by Sophie Panzer
My nosebleed starts seven days after my parents’ funeral. The virus takes them quickly, my mother right after my father, that first plague winter. I do not invite anyone to the cemetery with me except the rabbi. People offer to come anyway, but I refuse—it seems wrong for the living to risk so much for the dead.
I sit shiva alone and feel a dull ache in my sinuses during my walk on the last day, the ritual meant to signal I am ready to return to normal life. At home, I uncover a mirror to see blood pooling in my nostrils. The blood is thick and slow and tarry, a red so dark it is almost black. It oozes into my mouth all evening and the next morning as I try to return to work, editing documents on a computer from my apartment.
I go to urgent care in the middle of the afternoon because I can’t stop the bleeding. The nurse who fetches me from the waiting room compliments my eyes. “So pretty,” she murmurs in a dreamy, distant voice.
I am a chimera. My twin died in the womb at twelve weeks and I absorbed her embryo. I’ve always known she was a girl even though my mother was convinced she was a boy. I would have called him Evan, she used to say. I’ve always called her Evie.
Very few people pick up on my condition. They might notice my eyes—one green, one brown—and the patch of pale skin that stretches from my left elbow to my wrist, which is several shades lighter than my natural peachy gold and burns easier in the sun than the rest of me. They usually don’t know this means I have two sets of DNA. Spare parts, my father always joked.
I never told him or my mother that I dreamed about Evie sometimes. She aged with me in the dreams, always keeping pace with the passing years. We looked alike, although she looked more like my father—pale skin, green eyes, straight brown hair. We would have picnics in the park or hunt for worms poking up from the soil after the rain. When we got older we would go swimming in a lake or eat in fancy restaurants.
I am trying to remember the last dream I had about her as the urgent care doctor enters the examination room. He has dark shadows under his eyes and liver spots on his hands. He barely glances at my nose before launching into a barrage of questions about whether I use drugs or alcohol or medication and if I have any allergies.
No, I’ve just had a nosebleed for two days and it’s starting to worry me.
He sighs audibly. Is there any chance you could be pregnant?
No. Not at all.
He makes me pee in a cup anyway. When the test comes back negative he tells me to buy saline solution and phenylephrine over the counter. Then he shuffles out of the room.
I go home and cry myself to sleep. When I wake up the next morning my nose is crusted with dried blood, but the bleeding has stopped. I feel a rush of relief before a cramp in my gut makes me rush to the bathroom.
Diarrhea is funny until you’re lightheaded and dehydrated. I sit on the toilet for hours, gulping water from the sink, before I am finally able to drag myself back down the hall and collapse into bed again. I call into work sick and lie in bed all day staring at the picture of my parents I placed on my bedside table after the funeral. It shows my parents standing outside my childhood home in winter, bundled up against the cold and hugging and laughing about something. I snapped the photo before they even noticed I was looking.
I drift from my bedroom to my bathroom throughout the day. That night I fall asleep thinking about how my parents tried for another baby after I was born. They wanted a big family, but my mother had miscarriage after miscarriage, and three rounds of IVF failed.
They tried to brush it off for me. You’re more than enough for us! they would joke whenever I did something noteworthy—threw a tantrum, won an award. I like having you all to myself, I would say blithely when they asked if I was ever lonely. We had an unspoken agreement to reassure each other this way, that everything had turned out fine in the end.
The next morning my stomach settles, and I manage to eat breakfast. When I step into the shower and try to wash my hair, it comes away from my scalp in dark clumps.
I hear myself cry out. People always said how much my hair looked like my mother’s, dark and curly.
I make an appointment with my primary care doctor and bring her a bag of the hair I collected from the shower, showing her the vulnerable new pale patches on my scalp. She peers at my evidence and begins her interrogation. Have you been using any chemical straighteners? Are you on birth control? Have you been experiencing unusual levels of stress?
I shake my head at her first two questions before telling her about the nosebleed and the diarrhea and the fact that both my parents just died.
She purses her lips in concern. Grief can have strange effects on the body. You may want to consider seeing a therapist. Antianxiety medication could be helpful.
She orders some blood tests to check for vitamin deficiencies and autoimmune issues. I take the elevator down a floor to a lab where a nurse compliments my beautiful veins before draining what seems like a dozen vials of blood from my arm. By the end I feel woozy, and she brings me a juicebox.
I return home to work. My boss has emailed me about taking too much PTO for bereavement leave and doctor appointments. By the end of the day, my lab results are uploaded to my patient portal, and everything is within normal ranges. My doctor calls to confirm. Your vitals look good. I would really recommend seeing a psychotherapist. I can give you a referral.
At night I dream about Evie for the first time in a while. We are at the beach hunting for shells, and she is walking ahead of me.
Walk slower, I call to her.
Sorry, she says, waiting for me to catch up. When I get to her she hands me a pretty whelk.
For you, she says, smiling.
I smile back. Thanks. I haven’t found anything for you, though.
Don’t worry about it, she says, nudging the sand with her big toe. I’ve been a pest lately.
I give her a confused look. What are you talking about?
She keeps her gaze on the ground. I know I’ve been acting out since the funeral. You’ve felt it.
What do you mean?
She hands me a pebble, smooth and dark and volcanic. I notice the sand on the beach is black, and we are wearing raincoats. It reminds me of somewhere I’ve been. Ireland? Iceland?
She still won’t look at me. I’m sorry about the diarrhea. And the other stuff. I know you were really upset about the hair.
I shake my head. You mean this is you? You’ve been doing this to me?
She flinches. Don’t get angry.
Why? I raise my voice. Why would you do this?
She smiles sadly. I have no eyes or mouth to let me cry for them. What else can I do?
I move to shove her away and wake up before I can touch her.
I get my period, and it is electric blue like Gatorade, like the sanitized fluid they use in tampon commercials. I feel a surge of irritation and fatigue. Stop it, I growl to…..what? Myself? Evie’s DNA? She’s not even a person, just a collection of errant cells and troubled dreams. How can she possibly be responsible for this?
I save a pair of soiled underpants, now dried a crusty turquoise, to show my gynecologist, who asks if I’ve considered going on birth control. Menstruation can be so hard on the body.
I think of my mother stretched out on a table like this one, my father in the room with her. Both of them hearing one twin is gone, another embryo is gone, and another, and another. I feel tears leak down into the whorls of my ears.
I demand an exam, and the doctor complies, reluctantly.
Any nice plans for the weekend? she asks as she snaps rubber gloves over her hands.
I think about Evie on the beach in her raincoat. I might need to see someone about an exorcism, I say honestly.
Lovely. Now just scoot up a bit more.
After five minutes, she declares everything looks normal. I go back to my desk, and my boss calls me into a meeting to suggest I take unpaid leave if I’m dealing with medical issues. Otherwise, we’ll need to discuss making up this time on weekends.
On Saturday, I blow my nose, and a millipede drops into the bowl of the sink before wriggling down the drain. I blow again, and a moth flies out before promptly incinerating itself against a lightbulb. I blow one more time, and a spider trails from my nostril on a thread of silk. I let it crawl into a corner and don’t even bother making an appointment.
On Sunday, I vomit a frightening amount of silvery-black bile onto the hardwood floor of my bedroom. It splatters across my bed frame and my bookshelf and my walls before drawing in on itself to form a single snaking coil that oozes along the floor.
You don’t find this concerning? I ask the gastroenterologist after vomiting again in his office.
He wipes a fleck of bile off his glasses and scribbles something on a clipboard. Is there any possibility you could be pregnant?
I leave his office in disgust.
On Monday morning, the vomit stops. My body is suspiciously quiet when I get out of bed. It makes no strange sounds or movements, radiates no mysterious pain.
When I look in the bathroom mirror, I see a crop of blemishes across my forehead. The tiny maroon welts do not hurt or itch, but they spell the words I miss them.
I lean over the sink and cry until I dry heave. I retreat to my bed and do not log in to work. My phone rings and rings, and I do not pick up. By the end of the day, I suspect I am no longer employed.
I dream I am lying next to Evie on the floor of my childhood bedroom. I can’t see her, but I can feel warmth radiating from her skin.
I speak first. I don’t think I can do this anymore.
She doesn’t reply. For a minute I only hear the soft rushing sound of her breath.
I try again. I’m sorry about last time. I shouldn’t have yelled.
Finally, she speaks. It’s okay. I’m sorry I hurt you. I really don’t mean to.
I reach for her—a hand, an arm—but feel nothing.
I can take it from you, you know, she says.
I try to turn to look at her, but it’s as if my head is bolted in place, staring at the ceiling fan. What do you mean?
I feel her hand in my hair, turning a lock thoughtfully between finger and thumb. I remember my shower and almost move to push her away, but I don’t.
If it’s too much, she says. I can take over from here.
I watch the ceiling fan turn above our heads. I feel a heaviness pressing down on me, a force that threatens to crush me through the floorboards, past the foundation of the house and deep into the earth. Even if I was awake, I would be unable to move myself from beneath this weight. Even if I woke up and my body was completely normal again, I would be immobilized by it.
I give my sister a tiny nod. After a brief pause, I feel her fingers flutter over my face and gently close my eyes.
In my sleep, I feel the tingle of cells turning over, of pale skin creeping over mine. My stomach churns as my guts reshape themselves. A fog descends slowly over my brain as neurons light new pathways with each other. A sensation of falling, as though I am tipping backward into empty space. I feel no distress, only a final moment of clarity: Soon this body will belong to someone else. Tomorrow, after years of lying dormant, Evie will open our eyes. My sister will take up the mantle of grief I cannot bear alone any longer.
Sophie Panzer is the author of three chapbooks, and her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her writing has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Heavy Feather Review, MAYDAY, hex literary, Pulp Literature, and others. She lives in upstate New York.