Half of Everything

Syn wandered through the sickly green miasma in a daze. In the distance, golden strains of music cascaded off a violin like a waterfall off a cliff. The music was getting louder and louder, but what started off as sweet strains turned chaotic, like nails on a chalkboard. Energing behind all that chaos was an ear shattering scream splitting the air for the chorus. 

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SCREECH

Syn counted the beats in his head, his ears bleeding from the horrendous cacophony of noise, and bleeding further from the predictability of the beat of the drum that had joined the fray. 

The miasma parted. A hideous chittering like a hyena laughing joined the ugly cocktail of sight and sound, and in the mist, he could see clawed hands grasping his twin brother, who was unconscious. The ruby eyes of the night beast glinted from within the poisonous cloud. The clawed hands dug deep. 

Syn reached out a hand toward his brother, his name escaping his lips, his arm throbbing.

He looked around. He had fallen asleep under the kitchen sink again. He crawled out shakily and stood up. He saw no night beasts, but the shadows crowding the kitchen were closing in on him quickly. He felt a comforting hand on his shoulder. 

“Syn, Syn, wake up. You were sleep walking again.” His bandmate’s voice was kind and concerned, chasing away the shadows.

Syn struggled for a moment, and then he came back to reality, running a panicked, perspired hand through his raven black hair. 

His bandmate, Solomon had a furrowed brow. “You’ve been sleep walking since I’ve known you Syn. When are you going to get some help?” 

Syn gulped, still panting. He closed his eyes. In the darkness of his lids, he saw the clawed creature with the scaled arms. He opened them again and the creature was gone. Solomon turned on the lights. Syn walked away from his friend and went to his bedroom. He took out his quilled pen and began writing music. The song of his dreams, though hideous, contained beauty within it that could easily be changed into the perfect piece of artwork.

He wrote a few notes, but as he wrote them, the melody began slipping out of his fingers. The dream was fading, as was his elusive masterpiece. He leaned his head on his desk, feeling exhausted despite technically sleeping. Solomon followed him to his room and stated, “Everytime you sleepwalk, you come to your room afterwards and start scribbling up music. I don’t think your songs have ever made it into our concerts, though. Just what are you working on?”

Syn leaned his cheek upon his hand. His eyes were open but he was elsewhere. 

“I’m trying to eulogize my brother.” Syn whispered, a forlorn smile on his face. 

“I didn’t know you had a brother.” Solomon was shocked, 

Syn drummed his fingers on his desk. “It’s not something I can just tell anyone… but I trust you, Sol.” 

“We really should tell our manager that you’re sleepwalking, though. I can’t watch you in the night and you end up in the weirdest places—the bathtub, the closet, and now under the sink again.” 

“I’m not telling that money-stealing, slave driving monster anything!” Syn snapped. 

Solomon merely remained silent. Then he said, “Well, if you ever want me to stay up with you to help keep you safe, let me know.” 

Syn nodded, and Solomon left him to his devices. Syn crumpled up dozens of sheets of music and threw them away. Musical letters danced in front of his eyes, and he heard them as they floated by in bright colors. He tried to catch the letters, but they chittered mockingly at him, dancing out of the way. He scooted his chair back and stood up, going to his shelf to retrieve a journal.

As he read, the sound that had haunted him for the past nine years got louder and louder in his mind.

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SCREECH

“Sig…” he said out loud, and was beckoned into the past.

***

Back then, he had just turned ten years old. He, his twin brother, Sigurd, and his friend Elizabeth were all urchins who had to take food out of trash cans to survive. 

Back then, they lived in a back alleyway together, and he, being the oldest (by a minute or two according to his adopted parents), took it upon himself to look after his little brother and Elizabeth. He didn’t remember everything about those days, but there was a day he remembered clearly. The three of them were huddled in an alleyway—their home for a year now. The police were constantly after them, as they were known throughout the city for stealing food not only from trash cans, but from careless individuals who left their doors unlocked. 

“Do you both know who we’re going to hit up tonight?” Syn asked.

They exchanged glances, then shook their heads. He grinned and said, “We’re going to hit up our old caretakers, Sigurd!”

Sigurd’s mouth was wide open in shock. “Syn, we can’t! You know how mean they were.”

Syn looked down at the fire they had lit for warmth in the alleyway. “I know. You still have the scar.”

“And your hand is still useless.” his brother pointed out.

Syn’s right hand lay lank at his side, the nerves torn loose. He used his good hand to squeeze his brother’s shoulder. “They have plenty of food, Sigurd. This is our chance to get them back.” 

Elizabeth was silent throughout the exchange. She was usually a quiet sort. 

Sigurd shook his head. “No. This is ridiculous! We can get the food elsewhere.”

Syn shook his head. “They adopted so many kids, we could eat for months! Now is the time.” 

Sigurd considered that for a moment, his eyes downcast.

“Aren’t you tired of constantly being hungry?” Syn asked.

Sigurd’s fists clenched. “Fine. Let’s do it.”

“Let’s rest up, then. We’ll be up late stealing the food.” Syn said. “Elizabeth, you stay here. Keep me from sleepwalking too far.”

She nodded, and he and his twin settled down to sleep. He was staring at the wall of one of the buildings they were nestled between. The building was a blindingly white color, and it scraped the sky, coming to an odd point at the top. He blinked once and saw the wall. He blinked twice and a scaled arm seized his own, dragging him into the poisonous mist. He coughed violently and pushed himself to his feet. He heard a cacophony of instruments whirling around him.

He saw memories rotating by him in a maelstrom of sickly colors and chaotic music. He could see himself caring lovingly for his brother in all of them. One memory of them eating a loaf of bread sprang up from when they were five. They each had four slices, but he heard his brother’s stomach grumble loudly, and he had given him his last piece of bread.

Syn wondered what it was like to have plenty to eat, to have a full stomach, to not worry constantly where the next meal was coming from. He hated sharing with his brother–absolutely hated it—but he found himself always giving him the last piece of everything. He walked by dozens of other memories—putting bandaids on his brother’s knees, helping him up while climbing trees, even singing him to sleep when they were smaller. It would be so much easier to look after himself. But it was almost compulsory—like eating or drinking—to give his brother everything first. 

I do everything.

Why doesn’t he do something for me for a change?

I could run away and leave him to fend for himself.

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SCREECH

Then, he saw the most precious memory he possessed. His brother had found a violin in a trash can somewhere, and Syn had reprimanded him at first, saying, “What are you thinking? I told you to look for food!”

Sigurd had hung his head, and Syn immediately felt guilty.

“It sounds pretty.” Sigurd had murmured.

Syn had taken the violin in hand, intending to throw it out. But then, something completely magical happened. He decided to play it. His eyes lit up, his ears danced.

His sinking soul was ignited.

It all clicked for him all at once, it was as easy as breathing or walking. Pristine notes flowed from the instrument like a breeze on a shore. Nothing had ever made as much sense to him as playing the violin, and his brother had brought it to him.

He continued walking through the miasma, and saw, in the maelstrom of whipping chaos, the event that had destroyed him. His adoptive parents were furious at his twin for ‘stealing’ food from the fridge in the middle of the night. Syn had heard him screaming and thundered down the stairs. He had cried, “Leave him alone!”

His adoptive mother and father had exchanged glances, apparently impressed, and then they said to him, “Would you take his place?”

Syn swallowed, looking at the belt. He nodded slowly. The next thing he knew, they were tying the belt so tightly around his hand and pulling on it that he heard a pop and an unearthly screech emanating from his own mouth. 

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SCREECH

Syn felt his blood boiling at the memory. His ability to play the violin was gone. That instrument was like a window in a dark prison, and now, he could never play it again. It was the only thing he had ever been passionate about, even survival paled in comparison to the euphoric bars of trilling beauty that flowed from his fingers when he played.

Suddenly out of the whirlwind a scaled hand emerged, gripping his arm and pulling it off. He yelled, clutching his shoulder and falling to his knees.

He heard a whispering voice in his ears, do you want to hear pure beauty pouring from your fingers again? Like rain dancing upon the surface of a river? 

“What are you?” Syn’s voice was shaky, barely audible.

In the sickening mist, pointed teeth appeared. “The prince of the air. I appear to those in need.”

***

Syn snapped back to the present. He trembled and burst into tears as he put the journal back on his shelf. Syn wiped away tears as he remembered the day after his hand had been destroyed. Sigurd had caught him utterly broken, staring blankly at the wall in their room with tears rolling down his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” He had said.

Syn turned away, embarrassed and hiding his tears away as best he could. “It’s nothing.”

Sigurd clasped his hands behind his back. “Syn, you can tell me. We’re twins—we share everything, even colds. Let me share this pain with you, too. It’ll be easier when it’s halved.”

Syn continued wiping his eyes repeatedly. He cried all the harder, grateful that he would always have at least one person who always cared for him.

“I had such a talent. I know I did. And now I’ll never be able to share that talent with anyone. Before you found that violin, I didn’t know there was any reason to keep going, other than keeping you alive. I was just living day to day in a stupor, waiting for something like that to come along. Now, there’s no reason to keep going again.” Syn wept bitterly.

“Don’t talk like that! Everyday I wake up starving and yet I’m still breathing, my heart is still beating, and I want to know what’s going to happen to me next. I want to know what sort of jokes you’ll make to keep me happy, what trash cans we’ll hit up, what the weather’s going to be like. Don’t you?”

Syn buried his head in his pillow. “I’m not like you, Sig. I can’t be content with just surviving day to day.”

“If we share everything we can share this, too. I remember walking in the park once and you were so focused on getting us food that you didn’t even notice the sky. I had to point it out to you, and when I did…”

“I stopped and stared for five minutes. It was cloudy but the sun was rising above the clouds.” He remembered.

He could see the spark of the love of life in his brother’s eyes. Since they shared everything, Sigurd was right. He should share this love he had, but it was a leeching sort of sharing. Syn had no love of life, but seeing the love his brother had for it was what made Syn so protective of him.

Syn snapped back to the present once again, looking at his right hand and clenching it as tears poured relentlessly from his eyes. He grabbed his quill and sat down once more. He was exhausted, and kept snapping in and out of wakefulness, the chaotic music and the slithery voice entering his head. 

He was in that strange place between dreaming and wakefulness—the place where his artistic mind worked best—and the notes that were slipping from his fingers earlier he was catching effortlessly. He dove in, his mind consumed by his craft and trying to find the perfect notes to preserve his brother. 

He opened his eyes and wrote, then closed them and he was hauled before the scaled night beasts who had seized his hand as his adoptive parents had. They held his brother in their hideous embrace.

Syn was on all-fours before them. “Give him back!”

There was a long pause, filled in by the familiar sound.

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SCREECH.

Would you give your hand? 

Syn sobbed hideously. “I would. Of course I would!”

Liar. There was chittering laughter in the darkness.

“What would I have to do to prove it?” Syn asked. 

I told you. Give your hand. The night beast hissed. 

“My hand…” Syn whispered, looking down at his now perfectly working hand.

Syn’s eyes opened again and notes flew from his pen, crafting the perfect song at long last. When his eyes were opened, heaven opened up as well. But hell and the prince of the air were beckoning him more into the darkness. 

He’s right here. Give us your hand.

Syn snapped back to wakefulness. He finished the song with a flare of his wrist, and then stood up and clutched his head in his hands. He kept wiping tears away that wouldn’t stop coming. He knew if he gave his hand up, he would live in squalor again. He would no longer provide anything useful to society, and his truest love, music, would no longer be apart of his life. 

It hurts. He thought to himself. He covered his heart with his hand despondently. He looked at the song. He had done it. It was perfect, from the lyrics to the melody. But, if he gave them his hand, he would never get to play it. 

His mind returned to when they had raided the home of their caretakers. 

***

They smashed the window with rocks at about ten at night. They climbed in, and the other children the couple had adopted stayed silent. They remembered Syn, and they didn’t want to get him in trouble. He and Sigurd went to the fridge and removed dozens of food items and put them into a bag. They worked rapidly, and were ready to leave within ten minutes. His brother paused, however, and he looked down at his feet just as they were about to go out the window. 

“Syn…”

“Yes?” 

“This is wrong. The kids here need this food.” Sigurd said.

Syn walked to his brother’s side and momentarily put the bag of food down. He grabbed his twin’s shoulder with his good hand. “They will get more food from the caretakers. We’re the ones who are starving now. I don’t know how much longer we’ll last–”

“Syn… Let’s put it back.” Sigurd replied.

Syn swallowed. Looking into his brother’s eyes, he felt a sort of ravenous rage and a despicable sort of jealousy. “Who cares about right or wrong? Do you think our caretakers do? No one will care that we stole it.” 

“I can’t explain why we shouldn’t do it. I feel like someone is always watching us. Someone good and kind. That person knows what we’re doing here.” Sigurd said.

“Nobody was watching when we were being beaten within an inch of our lives, and no one is watching us now, Sig. Let’s go.” Syn grabbed the bag of food and headed for the window. 

Just then, a gunshot split the air and Syn collapsed. He heard his brother screaming his name, and he closed his eyes. He opened his eyes and the clawed hands were dragging him by the wrists into the hellscape. He looked up with teary eyes at the red-eyed night beast. 

He heard a SCREECH and when he woke up, he found out that his brother had been shot and he had lived. 

***

He retained his right hand, playing the song up on stage to the tune of billions of dollars that he would never see as his manager would confiscate all of it. But he never played music for money. It was as if he was playing for that being that his brother had mentioned, being elevated to another plane of existence. But in reality, he knew he was barely clawing his way out of the whirlwind of hell when he closed his eyes.

Twins share everything. We’re both in our own half of hell. I put us there. 

He finished the song with a beautifully placed, achingly sorrowful,

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SCREECH.