Alpheta Dawning

One time, Jimmie called me beautiful. It was our sixteenth birthday, and he called me beautiful. He looked at me with those dark, watery eyes and said, “You’re beautiful, Pheta.” I stopped curling my hair and turned to look at him.

“What did you say, Jimmie?”

“I said you’re beautiful.”

“Thank you, Jimmie, that’s very sweet of you.”

“You’re welcome. May I play with your hair?”

I nodded and let him take a handful of what wasn’t already in curlers. There was a moment’s pause as Jimmie breathed in, deeply, and then I saw the flash of silver before I knew what was happening. I looked up, and the hair was still in his hands, but suddenly he was sitting on his bed across the room, a large pair of scissors on the pillow. I watched, paralyzed with fear and confusion, as he sat and ate a single strand, rocking his body and groaning.

Then I started shrieking.

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“Jimmie was always a little… different after the accident.” That’s what mama used to say when anyone asked after my twin brother. His once-auburn colored hair had turned a dark grey, and the scabs on his face and forearms wouldn’t fade, no matter how much iodine and antibacterial stuff mama’d  put on them. They would swell until the pink skin tore open, and a weird grey-green puss would ooze out that none of the doctors would touch, even while wearing gloves. Mama would get on her knees by her bed and cry and rock for hours after every one of those doctor visits. Jimmie just went back into our room and slept. And I’d be stuck in the kitchen doing something to occupy myself as the two of them moaned and groaned their symphony.

You see, Jimmie had nightmares. Since we shared a room, if he started moaning in his sleep, I would sing to him to try and calm him down. It rarely worked, but I kept at it, because it helped me not have nightmares of my own. Often, I would wake up after having dreamt about very odd things, and Jimmie would be over on his bed groaning like an ox in the heat. I never remembered my dreams, but I’m sure they had something to do with the accident. Sometimes, if we were both startled awake at the same time, quivering and sweaty, I even thought they might have been the same dreams as his, but he’d never respond if I asked him to retell his.

He never responded to much, really. He just sort of ate and drank and went to bed early and got up late. He stopped going to school, and mama never forced him to go, saying he just needed some time to get used to his new self. I always thought “new” was a strange word for her to use, seeing as how he almost looked like an old man. He lost all of the hair on his body, and the hair on his head was receding. His eyes had turned a dark grey, like what hair was left on his head, almost black. His voice had changed; it was eerily deep with a strange gurgling sound to it as he spoke, like someone had cut the inside of his throat, but the blood had nowhere to go. Part of me always wanted to pour a bottle of hydrogen peroxide down his throat to clean it out, you know, if it weren’t poisonous, of course.

There was one dream I think we both shared on several occasions, and I’m almost certain it had to do with the night of his accident. In my dream, Jimmie is still healthy. In my dream, he and I are sitting down to breakfast when mama gets a call. It’s her sister, Aunt Mabel, and she wants us all to come over for supper seeing as how it’s our cousin’s eighth birthday. So we all head over there, and when we walk in the door, Aunt Mabel sends all of us children outside.

Our cousin, Tobias, takes us into the backyard and tells us how we’re going to go on an adventure. He says since it’s his birthday, we have to do what he says. He’s eight now after all, and we’re only five. We walk and walk and walk, until I can’t even see the house anymore, and finally we stop near what looks to be a deep hole. There are weird gurgling sounds coming from the hole, and it smells a mixture of gasoline and dead leaves. I feel a strange sensation of foreboding, and Jimmie moves toward the hole to look down into it. As he’s leaning forward, Tobias and I hear something coming up behind us, we turn to look, I hear a crash, feel myself falling, and then I wake up.

Every time I have that dream, I wake up to see Jimmie staring at me angrily, like I’ve done something absolutely unforgivable. And for some reason, I always feel like I have, too.