I was born seventeen minutes after my brother. I have resented those seventeen minutes ever since--enough time for him to steal the first breath, to claim the marrow of existence while I waited.

Mother calls us "miracle twins" with a rictus smile stretched across teeth she grinds to dust each night. Her eyes dart between us like trapped insects. Seventeen minutes. By the time I emerged, the novelty had worn off. I was merely the echo of his grand arrival, a discordant note in his opening hit song.

His name is Hugo. Mine is Juliette, though no one recalls it. I am "Hugo's sister," a shadowy appendage to his luminous being. When we were six, he informed me, solemnly pressing his small hand to my throat, that boys were kings and girls were only vessels for their seed. He'd learned this from Father. I, having recently discovered the concept of taxidermy in Mother's hidden books, decided then to begin my collection.

I. Genesis of Decay

I started with slugs in his cereal--watching him lift the spoon to his lips, the creatures writhing against white porcelain. He swallowed three before noticing. Mother assumed he'd put them there himself, another of his experiments.

"Boys will be boys," she murmured, plucking a glistening body from his spoon, its mucus stretching like silver thread.

Hugo only watched me over the rim of his bowl, a strange hunger blooming in his eyes. That night, I found a jar of crushed slugs under my pillow, their bodies leaking a yellow ichor that stained my sheets. The game had begun.

II. Communion of Flesh

At eight, he received a telescope for his birthday. I got a book on famous women in history, with pages that smelled of mildew and disappointment.

"Be like them," Mother whispered, her fingers digging into my scalp like talons.

That night, I stole the telescope. In the garden, I dug a hole six feet deep, my fingers splitting open on buried rocks, blood mixing with soil. I laid the telescope in like a corpse, then crawled in myself, lying beside it for hours, whispering secrets to the worms that came to investigate. When I finally buried it, I saved a handful of those pink, writhing creatures.

Hugo wept for a week. I fed the worms to him in his sleep, parting his lips with gentle fingers, watching them disappear down his throat. His dreams turned violent after that; I heard him choking in the night. He told Mother he could feel things moving inside him.

III. Sacraments of Pain

At ten, Hugo crowned himself inventor. He created a device of wires and batteries meant to protect his bedroom. It didn't work on intruders, but it worked on me--the current locking my muscles, my urine running hot down my legs while he watched with clinical detachment.

For one year after, I became his unwilling laboratory. I collected his nail clippings, his fallen hair, the yellow crust from his eyes. I mixed these with substances stolen from beneath the kitchen sink--ammonia, bleach, drain cleaner--creating tinctures I added to his food in microscopic amounts. His stomach distended. His skin erupted in weeping sores. At night, I pressed my ear to his bedroom wall, listening to him retch.

"Juliette," Mother sighed, finding me once with a vial of his blood, "He is your brother. Love him."

I smiled with teeth filed sharp in secret. Love was exactly what I felt--a love so dense and dark it could collapse into a singularity.

Three days later, Mother found Hugo convulsing on the bathroom floor, foam flecking his blue lips. The hospital pumped his stomach while I watched from the corner, clutching my vial of his blood like a rosary. The doctor pulled Mother aside, speaking in hushed tones about toxicology reports and child psychologists. For two weeks, Mother locked the cleaning supplies in a cabinet and watched me with eyes that finally saw. I learned then that our war had boundaries I needed to navigate more carefully--death would end our game prematurely, and I wasn't ready for that finale.

IV. Menstruation Mysteries

Hugo's obsession with my blood intensified as puberty descended.

"Girls bleed every month?" he asked, eyes gleaming. "Like, just... all over the place?"

I told him yes, that the blood came not just from between our legs but from our eyes, our ears, our fingernails--that we collected it for rituals, drinking it to maintain our powers. He didn't believe me.

So I invited him to witness my first blood. In the bathroom, under buzzing fluorescent light, I let him watch as I sliced a perfect line across my inner thigh with Mother's silver razor. The blood welled black in the harsh light. I collected it in one of Mother's teacups, its porcelain rim adorned with forget-me-nots.

"Drink," I commanded.

His face went ashen, but he obeyed. After, he vomited for three days. I kept the teacup, never washing it, watching the blood turn to a crust as black as beetle shells.

V. Erasure Rituals

By twelve, our bodies had begun to change in ways that disgusted me. If I could not remove Hugo from existence, I would unmake him piece by piece.

I collected his secretions--the oil from his pillow, the yellow crust between his toes, the phlegm he spat in the sink each morning. I mixed these with my own bodily fluids, creating a paste I used to mark the underside of his furniture, with symbols I'd discovered in a book hidden in Father's study before he disappeared.

VI. Consummation

At fifteen, the boundaries between us began to blur in earnest. I would find strands of my hair growing from his scalp. He would discover his fingerprints had somehow transferred to my hands overnight.

Our final confrontation came on the anniversary of our birth. He slammed me against the bathroom wall, my skull cracking against tile. I dug my nails into his arms so deeply I felt something tear beneath--not skin, but something membranous and wet.

What leaked out was not blood but a clear, viscous fluid that smelled of pond water. His eyes rolled back, revealing sclera webbed with black veins. From his mouth emerged a sound I had never heard before--not human, not animal, but something that existed in the space between taxonomies.

I felt my own skin split in response, a seam opening from navel to throat, exposing not organs but a nest of small, iridescent eggs.

The next morning, I found a note under my pillow written in ink that moved like mercury across the page: We were never two. For now.

Sometimes, in the pit of night, I wonder what victory might feel like--if erasing Hugo would leave a Hugo-shaped hole in me that nothing else could fill. But these thoughts I crush like insects; weakness is a luxury I cannot afford.

We maintain an uneasy détente now, passing each other in hallways that seem to lengthen and contract like breathing things. I still do not love my brother in any way Mother would recognize, but I love what we are becoming--something with too many limbs and not enough mouths, something that feeds on the space between heartbeats.

One day, one of us will consume the other entirely.

Yet sometimes, in moments of terrible clarity, I glimpse a future where I succeed--where Hugo is finally erased. What creature would I be without my twin, my mirror, my adversary? Perhaps I continue this war not to win but to sustain the only relationship that has ever defined me. Perhaps what I fear most is not losing, but winning.

Until then, I count the minutes. Seventeen. Sixteen. Fifteen.

But I no longer know why I'm counting.

Gio Clairval, a French-Italian creature from Lake Como, was last seen feeding ink-stained pages to a school of pikes. The words return to her at night, rearranged into variable and unsettling patterns. She writes from the liminal space between languages, dreams, and fever hallucinations.