She wants to go back to before, back to the beginning, prior to this secret death, long before the twins were snuggled inside her womb, a pair of bocce balls, grapefruits sprouting limbs, becoming gangly, alien-looking in medical film, later floating inside her embryonic soup like plucked chickens, as if pretending to be astronauts tethered to nothing, gravity inconsequential, and her feeling their slide and glide all the way up to her ribs, Jim, her husband saying, “Hey, they just moved, didn’t they?”, her thinking they should never have married let alone gotten pregnant, let alone with twins, her a twin herself, always copying Claire’s style, dying her hair blood orange in high school because Claire did, piercing her navel, lip, clit, now married-Claire, perfect-Claire, already bringing over baby gifts before the twins are even hatched, scads of matching baby outfits, Seuss-striped pajamas and miniature spoons, Claire thinking of twins—the concept of twins–as rare, precious, a kind of unbreakable bond between them, no different than the covenant of marriage, Claire happy in hers, Jim now lifting a butt cheek and farting into the sofa, him pale, bloated, dull as alabaster, an unremarkable future staring back through a reflective square in the television’s right hand corner, it becoming a kaleidoscope, then a camera, clicking away at their beige walls and carpets, their beige ambitions, nothing ever ventured, nothing, really, ever gained except an ordinary existence, a death sentence she feels sluicing down her thighs as her water breaks.

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