Note: Okay. This is a bit of a cheat. This is the story that inspired the title of my publication. I’ve attempted this story a few times but kind of dropped it because I couldn’t see the merit anymore. But since I’ve been a little all over the place this week (writing off-Substack), I decided to take the chance and write it anew. Now, there’s gonna be brambles— and more than a few, probably—because this has been rushed and I’ve had zero time to re-read, but I’m going to pass through it once I have part two settled— which should be tomorrow.
I don’t know if this story is still me. If this is still Echoes. I’m pretty sure it’s no good. But it comes back to me again and again. So that has to mean something— right?
1.
Mom named us May and June, after her favourite months. Looking at old pictures of us, tan and grinning, hair the color of wheat, I might’ve gone with June and August. Summer’s children, never happier than when we were running beneath the hot blue sky, laughing and playing games. But I suppose, us being twins, it makes sense to pick something that’s placed one next to the other, equal in love and closeness. And, in that strange way life has, my name does make sense. Even though I was born first, I was always the more timid one. Slow to wake, deep in thought; apprehensive in new situations. Ephemeral May, straddling the indecisiveness of spring and summer’s bright, burning confidence.
That might make me sound like a downer but I don’t think I was one, back then. It just means that June was usually the one who took charge of our activities, even when we played with others. She wasn’t bossy or anything. Just intrepid, bursting with the kind of enthusiasm that rubs off on you, pulls you along for the ride whether you want to our not. And more often than not, I wanted to.
I remember this one time, June decided to explore a construction site a few blocks from our house. It just popped in her head as we were passing by, no doubt drawn by the blue tarp hiding the secrets inside from view. There were six of us, I think, all on bikes. And I remember thinking: this is a bad idea. I could see the same thought on some of the other faces. But no one stayed behind when she found a way through the fence. And when she rode her bike across a wooden plank crossing a thirty foot drop we all followed, never mind how that thing sagged and bounced beneath our tires. We had a blast, racing across skeletal floors open to the air, rubber wheels coated in pulverised concrete as pale as ash. We chased each other on the staircases, rummaged through the tools. At some point, June went all the way to the top and rode her bike on the rooftop and I watched from the staircase with the others, light-headed and sweaty-palmed as she traced slow wavering loops across the bare concrete, like a palsied hand stirring the world’s biggest cup of coffee. My pulse spiked every time she forced the turn and her tires gritted in the dirt, mere inches from empty air and gravity’s unforgiving clutches.
We got caught, of course. Somebody saw us fooling around in the structure, or maybe saw June on the roof, her dark silhouette wheeling around and probably had a heart attack. Dad was besides himself, wanted to know whose harebrained idea it was, but I never told on June. Not ever. Because although she scared me sometimes, she was closer to me than the blood in our veins and the near-perfect mirror of our features. A connection that preceded the beating of our separate hearts, when we rested in dreamless amniotic sleep, whole and smooth and one.
So we both got grounded for three months. Which was rough but I thought it was fair, considering. June was pissed, of course. But Mom told her we could count our lucky stars nobody got hurt, otherwise we would’ve never seen daylight outside school hours again.
June had crossed her arms and aimed a smug smile at my parents. “Nobody ever gets hurt. Right, May?”
Yes, I told them. Nobody ever got hurt. But that funny little twist in my stomach knew that there would come a day that statement would no longer hold true.
2.
In the late nineties, Dad got a job offer up north. My parents had been looking to get away from the area for a while so they jumped at the opportunity. Scoping out potential places to live, they settled on a small town just outside Haverhill, where the deep New Hampshire woods provided the peace and quiet they were looking for.
Our new home was set on the outskirts of town, on a chunk of land carved into the forest. An old two-story farmhouse, complete with a barn that would end up serving as a garage. The first time we drove up, I thought it looked exhausted, sagging at the end of the narrow driveway choked with leaves. There were bald patches on the roof where the shingles had sloughed off and most of the paint had cracked and peeled. The one shutter hung kitty-corner from a second story window. Tall weeds poked up through the crooked steps leading up to the weathered, splintery ruin of the porch.
It should’ve given us the creeps but somehow it didn’t. Like our parents, June and I saw its potential. June more than me, of course. Faced with the inevitable, she was already picking her way through the house, looking for secrets. Picturing herself roaming the woods out back, playing games only the two of us really understood the rules of. Breathless, we told each other all the things we were going to see and do when we’d moved in, our backseat conversation a mess of half-sentences and single-word thoughts only the best of friends could master. Most of it was couched in sadness for the impending loss of our friends and lives in the city, of course, each of us doing her best to lift the other’s spirit.
“It’s gonna be great,” I said, fingers intertwined while I stared into June’s eyes, sparkling with excitement.
“It’s gonna be perfect,” she said.
3.
We moved in on the second of July. By then, the house had undergone a transformation. The roof had been repaired, fresh shingles gleaming. The new wood siding had been painted a soft white. There were new shutters on the windows, lacquered a glossy dark green, like the front door. The porch had been sanded and painted, as well, and there was furniture standing in the shade, ready to be used.
Workmen were still at it in the yard, fixing up the barn, but most of the interior had been finished. The rooms smelled like paint and glue. Standing inside them was like wearing a leather jacket that was nice but stiff. We stood around, feeling like houseguests, until Dad told us to get settled.
Later, as Mom took away the plates of our inaugural dinner of cold sandwiches, Dad told us to listen up. Running his tongue around his teeth, he fixed us both with a serious look and gave us the grave Dad pose: elbows on the table, fingers interlaced, as if in prayer.
“Now that we’re here, there’s a few ground rules we have to go over. June.” Dad frowned at what was no doubt an eye roll. “First of all, this may not be the city but the same rules still apply: home before dark—“ he lifted an index finger from the tangle “—and no rides from strangers.” Another finger went up. “I catch you breaking one of those, you’re grounded for the rest of the summer. Understood?”
We nodded.
“Good. Second, I know you two are already looking to get into trouble but listen to me very carefully: stay out of the woods in back. The workmen have told me that there’s an old cottage out there and that it’s very, very dangerous to go near it. Do you understand?” He looked from me to June and back again. When I gave an empathic nod, he turned to my sister. “June? I want to hear you say it.”
She sighed, tossed her hair. “I will not go to the stupid cottage in the stupid woods.” She made a face. “Like that?”
“Yes. Although I could do without the attitude.” He studied us in silence for a few seconds. “Just know that if I catch you out there, you’re never leaving this house again. Are we clear?”
“Yes,” we said in that eerie twin unison.
There was another pause before he nodded. “Okay. You can go.”
We went up the stairs in silence. But halfway down the hall, June turned to me, the familiar glint in her eyes and this time I didn’t need the twin thing to know what she was thinking.
4.
It took a while for the perfect opportunity to arise, and it was driving June crazy. Then one day, Mom announced that a friend was meeting her in town for lunch and they would go shopping after. My eyes crept to June’s but she was leafing through a magazine, oblivious. So I smiled up at Mom and told her to have fun.
She looked from me to June and I could see she was conflicted. But in the end, the idea of lunch won out.
“Behave?” she implored before she stepped out.
The door hadn’t shut or June was pulling at my wrist, grinning. “Let’s go.”
5.
June was running ahead of me, cutting a trail through the hip-high grass. I saw my arm, my wrist caught in hers as she pulled me along. And when a butterfly fluttered past, she laughed and turned to the side and I saw her, teasing out from beneath the blowing blonde locks.
And then we slipped beneath the trees. June hardly slowed down, pulled me along the path of leaves that rustled beneath our sneakers and when my foot hit a root and I stumbled she doesn’t stop, keeps pulling me along so I had to struggle to keep from falling. I could feel her excitement, her need, through the connection of skin as she raced along, deeper and deeper, until she stopped short and I bumped into her.
The path lost itself in the woods as the trees spread apart, towering high above us, branches reaching towards each other in a dense green screen that blocked out most of the sunlight, apart from a few golden slivers that shifted across the forest floor. And there, half-buried in shadow, was the cottage.
My first thought was that Dad had been right: it looked dangerous. It was old and small, erected in irregular stones. A chimney jutted from one side like a squat finger tipped with tangle of dry twigs from an old bird’s nest. Darkness lay solid in its single window, in the open slot of its doorway. In the murk, it had the appearance of an ancient grey face, jumbled and one-eyed, its skin cracked and peeling. Staring at it, I felt unease creeping up my arms with stealing fingers. I became aware of the silence that hung beneath the canopy, broken only by the merest whisper of the leaves stirring in the breeze high above. And I remember thinking: I don’t want to go anywhere near that thing.
So when June began to pull, I resisted. And when she tugged, our hands separated, like a chain breaking and she ran without a care, the sound of leaves crunching underfoot like a ravenous mouth chewing and chomping. It takes me a beat or two but then I start after, panicked.
This is it. This is the moment that exists in its own temporal pocket in my mind, still as alive and immediate as it was all those years ago. I see myself chasing after. My eyes are fixed on Junes hair, a ribbon of streaming gold. She’s fast, much faster than me, but I’m running all out, fear giving me extra strength. Because I know something bad is going to happen, know it in my bones. I see the starfish shape of my hand, reaching. Almost. My fingers brush her hair.
And then the ground opens up and swallows us.
6.
There was a splash and a blinding pain that exploded across my vision as I hit the bottom. It pulled a scream from me that was high and thin and as I stumbled back, my head rapped off the wall. I struggled to keep my balance; the surface beneath my feet was uneven and my questing hands found only slick stone that slipped beneath my fingers. There was another bolt of pain as I twisted to the side and almost went down.
I heard my own panting breath, bouncing back to me, the deep foul smell of the water in my nostrils. It was almost chest-high where I was standing, and freezing cold.
Up above me, I could make out a circle of canopy. A well. We’d fallen down a well dug in front of the cottage.
My head snapped back down to the darkness.
“June?”
There was a soft groan. My hands reached out to it, fingers touching cheeks and nose and lips, just above the water’s surface.
“June,” I husked. “June, are you alright?”
She muttered something unintelligible that lost itself in fuzz.
“June, say something!” I yelled, panic tugging at the highs of my voice.
“M’head. Hurz. Meh. Ed.” The rest was lost in a splutter as she slipped beneath the water.
“June!” I shrieked, digging beneath the water. There was another monstrous twist of pain in my leg but I ignored it, screamed in pain and effort as I began to wrestle June up from the water. It wasn’t easy, with the injury and the tumbled stones beneath my feet but somehow I managed to lean back against the wall with my sister’s lifeless weight against me.
I stroked her hair. “June, say something.” My lip quivered. “June, please.”
My heart did a little trot as another sleepy groan escaped her.
“What is it? What is it, June?”
“Dohleavemere.” It took me a minute to figure out she meant: don’t leave me here.
I started crying. “I won’t, June. I will never leave you.” I sniffled. “We’re going home. You and me. And everything is going to be fine.”
There was no answer. Maybe she’d passed out again. Or maybe she had her doubt and didn’t want to tell me what she was thinking. Whatever the case, I stroked her hair again, then lifted my head towards the eye of the well again, and started calling for help.
7.
There was no time at the bottom of that well. Only the dark and the sound of my own breathing striking off the curved walls in flat, spring-loaded echoes, while the cold blanket of the water clung to us. I felt buried, leaning against the slick stone with my sister’s lifeless weight on top of me. I looked up at the world, shrunken to a merciless eye that held us in place and I could taste bitter.
I had stopped yelling at some point. My throat was raw and burning. I was afraid, more afraid than I’d ever been in my life, and I would’ve kept yelling until my voice was down to a whisper. But by then I was starting to get tired. June’s legs were caught behind the tumbled stones beneath the surface, and I wasn’t able to lift her high enough, which meant I had to haul her up again and again. Each time I did, the broken glass in my leg crushed together and red pulsed behind my eyelids. Hot sweat and cold water met and made me shudder.
There are so many questions that plague you after. Like moths clinking off the glass of a porch light, they stir my mind at night while I stare up into the darkness, sleep as out of reach as the lip of the well had been. Could I have stopped her? What if I had stayed put? What if I had run just a little bit faster? I used to have nightmares about that, persistent enough to require a therapist. The sight of that splayed hand reaching for June as she sped up through the sea of leaves and almost… almost—
What occupies my mind most about that day is what might’ve happened if I hadn’t broken my leg. I wonder if I would have been as tired, had I not been injured. I wonder if I would’ve kept slipping on the scattered debris if I’d had use of both my legs. I wonder if I could’ve hoisted her up above the water just one more time.
9.
We both ended up in the hospital. When my parents came to visit and I asked about June, all I got was strained smiles and furtive looks. Mom brushed my cheek and told me to get better first. But her fingers were cold and Dad stared off into the distance, wringing his hands.
It was the nurse who told me. Dad was angry and wanted to give her a piece of his mind but when Mom put a hand on his shoulder, he deflated, shrivelled up like a balloon in his moulded plastic chair. My eyes kept bouncing between the two of them, trying to find some cue that this was all just a sick joke, that they were fooling me, that June wasn’t somewhere in this hospital, lying in a never-ending sleep.
“It’s gonna be fine,” Mom said, flashing me what she no doubt thought passed for a brave smile.
Dad broke down first, the sound of his cries like something jagged pulled up from his throat. It wasn’t long before we joined him.
10.
The first time I went to visit June, I was still in the hospital. My parents took me in a wheelchair, up to the fifth floor, where a quiet white hallway stretched away. June’s room was the second-to-last. There was a big teddybear holding a heart-shaped mylar balloon on one side. On the other, a stack of machines monitored my sister’s vital functions.
Dad rolled me up close to the side, then retreated across the bed.
She looked small, as if some great length of time had passed and I had grown, while she’d been suspended in more ways than one. The bandage around her head was in sharp contrast with her tan. But it had already started to fade. In another week or so, she’d be pale.
“You can touch her, if you want,” Mom said in a soft voice, and I looked up to catch them staring at me instead of June. I would catch them doing that a lot over the next few weeks. I’ve often wondered how hard having had twins must’ve been for them in that situation. People might have differing opinions about it but I think it was torture. When a loved one has passed, sometimes you recognise a characteristic or a passing resemblance in a family member or even a complete stranger, and those old wounds start seeping again. My parents saw June every time they looked at me. I was a walking, talking effigy.
I looked at the hand resting on the coverlet. My own hands gripped one another in my lap and I had to make a conscious effort to relax. My nerves gave a twitch when my fingertip brushed the back of her hand. Her skin was cool. The hand wasn’t stiff but slack, as heavy and lifeless as her body had been against mine in the dark pool of the well. Holding it in my own, I felt the truth of it come crashing down and I folded over in my wheelchair, sobbing.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry June.”
Mom rushed over and put her arm around. She made soothing noises, her mouth moving in my hair as she kept saying that it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t anybody’s fault.
11.
That first week I spent what time I could by her side. I talked to her, read to her. Brushed her hair and helped the nurses where I could. I even spent the night, curled up on the empty bed next to her, which the nurses agreed to, so long as no new patient came in.
Dad didn’t like it. I could see a truth in his eyes I shied away from. But Mom convinced him that it was fine, that I only wanted to spend time with June. Wasn’t that right?
And I nodded. Because I did want to spend time with June. But in truth, I would’ve stayed in that room with her forever, in penance for my crushing guilt. The both of us, buried like a pharaoh interred with his personal slave, to cater to his needs in the afterlife.
At night, I placed June’s arm carefully across the gap between the beds, and when I got into my own, I reached out and grabbed her sagging hand, like I had done so many times before. Hoping against hope, that one day I would wake up and her hand would be gone from mine. That she would be sitting up in her bed, dazed and confused. And after all that, she would ask when she could leave.
Night after night, I joined her in sleep’s sweet oblivion, away from the world that had separated us.
Until I found her again.
12.
I was standing in a vast green field. The sun hung low above the horizon, lighting the clouds on fire. The grass tickled my knees and I looked down to see I was wearing a dress, something I wouldn’t be caught dead in. It was a flower print number—even worse.
The field sloped up towards a hill, where a great oak stretched its branches towards the sky in wide bramble heart. At its base stood a lone figure, waving at me.
June.
I raced up the hill, grass hissing as I went and when I reached her, I stopped short. My hands came up to touch her, then paused as the truth of the matter made my heart drop.
“This is a dream.”
June shrugged. “Yeah.”
“You’re still in a coma.”
She frowned. “Am I? Huh.” There was a pause before she said: “What’s with the long face?”
I looked at the dream-June, miserable. “This is all my fault. I’m the reason you’re… you’re—“ I broke off, unable to finish. “And what if you never wake up again? What if I never get to talk to you again? What if—“
I trailed off when I became aware of the change in the light. I raised my eyes to the sky to see huge thunderclouds rolling in, knitting the sky closed. Purplish light flashed in their dark bellies.
“Yeah, maybe cool it,” June said.
“What— what is this?” I said, staring at the threatening storm.
“That’s you. Your feelings. Just relax, May.” I jumped as I felt her fingers on my shoulder.
I had to try several times before I could speak. “This is a dream.”
“You said that already.”
“This isn’t real.”
June reached out with a bored expression, grabbed a lock of hair and yanked. Hard. I cried out.
“Real enough?”
I rubbed my scalp. Then pain melted away in confusion. My eyes were drawn up as the light changed again, the clouds parting as swiftly as they had gathered, leaving behind the sunset sky.
My mouth opened and closed as I stared into my sister’s face. June smiled with patience, until she said: “May.”
The words unclogged. “What?”
June pointed up.
I followed her finger into the branches, where the motion of the seasons played out on a never-ending loop. Leaves unfurled green and bright, burned away in flaming hues, until they withered away into nothing, all in a manner of seconds.
“Am I… doing that?”
“Uh-huh. You’re confused. Or you’re nervous. It’s something like that makes it happen.”
I lowered my eyes to hers. “What is this?”
She gave me a look as if it was obvious. “This is a dream.”
“But— you’re here. I’m here. I felt you.”
“And I felt you—“
That was as far as she got before I wrapped my arms around her. I hugged June with all the fierceness I could muster, eyes squeezed shut in the sweet fire that radiated out from my heart.
“May,” June said in a strangled voice.
I opened my eyes. The entire field was a mess of colours, sweeping across us in pulsing waves.
“What’s going on?”
“Like I said: you need to be careful. Before you know it—“
I gasped out in darkness, and for a beat or two I had no idea where I was. Then I felt the limp weight of June’s hand in my own and it all came rushing back. A dream. It had been nothing but a sweet, cruel dream.
After another few seconds, I swung my legs out of bed, meaning to put June’s arm back to go to the bathroom. And then I saw it. A smile playing around my sister’s lips. It was faint but unmistakable, and it hadn’t been there the night before.
END OF PART ONE
Fucking brilliant.
Oh my god! I don’t have words for how I love this! This may be your best yet, Ken. My grandma Z and her sister (not twins) were named May and June, lol. This is so painfully beautiful and you captured little girls with uncanny accuracy. Love, love, love!