The trailer had been added on to over the years, always illegally and only semicompetently (mostly by the sisters themselves), with one new “wing” appended to the side and another “master suite” off the back; at some point the whole collage, with its uneven ceiling height and incoherent window placement, had been covered in a skin of vinyl siding so that, from the outside, it looked almost convincingly like an actual house—a single wide with a generic addition, like many of the other houses on the steep, semipaved, sparsely populated road. The one thing that distinguished E’s house from the others was its front door, which was the original 1960’s trailer door: narrow; red-and-white metal; with wide, movable horizontal slats stacked from top to bottom—an original, hard-to-replace jalousie door, she’d been told by the twins.

“Cool door,” S said as E finally straightened up to stand.

As E stood, she kept her head pointed down to the floor, cheap parquet laid on top of some toxic subfloor she preferred not to wonder about. This wasn’t voluntary—she felt as if someone very heavy, some giant, were pressing down on the nape of her neck, tilting her head forward like a hairdresser who doesn’t know their own strength. As she stood, she could feel the approach of S’s face; meanwhile, Splice wedged its head between E’s legs, just above the knees.

S was still, they both were silent.

E realized she’d closed her eyes and now she opened them, stared down at Splice’s chaotic mane, positioned between her blue-jeaned legs and S’s corduroyed ones. She lifted her eyes without shifting the position of her head: a torso behind a T-shirt behind an open, worn-out wool coat. Lifting her hands to touch it was like lifting her feet from the mud in the dream she’d had (old house, mossy pool), which now came to mind with such disorienting force she got lightheaded and nearly fell.

She placed her hands on S’s ribs, both palms flat against the T-shirt, edging under the musty coat. By the time she looked up, it wouldn’t have mattered what she saw.

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