Clara and Carmen weren’t twins, and they weren’t the same, but they were together. 

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As newborns, they cried together, in sync, as if carbon copies of each other. Sisters screaming madly in a frantic duet. Arriving in a pair, at two and a half months, the doctors discovered something incredible, and not just a little strange, about the girls. 

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Clara was deaf. Carmen was blind. They were opposites, complements, linked together from birth, magnetically drawn to each other. A pair of orbiting stars around an invisible planet. They seemed to have been born to guide each other through life without words or sound or touch or any sense that can be sensed.

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One saw the world in silence. The other heard the world in darkness. 

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As they got older, they never left each other’s sides. They finished each other’s sentences. They knew what the other was going to do before they did it. One girl in two bodies.

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They walked home together after school, not holding hands, but within arms reach. Oversized backpacks bobbed up and down over white shirts with khaki shorts and little white socks with pink flowers on them. 

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The old abuelas in the neighborhood told stories to whoever would listen about how the pair came to be in their care. They told of how the mother had two baby girls with two different men. She was young and troubled, and lived a life of reckless abandon, chasing things no one could see while men chased her endlessly. 

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One day, the young mother left her daughters. She walked out of the city and disappeared out into the desert, never to be seen again. Some say she was swept up in a sandstorm. Others claim she must have died of thirst or been eaten by wolves. Either way, “la muerte la encontró,” they said. Death found her.

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The two girls were raised by their aunts and uncles. They seemed to speak to one another in a secret language, tapping each other’s palms with their fingertips or humming deeply while pressing their heads together. They’d smile and laugh softly with each other, communicating through an unseen, unheard connection. 

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As they approached high school, the two girls began to fight, screaming at each other and pulling hair and slamming doors. They walked farther away from each other on the way home from school. The gravitational field had started diminishing. The connective tissue between them became just a bit more frail with each passing day. 

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At sixteen, boys entered the picture. Carmen became the “pretty one” in the neighborhood. Little half-bearded boys whispered in her ear in the cafeteria line. She had golden brown hair that fell down her back, and pale, ghostly eyes the color of spider webs. She walked with a stick down the halls and through doors, smiling in her own darkness. She listened closely to the many cousins and grandmothers that swirled in and out of her ears, telling colorful stories of the black, empty world around her. She studied their speech, taking note of the tonal shifts so that she could practice the phrases over and over as she waited to fall asleep each night. She pictured their faces. In her mind, they were Hollywood leading ladies. Powerful women bossing the men in and out of kitchens. She clung to the cadence that made her sound older, like someone who knew where they were going. Sometimes she’d ask if she could touch their faces, running her fingers across their brows and above their lips, comparing them to her own. She wore a mask that everyone except her was able to see.

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Clara spent her time walking alone in the woods, laying her head against trees and just below the surface of crisp, cold streams. She would stay up reading into the morning, holding a flashlight under the sheets and exploring tales of time travel, dragons and ancient, distant planets. Her world was too quiet for her own thoughts, so she filled her eyes with sound only she could hear. She rarely spoke to her family and friends, and when she did it was only to use words that she knew. Words that she had practiced in the mirror. She would nod and shake her head, her hands and fingers twisting and swirling into effortless sign language.

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On the night of her 15th birthday, Carmen had a nightmare. She was in the desert, standing on a dune in the moonlight, or at least what she imagined real darkness to look like. Soft, cool sand blew across her feet, burying them up to her shins. She was alone. Off in the distance, creatures, blobs of fur and skin and teeth, hobbled slowly toward her, their silhouettes hunching over against the sweeping crests of the sandhills. She was shaking and sweating, trying to move her feet, but they were stuck in the depths of the grains that closed in all around her. She began to scream and pull her legs as hard as she could, but she kept sinking deeper and deeper into the sucking sand. The creatures were closer now, and she began to make out faces in the night. Someone spoke to her in a strained, withered breath. “La muerte nos mira con desprecio,” they said. Death looks down on us. 

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Just as the army of creatures felt close enough to touch her, she woke up. She was screaming as loud as she could, and she felt someone holding her shoulders down. She flailed and flung her arms in the darkness until she felt a thud on her palm and heard a shriek from the end of it. She stopped moving, her chest rising and falling from tight, short breaths. 

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“Who’s there?” Carmen blurted desperately out into the room.

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“Your evil abuela Rosa!” her grandmother croaked back, holding a hand to her leathery face. “I raise you from a little nothing and you smack me like a dog? You were having a nightmare, pequeño.”

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“Lo siento abuela,” Carmen said. “I’m sorry, I was—. It was so scary.” 

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“Tell me now, which was it this time?” Rosa said, rubbing her cheek.

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“This was a new one.” She caught her breath. “I was in a desert and there were monsters and they, they said something to me. Something about death. Like—”

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“La muerte nos mira con desprecio.” 

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“Yeah, and— wait, no, how did you know that?” Carmen said, sitting upright. 

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“I was afraid this would happen.” Rosa heaved herself up onto the bed and turned on the lamp. She took off her glasses and set them down on the bedside table. “You’re turning 15 tomorrow, si?” 

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“Si.” Carmen said. 

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“Listen here. This is something I should have told you long ago, but alas, here we are and here we must be.” She took a deep breath. “When your mother left us… Your mama, she was deeply troubled, you know this?”

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“I know, but abuela, I don’t understand.” 

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“She had been saying things, mad things to us. Muy loca. When we came into the house, we found you and your sister alone, not crying or hurt or anything at all. You were just tiny little bebés, so cute. You were holding hands. The house was in pieces, you see, but it wasn’t just a rotting mess. The walls and floors were covered with...words. She had written things everywhere. Nonsense things that had fallen out of her head and spilled out into the real world. In the cabinets, on the mirrors, under the lampshades. She wrote in red ink, blank ink, pencil, blood, even.” 

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“What kinds of words? What did they say?” Carmen asked. 

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“This is hard for an old lady to remember, my child, but I do remember one thing. I remember it because it was scribbled right above the crib, above your and your sister’s heads, in big, swirly red letters.” 

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“Death looks down on us,” Carmen said.

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“Si, that is what it said.” 

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“Does Clara know? She has nightmares, sometimes. I can hear her crying, but I don’t think she knows I do.” Carmen said. 

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“No, nieta. Your abuelo and me have never told no one what we saw that day. It is a hush-hush thing, you see, because we- we know that your mama was very sad and people do things they cannot explain when they are in such a deep, dark place, you see?”

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Carmen tried to go back to sleep, but could not help but think about the dream and her mother and those words. She lay in bed trying to picture what her mama was like. Her grandparents and aunts had told her many stories about a sad, strange beautiful woman. She had big, round hazel eyes and long, luscious black hair that was so dark it seemed nearly blue. She was small, but strong like a horse, with a raspy voice that could put you at ease and scare you to death at the same time. She tried to hear that voice again, tried to understand these words that had finally killed her.

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Carmen awoke to the sounds of shrieking in the room next door. It was Clara. She felt her way through the hall, slowly opened the door and listened. It was quiet, but she could hear muffled sobbing.

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She found the lightswitch and flipped it up and down several times. Clara walked over to the door and touched Carmen’s hand, tapping it twice to let her know it was okay. She guided Carmen over to her bed and sat next to her. Clara and Carmen spoke in their own language they called “leg-uage.” They had developed this system when they were little so they could tell each other secrets and jokes under the dinner table. It also drove their cousins crazy, which was a plus. They sat side by side and began circling and tapping each other on their thighs. A sense they could share.

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“I had a terrible dream,” Clara wrote above Carmen’s kneecap. “I think it was about mom.” 

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“What happened?” Carmen wrote out eagerly. 

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“It was in a desert. There was sand raining down on me. It was quiet, but I could feel the wind slicing and swirling all around my ears. Screaming and growling and hissing from all sides. There were monsters and animals circling around me, and there was a woman with them, trying to tell me something, but it was like she was muted.. I couldn’t make out the words. The bad things started running toward me. Then, I woke up.” 

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“Death looks down on us,” Carmen said aloud. 

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“What did you say?” Clara mumbled gutturally, staring at Carmen and tapping her on the shoulder. She had read her lips. “How did you know what she was saying? That's what she said.” Clara stood up and started pacing around the room. 

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Carmen listened as Clara trudged back and forth over piles of clothes and wrapping paper. 

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She reached out and grabbed Clara by the arm. 

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“I had the same dream,” she said animatedly so Clara could read her lips. “I was trapped in the sand. It was nighttime, I think, and I could feel creatures breathing all around me and there was a mysterious figure spoke said those words to me.” 

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“How could we have had the same dream, but different?” Clara was back on the bed, dragging and tapping her fingers on Carmen’s leg again. 

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Carmen told Clara about abuela’s story, about their mother and the words on the walls. They lay down and scribbled on each other’s stomachs into the morning. They wondered what their mother had to do with all of this. Why now? Was she communicating with them from the dead? Was she even really dead?

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They slept in Clara’s room that night, holding each other’s hands, waiting for new dreams to arrive. Lavender rays warmed the blinds and seeped in through the edges of the window. Sparrows chirped and hopped from the chairs in the courtyard below. Headlights swam through thick fog and around empty street corners.

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Carmen opened her eyes. She was lying on the bank of an oasis. She was in the desert again, which meant she had to be dreaming. She sat up quickly, looking around at the cacti and the boulders that lined the water’s edge. She wasn’t wearing any shoes. 

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Clara was lying beside her, still asleep. Her back was to Carmen. Her hair was full of wet sand.

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This didn’t feel like a dream, she thought. She could feel the warm wind on her face and the sweat on her lip. This was something else.

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She shook Clara awake. 

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“Clara, Clara! Wake up!” she screamed, jerking Clara’s shoulder back and forth. 

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“What is it?” Clara said, her eyes still closed. “What’s wrong, Carmen?”

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Carmen stopped shaking Clara’s shoulder. “You can...hear me?” Carmen asked. “You can hear the words I’m saying right now?” 

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Clara opened her eyes and turned to look at her sister. “Carmen, what is this?” she said, only halfway understanding what she was saying as she listened to her own voice. She felt the vibrations like she always had, humming from within her neck, but the noise of her words escaping through the air felt like someone else’s, like she was reading from a script as she was writing it.

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Carmen saw Clara for the first time. The mud-red lips, the round, drooping caramel eyes, soft and sad, just the way she had always imagined them. They locked eyes in a silent gaze, neither one knowing what to do or say. 

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“This can’t be happening,” Carmen said. “This isn’t possible.”

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Carmen began pacing around the damp, sticky banks of the oasis. Her legs moved effortlessly through the clumps and over the thin layer of water. She saw something out of the corner of her eye and turned to face it. She was thinner in the cheeks than her sister, and her skin was lighter. Her eyebrows were closer together and her ears higher up than she thought. She had run her fingers through her own hair millions of times, but seeing the reflection of her long, silky black hair felt like spying on someone she loved. It wasn’t a mirror. It was a window.

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The sun has set behind the dunes now, and the lurching screeches of cicadas roared to life in fresh moonlight. The two girls lay next to the water, holding hands as shimmering beads of light blinked from every direction. 

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“What if we aren’t dreaming?” Clara said. “What if we’re just waking up?”

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“Let’s stay just a little longer,” Carmen said. “I just want to stay a little while longer.”