Twin A.

He’s a single flame of wild amber, flashing between static shores and glowing heavy with nightfall. He was the “such a sweet kid” known to cry when twin socks eluded him in the cluttered plastic pandemonium of the laundry basket. Or when rubber bath toys were swept away in whirlpools spawned by tiny hands. Or when burying a trampled ant in a peanut shell casket, encrusted with glitter and dimple clinging glue spots. He used to murmur breathy fragmented words in his sleep (patterns only I could understand). And bang his wrists against the steel bedposts, a muffled clanging through our paper thin walls. The tortured bed springs wept their songs of strangled metal, sparks and starlight (making my dreams beautiful). He sometimes laughed as though it were the only way to breathe, gulping air like a drowning man, with his head bobbing and emerging wildly from an oceanic prison. When he learned to walk, he strolled cautiously under the relentless sun that lit up the petals of flowers like the ears of a cat, orange blossom transparency and deep veins branching the walls that no longer held him, like a splitting coat of paint. When I hear him now at age 11, as he talks about deep things and simple things – his syllables enclosed in laughter like parenthesis. My hands knot the way they did on the day he first came home, a rigid cocoon of blue gray wool and baby powder. A peculiar eggshell to be handled with all the sensitivities of cotton candy melting in the humidity of life. Baby boy, Twin A. Robert Reese.