Rima — Tuesday
“I found them first,” Rima said.
“You found the drawings,” Sol said. “I found the sounds.”
A loose wooden door slid across the gym floor and struck their ankles.
They stopped arguing.
Ev, who had been watching from the old climbing ropes, sat down suddenly.
“Do it again,” she said.
Rima looked at the carved figures on the wall. A small circle stood beside a shape like an open mouth, and three short marks showed where a tongue should rest. She and Sol had tried the sound together because neither twin wanted to be the one who got it wrong alone.
Now the door panel lay at their feet. Someone had taken it off its hinges years ago. It had no handle and no wish to move by itself.
Sol pointed at it. They spoke again.
Nothing happened.
“It can’t get nearer,” Ev said. “You’re standing against it.”
Rima stepped back. Sol stayed beside her. They pointed and tried the sound once more. The panel scraped toward them across the flat floor.
Ev made a noise halfway between a laugh and a shout.
Rima wanted to make that sound herself. Instead she looked for the next drawing.
There were only two sounds they could work out. The first drew a loose thing toward the people speaking. The second stopped it. Both needed two live voices beginning together, and a pointing hand to show which thing they meant.
They tested a rubber ball, a low bench, and the door panel. The ball rolled. The bench scraped. The panel stopped at a ridge in the floor. Nothing would lift over it.
Sol tried the first word with a recording of Rima’s voice. The ball stayed still.
“Maybe it needs two people breathing,” Ev said.
They tried again, Sol speaking while Ev played the recording louder. Still nothing. Then Ev whispered the word beside Sol. The ball rolled straight into their shoes.
Rima watched it arrive. She had been practicing ordinary tricks for the school show, the kind involving a coin that stayed hidden in your hand. Nobody was going to remember her coin after seeing this.
They made a club that afternoon. No spell, no blood, no secret ring. They stood around the ball and promised not to tell people the words without talking to each other first.
“Our mother would say we’re being noisy,” Sol said.
Their mother was asleep after a night shift. That was why they had come to the disused gym, where the town stored old school equipment.
“Then we’ll whisper,” Rima said.
She was already thinking about the show.
Sol — Wednesday
On the school notice board, between TWO SONGS and COMIC DANCE, Sol found RIMA: SURPRISE ACT.
His sister had written her name in thick letters. One name.
He waited for her outside the classroom.
“What’s your surprise?”
“A trick.”
“Which trick?”
She looked at the floor, then at him. “The ball.”
“We said we’d talk first.”
“We’re talking now.”
Sol wanted the words to belong to their afternoons at the gym. A thing he shared with Rima and Ev, away from school lists and people asking which twin was which. He liked not having an audience.
Rima liked an audience. That had been true before the door moved.
“We could do it quietly,” she said. “With music. Nobody has to hear the actual words.”
“People film acts.”
“They film coin tricks too.”
“A video could catch the sounds.”
“I know. I’m not promising nobody will ever find out.”
She said she wanted one act listed under her own name. The twins had sung together, dressed together, and been introduced together for sixteen years. Even the teacher who knew them well sometimes said “the twins” when she meant Rima.
Sol understood that part. He still didn’t want to perform.
“I won’t be your voice hidden behind a curtain,” he said.
“I didn’t ask that.”
“You were about to.”
She walked away before he could find out whether he was right.
Rima — Thursday
The new speaker was louder than Sol’s little recorder. Rima borrowed it from the music room and set it behind the gym bench.
She played the first word, spoke with it, and pointed at the ball.
The ball remained exactly where she’d put it.
She tried three times, then turned off the speaker. She had known it probably wouldn’t work. Hoping harder had mostly made the gym noisy.
Ev arrived with a bag of crisps and a moving-box label stuck to her sleeve.
“What are you doing?”
“Failing.”
Ev sat beside her and opened the bag. She had been packing all week. Her family was leaving town the following Wednesday.
Rima knew they were moving sometime in summer. She had not known which day. She asked whether Ev had to go immediately, which was a stupid question even before she finished it.
“Yes,” Ev said. “That’s what leaving means.”
Rima wanted to ask about buses back, holidays, calls. Instead she asked if Ev would join her show.
“Are you going to say my name?”
“Of course.”
“Before the trick. Not as if I carried a box afterward.”
Rima agreed. They sat shoulder to shoulder, whispering in time with a slow piece of music. The ball came toward them. Ev nodded, and they whispered the stopping word together. The ball halted just before it hit the crisp bag.
Sol appeared in the doorway. He looked at the speaker first, then at them.
“You asked her because the recording didn’t work.”
“I asked her because you said no.”
“That’s the same answer with the bits moved.”
Ev put the bag down.
“I can choose to do it,” she said. “I’m not something you two pass back and forth.”
Sol went quiet. Rima wished Ev hadn’t had to say it.
They argued about the show until Ev told them both she wanted one afternoon without being asked to stay in town. Then they put the speaker away and walked her home. Sol did not walk beside Rima.
Rima — Saturday evening
At rehearsal, the stage had been flat. Rima’s prop crate stood on little wheels; it had rolled easily behind the curtain while she and Ev practiced with balls on top of it.
For the show, the caretaker wanted every wheeled box offstage between acts. He set a short ramp at the edge. When a helper tried rolling Rima’s crate down it, one wheel lodged against the lip. The helper lifted that corner by hand and moved the crate to the hall floor.
Rima looked at the stage. Her plan had been to begin with the whole crate moving toward her. Now she could not bring it back over that lip with the words. They could pull things. They could not lift them.
The caretaker could put it back, but he told her it would have to stay there through the acts that followed. The comic dancers had already complained about space.
Rima could cancel. She could do the coin trick. She could also leave the crate where it was and show the balls on the floor.
Ev stood beside her in the matching bright sleeves they had chosen.
“Still want to?” Rima asked.
“Yes. On the floor. With my name.”
Rima asked the teacher running the show for a patch of empty floor in front of the stage. The teacher moved two chairs and told them to finish in their allotted three minutes.
Sol sat in the second row. He saw Rima look toward him and folded his arms. She turned back to Ev.
When their names were called, Rima said them both into the microphone. Then she put it down. The music began, loud enough to cover their near-whispers without drowning the teacher’s announcements.
They pointed together. A red ball rolled away from the crate toward their feet.
Rima said the stopping word too soon. The ball wobbled and kept going because Ev had not begun with her. Ev caught it with a shoe. Some children laughed.
They tried again. This time the ball stopped halfway. They drew it toward them, stopped it, then moved a second ball around the first by shifting where they stood.
It was a small act. Nobody flew. The crate did not leap onto the stage. But the balls moved without a hand touching them, and the children near the front leaned forward to see how.
Afterward, a teacher asked where they’d learned it.
“The three of us found something in the old gym,” Rima said, nodding toward Sol. “We worked it out together.”
“What did you say to the balls?”
Rima looked at Ev.
“We’re keeping that part between us for now,” Ev answered.
The teacher smiled as if it was an ordinary secret trick. Rima could not be sure every phone in the room had heard only music. She had decided to take that chance.
Sol — Sunday
Rima caught him by the river path. Ev was beside him with a bag of stones she’d been collecting since she was nine. She wanted to leave them on the bank before the move, because she already had too much to carry.
“You were good,” Sol told Rima.
“Are we all right?”
“No.”
She stared at him, then nodded.
“I tried the recording again,” she said. “I wanted to do it alone.”
“I know.”
“I should have said that. I’m sorry.”
He accepted the words without supplying the answer she wanted. Ev tipped her bag. The stones scattered over the path, and all three of them bent to gather them.
“No spell,” Ev said. “I can manage a bag.”
They carried handfuls to the bank. Rima’s red show sleeves were tied around her waist. Sol was still angry, and Wednesday was still coming.
Ev asked which bus would pass this path next summer. Sol said the long route. She said he always recommended the long route because he liked being late.
“It’s scenic,” he said.
“It’s a bus,” Rima said behind them.
Ev laughed and began describing the scenery she expected: three walls, a shed, and the same dog twice. Rima came up beside them, adding a fourth wall. They walked on while Ev disputed its artistic value.
Loading comments…