Prompt from writer's digest; the subconscious

[Westerly_2]

the prompt encourages you to imagine you wake up to another state feeling strange and wondering why someone you would rather not see is hanging around,

[Westerly_2]

Was I even awake? I wasn’t sure. Either this was sleep and I was sleep-walking a life-like dream, or…this was my room, wasn’t it?...I was truly awake and suffering some… hallucinatory  reality. For here I was, at the edge of my bed staring down at the sleeping one, me, or was it my twin sister Sasha? And now that I take a closer look, that has to be Sasha, with the left-side part in her dark brown hair where mine is a right part and the tiny pink stye on her left eyelid near the lashes, where I had none. She looked as she had when we last shared a room as school kids, her hair all crinkly where she braided it wet and loosened it after, in a rushing river of corkscrew curls. This snaky hair and her color choices – purple with red, indigo and silver, and long flowing scarves buoyant as kites – marked her as the stand-out twin.

            It’s a funny thing how just a few centimeters of placement can beautify one face above another all but identical: the eyes slightly larger, more widely spaced, more deeply blue, small differences hardly measureable, making one girl “the pretty one” and the other, blandly unexceptional.

            As she slumbered there, her rosy pout and elfin nose, I was seized with the impulse like a shouted curse from my reptile brain to dig my thumbs into her windpipe and press the life out of her, this hologram, this interloper.  I was not foreign to these feelings, having had the same urges as I lived the life in real time. Was she undeserving of my wrath, you might ask, this beauteous innocent, the casualty of  jealousy, perhaps? Think again.

            Picture my sister at 15 showing me her pained help-me face – such a performer – in the cow line for school lunch. She cut in line, grabbed the sleeve of my sweater with her shapely lacquered nails glittering with silver sparkles.

            “You have to give me cash for chow, Sonja. I lost my lunch money and I’m starving.”

            “Lost you lunch money? Third time this week…what….?” You spending it somewhere else?”

            She dropped her eyes and her chin trembled.

            “Please, please, Sonja, I know you have it. You are so…conserving. You can spare. Sonja,” (Her voice was low and purring). “Don’t make me go to the office and plead family poverty .I will if I have to.”

            “Disgrace Mom?”

            “Don’t make me pry into lockers or dip into purses left lying around. I’m deperate, Itell you.”

            Picture her dimpled face as she pirouettes away.

“Thank you, Sis. I love you.”

And now my bed holds only my pillows and blankets,  no nightmare twin.  My imagination, dream-state, subconscious mind – whatever seized me to realize what I could not act out in life, to urge to punish, now when we are 38 and she is going into rehab for the second time. What broughtthat on?

           

[Marilyn]

Wow, very moving, Westerly! I love that the more beautiful twin winds up so damaged. Good stuff!

[Bmichael]

I agree...very fine writing, W.

[Westerly_2]

All fictional, I'm happy to say. I never had a sister.(I've felt like grabbing someone by the throat though. Once.)