I am an older sister to twin boys. We have other younger siblings, but it always seemed like the three of us were tidally locked, unable to physically be too far apart and yet never emotionally closer than we were. It might have only been a year and some change that separated me from them, but I lacked that secret biological ingredient cooked into them as they marinated nine months in our mother’s womb together. My own maternal soup was light on psychic connections and heavy on a fluttering anxiety that plagued me from the time I was conscious enough to realize bad things could happen to those I loved.
Maybe the twins’ latent supernatural senses could smell the sour stench of worry, desperation, and fear of abandonment on me, but they were always naturally distrustful of my presence. I was branded as a tattletale with the same incongruous solemnity that they divided everything between themselves—always orange or red for Jacks, green or blue for Sam—despite the fact that I had never actually done anything to deserve the title.
To them, I was trouble on wheels rocking at the top of a steep hill, potential energy incarnate, judged to be kinetically devastating to the Twin Team Agenda. And so, to compensate for their assessment of me, I hovered around them, meek and yearning, waiting for the chance to be part of their secret club, to feel the built-in safety of a bond of blood, popsicle stick jokes, and shared experiences. My so-called bucolic childhood was ultimately my brothers’, internalized and adopted as my own, but viewed as if from outside the unwashed windows of the family home that in theory we shared.
Our mother was distracted, our father disinterested—both distant in a way that made them feel somewhat unreal, like faceless Peanuts adults that existed on the periphery of our lives. We were homeschooled, but our mother always seemed to have a fresh infant that demanded her time and her body, so our rare lessons consisted of all the things we shouldn’t be doing and the horrific consequences of each. We were students of the School of Fear, curriculum developed from either our mother’s personal anxiety (mine had to come from somewhere) or from a tired attempt to keep us from accidentally killing ourselves by removing herself from a 24/7 supervisory position and appointing us stewards of our own lives. The rest of our sparse education was workbook-based independent study disseminated to us via a multilevel marketing scheme that ran rampant among the homeschooling community.
When I was eight and the twins seven, someone our mother knew had a son who died after swallowing a button battery. This sparked an urgent dining room assembly where the twins and I were bombarded with harshly clinical information about the dangers of these tiny metal death bombs, personified as wanting nothing more than to leap from the back of the bathroom scale down our throats to detonate in our bodies. There was a slide presentation.
Barely after learning our heads from our shoulders and knees from toes, and long before we heard any whisper about the great mysteries of the the birds and the bees and were gifted proper words for our hoo-has and pee-pees, we were taught about tracheosophageal fistulas and the alkaline reaction when Lithium meets the moist environment hidden deep within us. We learned about the liquefaction of tissue as the catastrophic battle of human versus metal rages on, melting together and breaking apart delicate structures in a way infinitely more painful than anything our untested and innocent brains could comprehend. And we learned about death—something nebulous yet final, described as being locked in a dark closet and never being able to see your family again. (The concept of heaven did not mesh well with the overall goal to inspire us against wanting to be dead and nothing/no one we truly cared about had died as of yet.)
This combined with the section of my nightmare catalogue dedicated to images from The Fly—a movie I was not allowed to watch and yet had seen one night when our father had fallen asleep in front of the tv while our mom was out at a church function—caused me to have bad dreams for months about each and every member of my family melting into a Cronenberg mass of rubbery flesh after consuming bowlfuls of button batteries that came out of innocent-looking cereal boxes or accidentally breathing in button batteries that fell from the sky like raindrops. Their gooey fingers would reach out to me as they screamed thickly and wordlessly in agony, the inside of their mouths sticky in a way reminiscent of the chocolate swamp creature from our Candy Land game board.
For once in my life I knew exactly what the twins were thinking because I was thinking it too. The button battery lesson did not only linger with me, Jacks and Sam were also darkly obsessed. The two of them took to torturing me with elaborate set ups where they pretended to eat batteries in front of me or set up death scenes for me to find where they covered their faces and necks with impressive homemade prosthetics concocted from DIY play dough recipes. In a stroke of alchemical genius, they added spoonfuls of gritty Metamucil that made the color grotesquely realistic.
I took to carrying around the only button battery I could find in the whole house, carefully transferring it each morning and night to whatever I was wearing. Something about being able to reach into my pocket and finger its dangerous and deadly shape brought me tentative peace. I was in control of it. My baby siblings would not find it. The twins would not accidentally on purpose swallow it. And I would not forget what exact shape and size it was, despite my traitorous brain suggesting that anything anyone was putting in their mouths at any moment could be one.
It wasn’t long before I learned all the twins’ tricks, and Jacks especially grew bored with my increasingly lackluster reactions, bolstered as I was by my secret talisman. But then Jacks figured out he could swallow small coins.
Where before the twins would flash a glimpse of “button battery” before passing a closed fist past open maw with a comical gulp, now Jacks would wander into the doorway of whatever room I was in and say, “Hey, Savannah—watch.” When I looked up, he would place a dime on his tongue and present it for me to see. As I started up from my seat in panic, he’d curl his tongue back into his mouth and swallow the dime. He would smack his lips theatrically, pause as if stricken, and then fall into fake convulsions as he acted out his interpretation of nuclear button battery devastation. I would clutch my pocket for reassurance.
I slowly came to realize that perhaps the twins had never truly thought I was a snitch, but rather they had manipulated me into never being one. There was always a malevolent shine to Jacks’ eyes before he began his coin performance, an insinuation of a dare—tell and you are what we always said you were. And so I watched silently and our parents never knew.
Late at night, through the wall my bedroom shared with the upstairs bathroom, sometimes I could hear Jacks grunting soft little kid grunts as he strained on the toilet. And sometimes I could hear the waterlogged plink of something small and metal on porcelain.
Too soon after this, I think Jacks shifted from caring about the button battery ruse to being curiously invested in what he was capable of swallowing without choking. On days where we were responsible for our own lunches—that is most days—the three of us would sit across from each other at the table in unholy trinity, egged on by Jacks to see just how big of a spoonful of Top Ramen we could force down our throats without chewing. I hated the way the slick noodles felt when I ate them this way, more like a bolus of worms than food, and I was on edge constantly watching the twins eat. I think it made Sam uncomfortable too, but he was careful not to show it. Jacks, of course, always won.
Jacks graduated to larger coins, nickels and pennies. Sam was his devoted hunter gatherer, slipping his hand into our father’s jacket pockets and crouching to scoop up change whenever he saw it glinting on the sidewalk. We’d lock ourselves in the bathroom and bear grave witness to Jacks performing his ritual. He liked to watch himself in the mirror as he ingested penny after nickel after dime after Ukrainian kopek (the final found outside the King Supers), all vanishing into him like a coin-operated washer or a gum ball machine.
While Jacks watched himself, Sam watched Jacks, unblinking, and I watched the pair of them, as noninvasive an observer as the mirror itself. I noticed that Sam—in unconscious or perhaps twin-related response—would open and close his own mouth in time with Jacks’, almost as if unwilling to fathom an experience the two of them wouldn’t share. Our brother had made a piggy bank of himself. I half expected to hear him jingling as he walked.
Ritual complete, we’d slip from the bathroom and wander back downstairs to our schoolwork or the tv, Jacks satisfied and Sam and I complicit.
What must have been several dollars in, it became obvious that Jacks was changing. Where before it was almost impossible to tell the twins apart, Jacks was now recognizable as the less healthy one. It was subtle, hardly noticeable unless you spent hours staring at him as I did, intensely focused on his face as if I could keep him from choking by sheer force of will. (I knew of the Heimlich Maneuver thanks to another School of Fear lesson about the terror of aspiration but only had a vague idea of how to perform it.) My contribution was watching and wishing, and all the while noticing Jacks get worse.
Jacks didn’t jingle as he moved, but he did develop a wheeze, a concerning lethargy that preceded his appearance around ever corner. He also began to lean on Sam as they walked, Sam bracing Jacks’ shoulder with his own in a way I wasn’t sure if he even realized he was doing. I also no longer heard Jacks grunting as he struggled to pass his coins in the bathroom at night, but I did hear him retching, at times making noises so violent I felt them in my own diaphragm and causing me to sit up in bed, straining to hear through the dark static of my room for any sign that Jacks was not okay to the point that I needed to finally intervene.
When Jacks’ eyes became glassy and his nightly bathroom trips took on the guttural tonal quality of an exorcism, I made the mistake of suggesting, timid and deferential, that Jacks should stop swallowing things. I tried to soften it with a lame joke, insinuating in nervous breathy tones that we’d end up homeless if he didn’t quit consuming all of our money. The consequence of this was swift excision from the group. Jacks and Sam abandoned the bathroom and began instead barricading themselves in their bedroom, a place forbidden to me even before my exile.
I took to listening at their door, anxious to be close by in case I was needed, afraid of being left out, panicked at feeling responsible for them as the eldest. But I never heard more than soft whispers I couldn’t quite make out.
One day, Jacks got a nosebleed as we sat in front of our workbooks. My ears, sharply attuned to noises beyond the ordinary by this point, heard the first soft plat of a drop as it hit paper. I jerked my head up and met Jacks’ shocked gaze, eyes sunken in a narrow face that had rapidly deteriorated over the last weeks from mildly sallow to alarmingly gaunt.
A saturated red trail slipped from his nose and over his lips before his hand shot up to cup his chin. We stared at each other, frozen.
“Jacks, your nose,” Sam said, belated, halfway standing. By this point, Sam had become overprotective of his twin, his energy growing more and more frenetic as Jacks himself became muted and withdrawn.
As Sam and I watched, Jacks’ chapped lips parted to allow the odd pale tip of his tongue to dart in and out, rapid and almost reptilian. I don’t think he originally meant to do it, but I know Sam and I both saw his expression flicker. For a moment the glazed look in his eyes was gone, replaced by the bright glint he used to possess. He wheezed slightly and swallowed. Sam and I also swallowed, in communion. Maybe I imagined it, but I swear I could taste what he was experiencing, that liquid, bright and copper as a penny—familiar at this point—but warm and slippery rather than cold and sharp. That’s how naked his expression was for that fleeting second. It was the closest I’d ever felt to him.
He shoved back from the table, and took off for the bathroom with Sam right on his heels like a reverse shadow. I was left behind, unable to tear my eyes from that urgent stoplight dot of red marring the workbook across from me.
At this point, I can only guess at the exact sequence of events that transpired between the nosebleed incident and the end. The twins took extra measures to hide things from me, sensing—accurately—that I was close to the limit of what I could reasonably be counted on to keep secret.
Perhaps Jacks, deeply disturbed and addicted, tried to cut himself and satiate his craving like a vampiric ouroboros before Sam stepped in and offered from the cup of his own healthier vessel. Maybe Jacks asked it of Sam and Sam was afraid to decline out of a very real worry of the lengths his twin would drive his body to without him. Most likely, it was unspoken. After all, they existed for each other, as extensions of each other.
I do know that Sam, the type of boy who demanded to wear t-shirts even in the coldest, snowiest winter, began dressing in long sleeves. He dug up years’ old Christmas pajama tops that were inches too short and too tight by far and even stole one of our father’s sweatshirts from the laundry—a move that was considered to be benignly “adorable” by the adults who even noticed.
But I caught glimpses of things that scared me, bandaid wrappers in the trash or floating unflushed in the toilet, a purloined pink razor hidden in the cardboard spoke of a roll of toilet paper under the sink. When I pressed my ear against the twins’ bedroom door, among the whispers I also heard the sharp hiss of a pained intake of breath and once or twice even the faintest muffled whimper. I fingered the battery in my pocket like a worry stone, discomfited.
Soon Sam joined Jacks in looking unwell. They drifted blanched and wraith-like around the house, forgoing rambunctious rough housing for quiet afternoons spent watching YouTube. Their gaming consoles sat forgotten. And our mother, for her part, seemed content with the tranquil environment she thought she had fostered. I hated her for not noticing and I hated myself for not being strong enough to make her see.
On the last day, I lay on the floor outside my brothers’ door keeping my standard vigil. Cheek sunken into the dusty fibers of the flattened beige carpet and ear to the gap between it and the door. The susseration of their hushed voices lulled me slowly to sleep. And then Sam’s voice cut through my doze. Heart thrumming hummingbird fast even before I parsed his words, I heard him cry out, “Jacks, stop it’s too much!”
I lay still, fighting entropy tenacious and syrupy as sleep paralysis, listening hard. Sam was crying now, an unfamiliar and animal sound I hadn’t heard from him since he was small. And then I heard the sound I feared the most over the past months—choking.
I ripped myself up from the carpet, lurching into action that felt at once rusted and purposeful in a way that surprised me, as if I still was watching from afar as someone else piloted my body. This body shouldered the door open, popping the weak lock and all but tumbling into the space between the twin little boy beds decked out in Jacks orange and Sam green and Sam red and Sam red and Sam red.
Sam sobbed on the bed. I could see shallow gashes on his skinny arm where bright bright blood was weeping in solidarity, but it was his right foot cradled up into his lap that broke my brain, untethering me from my position of complacency and sending me careening down that steep hill of kinetic energy at last. Deep dark crimson bubbled from where his big toe had been. Unbidden, hysterically, “Gone to market” singsonged in my mind. But despite the grisly horror of Sam, it wasn’t Sam who wasn’t breathing—it was Jacks.
Wide-eyed Jacks clawing, scrabbling, clutching at his throat. His distress was silent now, something our mother told us meant the worst. Without significant thought, I hoisted his frail body from his bed and placed my fist above his bellybutton and heaved in and up. He was so light, lighter and softer than I expected with what I imagined was a stomach full of metal. I could feel the ridges of his spine against my stomach. I squeezed him again and felt a carbonated release, something pink-tinged and wet launching into the wall.
Jacks sank against me, wheezing. I spun him to face me, shaking him by the shoulders. His head lolled, eyes half-lidded and a febrile, translucent purple. “What is wrong with you?” I shouted. Great black pools of pupils rolled upwards to meet mine with something I thought I recognized as a faraway defiance. Without breaking eye contact, he brought a bloody finger up to his mouth and suckled the gore from it before pulling it out with an offensive pop, trailing a sickly, mucosal drool. The corners of his mouth lifted, exposing gruesome teeth.
I felt myself losing it. For the first time in my short life, I was furious. “This has to stop, Jacks.” My hand went to my pocket and came free with the button battery. “You need to stop.”
He was so weak. The doctors said his body was riddled with all sorts of irreparable damage caused by the massive amount of coins they pulled from his gastrointestinal tract—corrosive zinc toxicity from the pennies, organ failure—really the button battery was just the cherry on top of the caustic mess he had already been brewing on the inside.
He didn’t have the strength to fight me as I forced the small disc as far as I could reach down his throat. And even still, curiosity and muscle memory led him to swallow, dutifully gulping down this final metal pill like prescription ambrosia.
I don’t know what Sam saw, if he saw me with the battery. He never said. Our screaming brought our mother, and our mother—to her credit—immediately bundled the three of us along with Sam’s toe in a Ziploc bag of ice into the car to the hospital, leaving our youngest siblings behind with our confused father.
Sam went into surgery and Jacks and I sat with our mother in the waiting room of the ER. As was my custom, I watched Jacks without a word, mother none the wiser. It wasn’t long, though, before Jacks vomited—red, violent—and fell to the ground convulsing.
And eventually he succumbed to his best performance of Button Battery Death.