps, breath shallow in his throat. He shouldn’t be here. Yet he was, and Keane didn’t know.

And what Keane didn’t know, he couldn’t rage about.

The lobby was dim, cobwebs swooping lazily from corners of the decaying ceiling. The potted plant by the door was dead, leaves crumbling onto the thin carpet. He took the elevator to the third floor and spent the entire ride trying to steady himself, straightening his knees and his fingers and his windpipe. He wanted to seem normal. Talk normal.

For once in his life, he wanted to be normal. Not Keane’s kind of normal – the bounding, vivacious kind, with a smile that stretched halfway across his face. He wanted to be his own kind. But three minutes in an elevator was not nearly enough time to figure out how, exactly, he was going to accomplish that.

Just as he was thinking about being different, he stuck his hand in his pocket and his fingers curled around the envelope. The paper was damp with sweat, corners curling around his fingernails. He was forced to remember that he wasn’t here for himself, which promptly quenched the rest of his trembling.

The hallway to her room was narrow; the ceiling, even narrower. The tiles were black with mildew, and the air smelled like decay. Her door rose barely above his forehead. Without knocking, it swung upon.

And there she was.

Four feet of pure, unbridled oddity. She was skinny in all the wrong places. Her wrists and ankles were fragile, her neck wobbling, as if too delicate an appendage to hold up her curved head. She was wearing knee socks and a hat in eighty-degree weather, and when she raised her head he saw that her hair was white. White, with electric blue and yellow feathering along the wisped ends. She was a mixture of the solstices, an eclipse all of her own.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Pondered as to why Keane, with his disdain for eccentric people, had latched upon this girl. Her features were too sharp, too long for beauty, her mouth too full and her eyes alarmingly small.

But. That wasn’t important. So he reached for what was important, right as the girl tipped her sunflower-stem neck and spoke.

“Keane?”

That was the first thing. He blinked, startled. His fingers slid out of his pocket. She must not have known Keane very well – most acquaintances were able to separate the two. Keane stood with military precision; he slumped. Keane was strong; he was spindly, and his hair stuck straight up from his forehead at unfortunate angles.

“He sent me,” he said uselessly, because that was all he could think to say. He didn’t want to disappoint her, but he wanted to spite the fact that she had confused him with his twin.

“Funny.” The girl just stood there, looking. Her eyes widened as she took him in, white-blonde lashes beating a frantic staccato against her oval cheekbones.

“What?”

“Funny, you.” She said. “He didn’t mention a duplicate.”

With that, he reached for the envelope again. He didn’t want to remain here, categorized and critiqued yet again. And he wasn’t a duplicate – the matching piece to a genetic jigsaw puzzle.

“We’re twins,” he explain stiffly, as he pulled it from his pocket. He thrust it out towards her. His fingers, he noted with dismay, had begun trembling again.

The girl stared at it for a moment. She reached out cautiously, and took it by the tips of her fingers. She left it swinging from her grasp, like an accessory, as she scrutinized him. “Keane sent this.”

“It wasn’t that he was busy,” he said, because Keane had told him to clarify. “It was that he couldn’t come. Physically couldn’t.”

The girl furrowed her eyebrows. They were mere white spider webs, draped over her tiny eyes. “What does busy mean to you?”

“Uhm.” He didn’t quite know how to reply to that. “He was on a trip. A sports trip.”

“Yes,” the girl mused, “he told me he was going away. He didn’t tell me he had a messenger.”

Gideon turned. He was the messenger, he was the lackey, he was the twin. From now until Keane broke her heart, this girl would remember him as vaguely this grey, terrible day. It was not a new sensation, but it was an unpleasant one. Especially coming from a girl with multicolored hair, who looked as if she knew a thing or two about being categorized.

But, he reflected, she was human. And hair dye could not change that. She was one in a long string of others who would constantly turn away, only to swivel back and confuse him. Keane?

“Have a nice day, twin.” Her voice was quiet, resonating from behind him. The paper crinkled in her palms. “Will I be getting any more messages?”

He didn’t turn. He couldn’t. His hands were shaking now, his heart pounding. He could feel that beat, hammering behind his collarbone, threatening to break free. Without a final word, he left, feet striding briskly across the narrow hall. He could feel her gaze, even as he boarded the elevator. It was burning into him – eating him alive.

It was curiosity. But, behind that, it was amusement. And that scorched him, far more than the April sun and the humiliation of Keane.

He glanced up as the doors were sliding closed. The girl was standing in the middle of the hallway, still holding the letter. She looked, in that split second, scared.

But after the doors slammed shut and she disappeared, it was far easier to remember her as an oddity. And mocking. In his imagination, she did not have the complexion of a girl in over her head.

So he let his thoughts run amok, and remembered her as she wished. That way, he didn’t have to remember the beautiful blue of her hair, and how it matched the bluish flecks in her eyes. The tense, coiled knot of her shoulders. The way she said Keane – as if she said it too sharply, it would settle on her tongue, turning to poison.

That way, he didn’t have to acknowledge that his brother, yet again, had stolen something he had wanted.