Insects buzzed across the unkempt fields of Anville Town, and the late summer sunset tinged everything with fuzzy, humid gold; and a woman stood on the front steps and watched her young sons cut purposefully through the grass to the trainyard, away from her, hand in hand. They always held hands. And it had always been like this, them going off together with little more than a polite word to her. The twins were strange children; she had been given eleven years to understand that, but she still felt lost. These were supposed to be her children, but she and her husband were on the periphery of their existence, and everyone else simply didn't exist. Ingo and Emmet lived in a world of their own. They had from the first—odd, silent infants whose first words were each others' names, and for whom "mama" and "vater" came much later, after they had exhausted the possibilities of everything else they could pronounce. Their curiosity about the world had been for the most part limited to each other: she'd watched them putting their hands and feet together and reveling in their identical gestures, all their toys abandoned. And they had asked questions of her, the wise and all-powerful being who floated around the edges of their consciousness. Why does Emmet look like me, and Are we always going to be the same, and Why did I turn into two people. That one chilled her blood. She'd explained gently that they weren't one person—have they really gone this long thinking they're one person—they were only brothers—they're almost three years old, they should know this by now—they just had the same DNA—what if they've gone this long thinking their name is Ingoandemmet—and that was because…
Why had she told them that? Maybe they would have turned out far more normal if she hadn't taught them all she had learned about twins, and where twins came from, and what some people thought twins could do…But no. She knew that they had known, in some way she couldn't comprehend, long before she had told them; that they had felt something missing before she had ever started to worry.
And that was fine, really it was, or so she told herself. They were healthy children and she could have been saddled with much worse. Not that she hadn't taken them to countless doctors in far-off towns, hoping that someone could diagnose something, that maybe this problem had a name—were they autistic? She barely knew anything about that. She almost wanted them to be, scary as it was. But for eleven years, every one of those professionals said no, the twins were technically normal in every way, they were just very attached to each other. To the exclusion of everything else, she thought bitterly, even their own mother. Maybe, it was suggested, they would grow out of it. She had believed that, once.
As her boys—if she could call them that—disappeared over the curve of the hill, the mother wiped her sweating hands on her apron and went back inside, to cook a late dinner for her perpetually-working husband and pick up the twins' homeschool books from where they had been left, in a neat stack on the table. They'll be fine engineers someday, their father said proudly, and she had to agree, picturing them as grown men, tall and pale like their father, and still in the same tiny town, in their own little world, interacting with only machines. It was the only future she could see for them, and though it made her sad, at least they would be happy with each other. They didn't even notice that they'd never amount to much.
