It looked so soft, like that stuff they stuffed pillows with. I bent over to take a handful, and the pain shot up from behind like friendly fire, almost cowardly. I clamped down on myself. Don't move. Don't move.

But I didn't understand. It looked so soft.

What's that stuff they stuff pillows with?

What? I don't know. Feathers? Down? We need to focus. It's getting late.

Yes. Late. The woods were bleeding light. Soon the black trees would lose contrast, run together, as the snow between them faded from white to grey, bone to ash.

◊ ◊ ◊

"Should I close my eyes?"

"No. I don't know. One, two—"

"No, wait! I'm not ready!"

"—three!"

Jake torqued back on the pliers. Ely shrieked. They'd been five and six years old that midsummer Saturday, not yet the seasoned double act they'd become, but clever enough to synchronize their procedure with their father's lawn mowing and mother's evening japa. From the moment she'd started chanting, yoga mat flanked by a tall glass of turmeric root juice and a timer for the vegan meatloaf, the boys knew they had ten minutes to complete the extraction, give or take a few Namu Myōhōs and Renge Kyōs.

The tooth glistened in the needle-nose pincers like something larval in the beak of a bird. The mower droned monastically in the distance. Ely groaned and fell back into a pile of sawdust; they were in the garage, which moonlighted as their father's workshop and mother's erstwhile candle-making studio. He cupped his hand under his chin to catch a dribble of blood. Jake wrenched him up by the elbow, anticipating tears half a second before Ely felt the telltale burn in his throat.

"Don't cry," Jake said. "I didn't cry."

Ely grabbed a rag from the workbench and crammed the cleanest part into his mouth to stem the flow.

"Easthy for you to sthay," he sniffled around the rag. "Yoursth came out all by itsthelf."

"Just like yours." Jake gave him a hard look. Ely gingerly removed the rag from his throbbing socket and held out his hand.

"Yeah. Gimme the tooth."

Their parents were not convinced by the tableau vivant arranged for them in the kitchen: the tooth a bloodless prop on the tile floor, Ely pitching half a step behind as though he had just dislodged it with one particularly forceful hiccup, Jake twisting around on his barstool, lips parted around the gap in his own gums where, two dinners prior, a spoonful of gelatinous succotash had suctioned his wiggly canine right out of his head and left him changed. For two whole days of Kindergarten they'd suffered the ignominy of individuality, of every smile betraying them to their teachers and classmates. Even their parents hadn't been able to tell them apart before (not without exposing their navels, which seemed like a humiliation now that they could talk). But parents weren't always as stupid as they looked.

It wasn't healthy, their mother explained. It wasn't honest, said their father. The tooth fairy didn't come to jealous little boys who wanted a quick buck—nor did she come to those who ripped their brother's teeth out like a medieval barber-dentist. Of course their parents thought it was about the money; the boys weren't about to correct them, not that they had the words to describe it. The need. The itch. They looked into each other across the dinner table, between bites of meatless meatloaf, and the locking of their eyes was as pure and clear as anything they might've said aloud. Who could spot the difference when even they could not? In making a gap they had filled one.

The tooth had not been the first time, but it was the first time they could remember with any clarity. It was the first time they had made a plan. And it was the first time—but not the last—they'd been caught.

◊ ◊ ◊

Houses shone through the trees with expectant warmth. The entire cul-de-sac answered the dusk with the same golden glow. We were no more than fifty yards from home. Nothing could stop us from stomping our snow-shoed feet over the brittle bittersweet and yarrow clotted on the forest floor, breaking through into the back yard, and staggering in the back door. It was almost tempting.

I don't think this'll work.

It'll work. It's just a matter of getting the right angle. Now help me move this log.

We rolled it with our feet until it bisected the trail. I moved in a hunched shuffle, arm clamped to my side in forced paralysis. My breaths came fast and clipped, and I wobbled slightly on one foot.

Keep it together. Don't fall down again.

Screw you.

Independently, in unison, we eyed the imprint in the snow, retracing the skid, the impact. The overall effect was something of an aborted snow angel. Little divots pocked the snow under nearby hemlock boughs, where the thud had dislodged needles and ice. An innocent enough accident—yet still demanding of atonement.

◊ ◊ ◊

Similarities had, of course, been abundant from the beginning. The first eighteen months of Ely's life played out like an extended case of déjà vu for Mr. and Mrs. Anselm, who might've made different directorial decisions had the affair felt more like a reshoot and less like a rewind. Perhaps it was the material, or perhaps it was merely their own range, an incapacity to improvise. Either way, their cues rarely forced them to. Both babies favored the same formula, fussed at the same time of day, shied away from one neighbor's Chihuahua but cooed at the other's Plott hound. Both did the same straight-legged flutter kick when tired of being held and tugged at their left ear when confused.

Then there were those little, ineffable moments that, as parents, they'd thought irreplicable—first smile, first steps, first word. It wasn't so much that Ely's milestones mapped perfectly onto Jake's, but rather that the Anselms couldn't distinguish them once they'd happened, as though the process converting moment to memory were somehow corrupted, snippets jumbling like scenes on the cutting room floor, crossing like wily chromosomes in meiosis. Ely walked two days before his first birthday, but Jake didn't walk till a week after his—or was it the other way around? Jake laughed and laughed when we took him to see that movie with the rabbits—or was that Ely? Doesn't matter. They both laugh at it now, when we play it at home.

Only when déjà vu became double vision did Mrs. Anselm feel the blood return to her fingers. She was changed; she was awake. Her husband might've been happy to stay the course—minus a couple grams of rat poison—but she saw that the universe was naught but scripts, prompts, and incantations, glitches and patches and enzymes swimming in soup, searching for reactions to catalyze. Or, rather, she wished she saw these things. In reality, the most she could discern of the pattern was those white-washed precepts of secularized mysticism: that shiitakes kinda taste like beef if you add enough paprika, that karma goes down easier when your ass looks great in yoga pants, and that ritual is the best damn substitute for control shy of striking a deal with the devil in exchange for your firstborn son.

She needed reassurance—first that there were rules and plans, and second that they were safely beyond her comprehension. She needed daily exercises and monthly cleanses to remind her of the multitude of kinks and toxins she would never work out. She needed design to nullify her accident, and accident to nullify her choice. She needed just the right amount of disorder to keep the world from making the wrong kind of sense.

◊ ◊ ◊

He removed his jacket and tied it around his waist. Then he changed his mind and threw it down on the snow beside the log so that his knees wouldn't get wet when he kneeled. I protested feebly.

Just wait a second, okay? Just wait. We don't even know if it's broken.

He glared at me, his hobbled double. Together we had peeled back my coat, good arm first, and even in those dazed seconds following my fall the thing hadn't looked right: pinkening, swelling, misshapen. Different.

It's broken. You know it, I know it. The quicker we get this over with, the better.

I watched him shimmy the log deeper into the snow and kneel before it like a penitent, but I could make out no hint of contrition on his face. It looked like the tree trunks in the failing light: steely grey, furrowed, and cold.

◊ ◊ ◊

There'd been nothing clandestine about it until Marco Sepúlveda slithered up to them in the schoolyard and gave them all sorts of new words and worries to chew on. Until then, the weirdest thing about them was not that they were alike, but that they were brothers; even in their tony Chicago suburb, second children were a rarity, the enormous overhead cost compounded by a brutal population tax (which toggled on and off every few years depending on the party in power, and left the decision to pull the trigger on additional offspring looking much like a game of Russian roulette). Even with the settlement money from the lab, the Anselms were near paupers compared to many of the families in town, but there was a special status to having two, even if one of them was a dupe. Our boys, their parents said with pride. Our sons.

"You're not brothers." Marco had said it in the manner of a doctor breaking a difficult diagnosis, hands splayed on his corduroyed knees.

The Anselm boys looked at one another. Ely plucked a spider off Jake's shoulder and flicked it out the playhouse window.

"Yes we are," he said. "We're identical brothers."

It was the term their mother had come up with in lieu of twins, which, given their separate birthdays, had never sat quite right. Ely was a bonus brother, she'd explained with a wink, a gift from the lab because Jake had turned out so great.

Marco pushed his bramble of black hair out of his face.

"My parents are neur-o-sci-en-tists," he insisted, enunciating each syllable. "And they told me all people who look the same are either twins or clones. And you guys aren't twins."

"I know I'm a clone." Ely looked around for a teacher, but the playhouse's yellow walls afforded them considerable privacy. He knew it wasn't a curse, exactly, but there was something not-quite-right about saying that word unsupervised.

"He's still my brother," Jake said.

"Look at it this way." Marco picked up a plastic lion from the dirt floor. "This is Jake. Who are Jake's parents?"

Ely and Jake mumbled their parents' names. Marco grabbed a disheveled Barbie and a denuded G.I. Joe and set them side-by-side on the ground above the lion, so that they formed a triangle. There was a fugitive, leaping light in his eyes, like a magician about to perform a trick.

"And who are Ely's parents?"

The Anselms pointed to the dolls.

"Wrong." Marco pawed around the junkyard of toys until he came up with a tiger cast in the same mold as the lion, but painted with a few hasty stripes. He placed it under Jake's lion, like a drip coming off the triangle.

"Ely doesn't have parents," he said. "The lab made him by—by—" Here he bumped up against the limits of being six years old. "—by putting Jake in the copier. They made a copy of him. Brothers come from the same parents, but Ely, you came from Jake."

The Anselms' faces puckered in consternation. They looked sallow in the yellow tint of the playhouse, but Marco glowed like butter. Time ticked.

"Why does it matter?" Jake asked.

"It doesn't to me," Marco answered. "I'm not the one making things up. That's the grown-ups."

"Why would they lie?" Ely asked.

Marco gave a breezy sort of parlor laugh and fanned the air as though Ely had said something dreadfully droll.

"They didn't lie," he scoffed. "Not really. They just did that thing grown-ups do, like—like when we play house, you know? I might say I'm the father, and Jake might say he's the dog, and you might say you're the baby. We're not lying. We know we're not really those things. Grown-ups, they're always playing house, every single one of them, and they get upset when you break the rules. Makes sense, right? Nobody wants to play pretend with someone who's not pretending."

Jake and Ely exchanged uneasy glances. Here were their suspicions, it seemed, spelled out in the very instructions required to make sense of them. It was as though Hooked on Phonics contained some vital warning for children to divine in strained, stuttering syllables. All their short lives they'd worried there was a line somewhere, thin but definite, between the things they were allowed to share—finishing each other's drawings, wearing each other's clothes, picking at each other's plates—and the things they weren't.

"Do you have to do it all the time? Pretend?"

Marco shrugged. "You don't have to pretend with me," he said. "But there's just some stuff you don't say around some people."

"Kinda like curses?"

Marco smiled. "Yeah. Kinda like curses."

◊ ◊ ◊

I don't know how to do this.

I swayed over him. Cold sweat wormed down my back.

Yes you do. You've already done it.

I took a deep, steadying breath. My arm throbbed against my side, where I held it stiff like a soldier at attention. Below me, he'd assumed a sort of child's pose reminiscent of our mother during her daily mindfulness sessions; one of his arms braced against the earth as the other extended over the log, skinny and winter-pale, T-shirt sleeve bunched up over the shoulder. His face was turned away so that he looked almost like a sleeping fawn, all curled in on himself except for that one arm, so thin and exposed. A limb on a limb.

Teetering above, I focused on the center point between elbow and shoulder. Just another fallen branch. Just a dry twig, like so many littering the trail.

I lifted a snow-shoed foot.

Set it. Set it right.

Just like mine.

◊ ◊ ◊

It was for no particular reason that Mrs. Anselm asked the boys' primary physician for a referral a few months after they'd started fourth grade. The boys were just so close, she told Dr. Meredith Morgan, PsyD, projected on the glass wall in the salon—not that closeness was unexpected, or bad. But they still did all the same extracurriculars, had all the same friends, and seemed—though it felt wrong to admit it—like the same person occupying two bodies.

"It's not like something's happened. There's nothing specific I'm worried about. I wouldn't even say I'm worried—" Mrs. Anselm pursed her lips. "They're just so close. When they were little, it seemed like a given. Most one-, two-, three-year-olds have basically the same frame of reference, right? But I knew a couple sets of twins when I was a kid—you know, spontaneous ones, before the ex-womb, before sequence tailoring—and they grew apart as they got older. My boys, well—it's like they only get more alike as time goes on."

"Individuation can be more difficult for twins than single children," Dr. Morgan explained in a reassuring, slow-honey voice, neglecting to mention that her own experience with doubles was increasingly sparse and geriatric, hardly ten years out of medical school herself. But she was as qualified as anyone to reiterate the aging literature. "A child starts out seeing himself as a symbiotic unit with the person who he depends on the most—usually, his mother. As he develops, the child learns to separate his ego and recognize boundaries. It's not uncommon for twins to struggle with mutual interidentification. They're more apt to form that symbiotic bond with each other. They've seen themselves as a single unit for so long that the idea of boundaries might seem foreign to them. It could be that Jake and Ely just need a little more time to self-discover."

Dr. Morgan had no illusions about her job. She'd long thought pediatric psychology had more in common with veterinary science than many other medical disciplines; in both fields, it was often what the patient couldn't tell you that mattered most. She had a nose for molestation, Munchausen's (by proxy or not), and every shade of autism on the spectrum. ODD, OCD, ADHD, PTSD—all those acronyms had a nasty habit of masquerading for one another, but she knew the twitches, the tells. The prospect of young twins excited her; like all highly specialized people she was more than a little compulsive herself, and there was no more meticulous a test than parsing through a pair so alike even they didn't know how they were different. She would have to show them.

To Dr. Morgan's credit, she didn't allow her complete professional bafflement to interfere with her performance. She met with both boys together, then separately, once per week for two months, palpating for the usual weak spots, floating her usual probes, but she was too late—by about five years—and she knew it. By then, the boys had a system in place, deep-rooted and disciplined, and she could not force them to divulge their blueprints, let alone fix what was not yet broken. She knew she'd run out of contrived concerns for Mrs. Anselm long before she compelled the crisis. Besides, she wasn't in the business of forcing under-ripe nuts to crack (that would be psychopharmacology).

"They're quite aware of themselves," she reported to Mrs. Anselm after what she knew, from the other woman's lack of nerves, would be the boys' penultimate appointment. "Jake and Ely are both very capable of differentiating between their identities. Their joint interests and friends seem to be a product of their environment and natural inclinations, which understandably overlap to a large degree. They seem less dependent and more dutiful, if that makes sense. Each wants the other to be happy. This attitude might come from each boy seeing himself as the more capable twin. If anything, this primes them for some healthy competition as they age. Confidence and compassion are good things."

"So they're normal, then?" Mrs. Anselm asked. Dr. Morgan smiled with closed lips.

"Who's really to say what's 'normal' for their situation? It seems normal enough to me," she lied.

The boys had one final, shared appointment on the insurance company's dime, seated a pillow-length apart on Dr. Morgan's reasonably comfortable chintz sofa. They knew that they were through, that they were off scot-free, but had the good graces not to gloat. This wasn't, after all, a game.

Though she was resigned, for the most part, to letting them go, Dr. Morgan eyed them with a glimmer of lingering hunger. The temptation to take one last swing is often strongest following capitulation, like the cancer patient's brief second wind after calling off the chemo. No freedom like having nothing left to lose. Receding, sinking like a shadow under dark aquarium glass, the Anselms' delicious strangeness tantalized more than ever. From that vague shape she'd make plenty of guesses, revisiting the pair like a mental gymnastic for years after they'd been absent from her couch, but revelation eluded her always, and for one simple reason: she still thought of them as twins.

She let them waste most of their last appointment complaining about how their parents wouldn't get them a dog. When they hit a lull a quarter till, she eased into small talk.

"The casts must be coming off soon," she said. The boys nodded.

"We're going in on Wednesday," Ely affirmed. Jake plucked at a bit of cotton batting coming loose at his shoulder.

Two supracondylar fractures of the humerus. Same arm, same place. It was a miracle she'd kept a straight face when Mrs. Anselm marched them into the office for that first afternoon assessment. Mrs. Anselm, who would sit in the waiting room dog-earing grain-free recipes in Edible Chicago for the better part of an hour. Mrs. Anselm, who'd insisted she was calling on little more than a whim. It's not like something's happened. There's nothing specific I'm worried about.

And there were the boys, bashful but unabashed, adept at the trick of hiding in plain sight, of playacting one pathology to mask another. Still, they were only children. In a half dozen more sessions, she would've coaxed them open. Something—a hitched breath, a microexpression—would've reminded her that they were offsets, not twins stemming from the same root, but untethered, grafted things eternally frustrated by the seam between them. She would've flaked their mirror off in sheets until she saw the reflection was flesh, not light, all along. The rest, no doubt, they would've offered willingly; they weren't used to being seen, and the itch would've hurt too good to stop scratching. Yes, they knew all about itches, they'd tell her. Let us share everything with you, every bloodletting major and minor: the ripped out teeth, the ghostwritten essays, that one time at Cub Scout camp that Jake wet his sleeping bag and Ely, somber, chugged half a liter of Mountain Dew to hold up his side of the bargain. Let us admit to the cloistered confessionals of friends' secrets told in confidence, the nightly debriefings, the logistical weariness of managing two lives as one. (Say nothing of the future—of Jake deliberately flunking his driving test because Ely had fucking forgot to signal; of both faking crushes on the notoriously wholesale Sasha Gourley so they could claim the same first kiss; of Ely throwing the 800m final so that they could end sophomore year with the same track record). They were not twins, sleepwalking in synchrony; for them, every emulation was the very opposite of accident. Every overlap was hard won, ceded grudgingly by that cardinal distance.

So there you have it, they would've told her. Now set it right.

Only Dr. Morgan, shrewdly or ineptly, didn't force a fracture. She merely reminded them that she was just a phone call away, that they could talk anytime, that there was nothing they could tell her that she hadn't heard before. Adolescence was coming, and it was weird for everyone. Jake and Ely nodded, relaxing into the cushions, feeling happily misunderstood. Their lowered defenses proved too great a temptation for the doctor. With five minutes to spare, she tapped the glass.

"So boys," she said in her slow-honey voice. She leaned forward, rested her elbows on her knees. "Want to tell me how you really broke your arms?"

◊ ◊ ◊

I found the angle, lined it up, brought the shoe down hard—

I wanted to do it right the first time.

It wouldn't have been fair to him otherwise. And it was getting late.

◊ ◊ ◊

"We told you," Ely said. "We were snowshoeing in the woods behind our house and we fell. Hit the same patch of black ice."

"There's a lot of it," Jake said. "Hidden under the snow."